Turkiye restricts Black Sea traffic as drone attacks on commercial vessels spike
The Cradle | August 8, 2026
Turkiye has begun restricting commercial ship traffic into the Black Sea amid a surge in Russian and Ukrainian attacks on civilian vessels, Bloomberg reported on 8 August.
Turkiye’s Directorate General of Coastal Safety has informed several ships heading to Novorossiysk, an important Russian oil and grain export port, that it is not issuing transit permits at this time and requires more time to review passage applications through the Dardanelles.
The sources told Bloomberg that Turkish authorities had provided no explanation for the move. Some vessels have also reportedly been told that the restriction applies to ships heading to Ukraine.
The report comes after a series of drone attacks targeting Turkish commercial vessels operating in the Black Sea and near Russian ports in recent months.
On Friday, a Turkish-flagged vessel, the MV Gulluk, was struck by a drone off the Russian port of Novorossiysk. Although the drone hit the ship’s living quarters, no crew members were reported injured or killed.
On 3 August, the Ro-Ro cargo vessel Nadezhda was struck by a drone about 20 nautical miles off Novorossiysk while en route from the Russian port to Samsun. Three members of the ship’s crew were injured and in serious condition after the attack.
The same day, two civilian vessels, the Yasar and the Nadezhda, were attacked after leaving Novorossiysk.
In response, Turkiye’s Foreign Minister issued a statement saying it was “deeply concerned about the escalating conflict between Russia and Ukraine in the Black Sea, which is affecting civilian shipping despite our numerous warnings.”
“Unless preventive measures are taken, the escalation in the Black Sea will have multifaceted negative repercussions, including for food security,” the statement added.
Ukraine’s targeting of ships in the Black Sea, as well as Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian port infrastructure and vessels, have threatened grain exports from both countries, pushing wheat prices to a two-year high in July.
“Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter, and Ukraine is known as Europe’s breadbasket, while mutual attacks between the two countries are putting pressure on maritime transport in the region during the harvest season,” Anadolu Agency reported.
Global food prices already spiked as a result of soaring energy prices following the closure of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf earlier this year.
Iran closed the strait in response to the US-Israel war of aggression, disrupting oil and natural gas exports from the Gulf countries partnering with the US and Israel in the war.
Global fuel prices have also risen in response to Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian oil refineries.
On Saturday, a Ukrainian drone targeted the Ilsky oil refinery in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region, causing it to catch fire.
Ukraine’s general staff said the Ukrainian military also hit the Syzran oil refinery in the Samara region of Russia overnight, causing a fire there as well.
The Ilsky refinery can process over 6 million metric tons of oil per year, while the Syzran refinery has a processing capacity of 8.5 million tons annually.
In May, Reuters estimated that disruptions associated with the wars between the US and Iran and between Russia and Ukraine together had knocked out nearly 9 percent of global refining capacity.
Let them eat burritos: Out of touch influencers risk all for Trump war
Republicans on pro-war autopilot are mocking Americans who are concerned about rising prices. Not a good look ahead of the midterms.
By Jack Hunter | Responsible Statecraft | August 8, 2026
As the 2026 midterm elections near, polls show American voters’ top priority is the economy, including concerns that the unpopular U.S. war in Iran appears to be driving up prices at home.
Might these voter concerns give Republican hawks pause?
Apparently not.
“If we can’t handle four dollar oil for a period of months in order to disarm Iran of a nuclear weapon then we are not a superpower anymore,” former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen told Fox News last week.
One of the biggest pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress had a similar message. “As much as it stinks to pay an extra dollar for a gallon of gas… think about the damage of a nuclear bomb going off in Washington, or New York, or Miami,” Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) said Monday on News Nation.
Surely some of these Republicans would recognize that fear of inflation combined with growing opposition to the war could hurt their party come November — that maybe an adjustment in language and tone is in order?
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) gets it. Sort of. He wants to keep prices down for Americans but thinks the only way to do that is to bomb the hell out of Iran for “two to three weeks” to get the Hormuz Strait open. He says the Iranians cannot be trusted to broker a deal without military force, so why not keep doing what hasn’t worked yet over the last five months?
Others are leaning hard into the notion that higher prices are just “fake news” — no doubt in hopes that repeating that enough will just make the problem go away.
The Iran war “has had basically no impact on food prices in the US,” declared The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro on Wednesday, seemingly responding to what writer Sohrab Ahmari is calling the “great American burrito debate” on social media over the current cost of food and how that might relate to the current cost of war.
Ahmari’s essay notes that, to Cotton’s point about Hormuz and prices, “even though the United States is the world’s chief net energy exporter, the supply squeeze in the Strait of Hormuz puts inflationary pressure on gas prices in America. And it’s not just gas prices which are affected, but those in many other sectors, too — from transportation to agriculture to restaurants and hospitality.”
In addition to rising prices, new data released Friday showed that 23,000 jobs were lost in July, an unexpected number for economists. All eyes are on the new inflation figures to be released this upcoming week. In May, it rose to 4.2%, the highest since 2023 and relaxed in June to 3.5%.
Never to be left out, regime change maven and Fox News host Mark Levin on Sunday urged Donald Trump to attack Kharg Island to bring Iranians “to their knees” and not to worry about sparking “a worldwide depression and so on. It won’t happen!”
Trump seemed to share the same reality-detached hopefulness, proclaiming on Monday that, “Now, US is the King of OIL!” The president shared a chart showing U.S. “oil exports [surging] to historic high!” He is likely hoping that his audience won’t read up on the subject and find that it doesn’t matter how much the U.S. produces; it won’t affect current gas prices at the pump today.
One time MAGA-darling turned Trump critic, former Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, wasn’t having it. She called out the president on what Americans are actually experiencing.
“The national price of gas is $4.10 and diesel is $5.36. Your illegal senseless war on Iran is crushing the very people that voted to end foreign wars, lower inflation, and lower the price of gas,” Greene said on X.
Trump even went so far as to suggest that greedy energy companies might be to blame, saying at the Oval Office this week that Chevron and Exxon Mobil are making “too much money,” amid the war. “I don’t like it… They ought to give some of that back to the public,” he said, according to C-SPAN
The Independent’s Eric Garcia couldn’t help but notice that Trump sounded like Democrats complaining about “greedflation” under President Joe Biden.
None of this appears to be fooling voters, including Republicans.
On Tuesday, CNN pollster Harry Enten rattled off some of Donald Trump’s approval numbers among moderate Republicans. “On Iran, he’s six points underwater within his own party. Within his own party! You think that’s low? (He’s) about 17 points underwater on inflation.”
“Inflation was the name of the game with the economy back in 2024,” Enten noted. “If I am a Republican running for Congress in those swing districts, I need those moderate Republicans, and they are leaving Donald Trump, and they may be leaving those Republican candidates as well.”
The New York Times suggested on Tuesday that the war was undermining Trump’s presidency. “The war in Iran, along with a cycle of threats and walk-backs, has upended President Trump’s domestic agenda at a dire political moment. Americans are facing rising gas prices.”
It went on to cite the most recent Quinnipiac University poll, which found that 60% of voters opposed military action against Iran, “a slight uptick since May.” Furthermore, a recent CNN/SSRS poll found that 74% of Americans — including about 43% of Republicans — said the war was not “worth the cost in terms of the financial burden or American casualties,” the paper noted.
While some hawks are doing mental gymnastics to say war costs and domestic affordability are unrelated, other conservatives have told them to knock it off and course correct.
The Daily’s Wire’s Matt Walsh shared an X post on Monday that at the time of this writing had 4.4 million views and climbing.
“Grocery prices are insane. They’re still rising. Addressing this problem should be the number one priority of every elected leader,” Walsh wrote. “End the stupid foreign wars and focus on this issue.”
In response, Charlie Kirk Show producer Andrew Kolvet tried to downplay current inflation as “hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation,” but also quoted one of his TPUSA college students bemoaning that, “a burrito shouldn’t cost $20.”
The forever-hawkish Marc Thiessen was back again, completely dismissive. “Cry me a river. The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan.”
Add to that Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) who recently lost his primary by double digits. “Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates. The market does not care what you think something should cost,” he posted. To which conservative commentator Ryan Girdusky responded: “Can’t understand why you lost your re-election.”
Hence the foreign policy-inflation-driven-burrito-cost debate that is probably still raging on X and that Ahmari insists “the neocons are losing.” He might be right.
No matter how much hawks doth protest, there are costs to any war, often including affordability.
Iran war defenders pretending otherwise is just something reality won’t afford them.
Jack Hunter is the former political editor of Rare.us. Jack has written regularly for Modern Age, Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The American Conservative, Spectator USA and has appeared in Politico Magazine and The Daily Beast. Hunter is the co-author of the The Tea Party Goes to Washington by Sen. Rand Paul.
Musk blocks Ukraine from using Starlink for deep strikes in Russia – Atlantic
RT | August 8, 2026
Elon Musk has refused to allow Ukraine to use his Starlink satellite internet service to guide drone strikes deep inside Russian territory, The Atlantic reported on Friday, citing two close allies of former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov.
According to the publication, Fedorov, a tech-savvy promoter of drone warfare who was sacked from his position last month, has since been working through back channels to appeal to Musk, but the billionaire has so far refused to relent.
“As of this moment, there is no positive decision,” a Fedorov ally was quoted as saying. “Elon keeps saying it’s time to make a deal,” the source added.
The Atlantic previously reported that during his visit to the US last month, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky asked President Donald Trump to help influence his close ally Musk on the matter, but Trump remained noncommittal.
Musk began donating tens of thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine shortly after its conflict with Russia broke out in February 2022. However, he soon began clashing with Ukrainian officials as he urged them to focus on reaching a peace deal between Moscow and Kiev and repeatedly warned that the conflict could lead to “World War III.”
In 2023, the entrepreneur confirmed reports that he had rejected Ukraine’s request to use Starlink for attacks on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and naval bases in Crimea. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” he said at the time.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said last month that Musk should shut down Starlink in Ukraine altogether if he truly wanted “people to stop dying.”
Musk’s reported position represents a second major blow to Ukraine’s diplomatic efforts after Trump walked back an earlier promise to grant Kiev a license to produce Patriot air defense missiles and rebuffed a plea to deliver more interceptors. Zelensky and the Ukrainian military said this week that the country was struggling to fend off Russian strikes on Kiev and other cities.
Zelensky’s abrupt decision to sack Fedorov sparked street protests across Ukraine, with crowds and several prominent activists demanding his reinstatement. Zelensky responded to the public outrage by firing the country’s top commander, General Aleksandr Syrsky, with whom Fedorov had reportedly clashed over priorities and tactics.
Col Doug Macgregor: All Out War w/Iran Getting Unavoidable
Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – August 7, 2026
British trade union leaders urge PM to stop UK support for illegal US-Israeli war on Iran
Press TV – August 7, 2026
British trade union leaders have urged UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham to stop rendering support to the United States and Israel in their illegal war on Iran, demanding he reverse his decision to allow the use of UK bases for aggression against Iran.
In an open letter to the PM run by the media on Friday, leaders of ten British trade unions, representing more than 2.3 million workers, urged Burnham to stop rendering support to the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran, and instead focus on the nation’s cost of living crisis.
“[T]he US and Israel’s devastating, illegal war on Iran is deepening the cost of living crisis faced by our members and the British public,” the open letter to Burnham stated, pointing out in continuation that the disruption caused by the war is worsening the cost of living crisis in the UK.
“Disruption to the world’s food and energy supplies is hurting communities here in Britain and having a catastrophic impact in the global south,” it said.
British trade union leaders said they were encouraged by the new Labour government’s focus on the cost of living crisis, but voiced deep concern over any authorization granted to the US to use its bases against Iran.
“We are encouraged by the new government’s focus on the cost of living and the measures it is taking to make life more affordable. However, we are deeply concerned that the same government has authorized US air strikes to be conducted from bases on British territories as part of the war against Iran,” the representative of the large group of British laborers said in the letter to the UK Labour Party prime minister.
They called on Burnham to put pressure on US President Donald Trump to bring the US-Israeli war on Iran to a quick end.
Burnham, right after he took office last month, allowed the use of RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and the Indian Ocean territory of Diego Garcia to assist the US in the illegal war of aggression against Iran.
On July 21, Burnham approved the continued use of British military bases by the United States for military aggression against Iran, maintaining a policy established under his predecessor, Keir Starmer.
Burnham’s approval of ongoing contribution to American aggression against the Islamic Republic came after another hostile decision by the British government to designate the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) under Britain’s so-called “State Threats legislation.”
Late last month, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned the UK against contributing support to the aggressors waging war against the Islamic Republic.
Iran’s top diplomat issued the warning in a direct telephone call to his British counterpart Ed Miliband on July 31.
Turkiye, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia Sign Memorandum on Collective Defense – Statement
Sputnik – 07.08.2026
Turkiye, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed a memorandum on collective defense on Friday, according to a joint statement from the countries seen by Sputnik.
According to the Turkiye newspaper, the joint defense agreement provides for cooperation in the field of intelligence sharing and regional security coordination. Turkiye’s accession to the system of strategic defense cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, an agreement on which was signed in 2025, may become an important stage in changing the balance of power in the Middle East.
“Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Pakistani Prime Minister Mohammad Shahbaz Sharif and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed an agreement in Mecca on collective defense, showing the countries’ shared commitment to further enhance collective security,” the joint statement said.
The purpose of the agreement is to strengthen collective deterrence of any act of aggression, the statement read.
According to the document, an attack on any of the three countries would be considered as an attack on all of them. It also implies strengthening all aspects of defense cooperation between the three countries, the statement said.
Prof John Mearsheimer: Drones Can’t Deliver Ukraine Victory
Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – August 6, 2026
US Overestimates Capacity to Wage War on Iran While Supporting Ukraine
Sputnik – 06.08.2026
Ukraine believed it could outsmart Russia by placing its most advanced drone facilities under the protection of Patriot air defenses around the capital, military historian Yury Knutov tells Sputnik, adding that the calculation proved wrong — American interceptor missiles ran dry.
“Germany, Norway, the Baltic states, and the Gulf monarchies that purchased Patriot systems are now confronted with the fact that the American shield has holes in it – and can no longer be fully relied upon,” says the pundit.
Reports say the Trump administration discovered its interceptor stockpiles had been drastically depleted, forcing it to scale back plans for large-scale strikes on Iran and deny Ukraine’s request for additional Patriot missiles. The Iran war was identified as a key driver of the shortages.
“For the next 3-5 years, the US will be forced to operate under strict constraints, unable to simultaneously protect all of its assets in the Middle East and continue supporting Ukraine,” Knutov says, commenting on reports that US missile stockpiles may not recover until 2029-2031.
The US may also scale back protection of its allies, the pundit suggests:
- Ukraine is only the first warning sign – other allies could be next to face reduced US air-defense support
- Many Iranian missiles aimed at the Gulf now go unchallenged as US troops conserves scarce interceptors for defending their own bases in the region
- A number of US units not directly involved in air operations or air defense have been withdrawn from the Middle East
The Imbalance in the Iran War is Critical
“Even if the US multiplies production several times over, it will never match Iran in terms of cost or production speed,” Knutov says. “Iran can manufacture missiles and drones at a fraction of the cost, while its facilities are dispersed and protected.”
A war of attrition against Iran would be a losing strategy for the US from the outset, the expert concludes.
Trump returns to talking on Ukraine but war must mature first
By M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | Indian Punchline | August 6, 2026
Russian President Vladimir Putin fired the political equivalent of an Oroshnik hypersonic missile Wednesday to scatter the recent pot shots by hawkish factions at the Russian ‘power vertical’, never a unified construct actually, over the future directions of Ukraine war.
Putin coolly announced at a Kremlin meeting Wednesday with the Defense Ministry leadership a major reshuffle of Russian commanders in the special military operation zone asserting that he has his own mind about tactic and strategy and intends to continue with the special military operation to its logical conclusion, while retaining the structural patterns.
Simply put, Russia’s Bismarck does not want to be remembered in posterity as someone who wantonly sacrificed the lives of his country’s youth to conquer foreign lands for self-glorification.
It is a noble decision — pragmatic and tactical but also strategic. This will mean Russia’s attritional war will continue but a paradigm shift to put maximum pressure on the leadership of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is to be expected. Indeed, the massive missile strikes at Kyiv in recent days are no longer meeting with missile interceptors, as Americans do not have surplus stocks to spare.
Put differently, there has been a paradigm shift as Russian forces gain ground all across the frontline while there are growing signs of demoralisation within the Ukrainian army whose command and control system has become shaky following the recent dismissal of Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and the replacement of Defence Minister Mykhailo Federov.
Putin has reposed confidence in the military commanders who worked as a team in advancing the special military operation. From the political perspective too, Putin is pleased with the return of the US administration — and President Donald Trump personally — to the Ukraine settlement process.
The big picture also needs to be factored in, as Washington’s high-level contacts with Beijing are intensifying and Moscow cannot afford to lag behind. Russia’s sherpa to the APEC summit at Shenzhen Ambassador-at-Large Marat Berdyev told Izvestia recently, “It’s premature to discuss specific meetings. However, in my opinion, such a trilateral contact [US-Russia-China] would be very useful. In practical terms, it’s entirely feasible, as three leaders of the leading powers are expected at the designated venue.”
Certainly, the first in-person meeting in Manila on May 25 between foreign ministers Sergey Lavrov and Marco Rubio since September of last year was a defining moment. Ukraine was largely the focus of the meeting. Rubio told the media there was a need to seek “new proposals and new ideas,” adding that Washington was prepared to present “some of them in the appropriate context and format.”
This marked a departure from the Anchorage agreements of last August. But Moscow decided not to make an issue of it and instead signalled appreciation that after a lengthy pause, the US was renewing efforts to restart the Ukraine negotiation process.
In a subsequent interview with Fox News on August 1, Rubio announced that Washington was once again ready to work with Moscow and Kyiv to achieve peace, despite the two countries’ existing “strict red lines.” Rubio stated that Moscow and Kyiv have “some pretty strong red lines. Until we can bring these red lines closer together, we won’t achieve our goal. But we are ready to act.”
Rubio also touched on how Washington envisioned the main goal of its diplomacy in the new phase: “The dynamics of the conflict have changed somewhat in recent months, with the Ukrainian side now capable of striking deep into Russian territory and making the Russians feel the effects of this war. Therefore, we want to explore whether this new dynamic can lead to some kind of negotiated settlement.”
But to be sure, Rubio would also have been aware that the emergent reality included sustained and massive Russian missile strikes on Kyiv, and that a major drone production facility belonging to the American company Terminal Autonomy was destroyed last week. According to the Guardian, this company manufactured high-precision drones for “deep strikes” in Ukraine, with guidance systems resistant to Russian electronic countermeasures. Of course, Russians were making a point.
On the other hand, Trump retracted from an earlier offer during the NATO summit in Ankara on July 8 to allow Ukraine to manufacture Patriot missile; and he also failed to respond to a request from Zelenskyy for an “emergency winter package of 300 Patriot missiles” without waiting for licensed production to begin.
The White House and SpaceX are also non-committal apropos of Zelenskyy’s proposal to Trump on July 28 to lift Starlink’s geographic restrictions over Russian territory that would enable Ukraine to use Starlink’s real-time connection to steer long-range drones against mobile Russian ballistic missile launchers positioned deep inside Russia.
Furthermore, it transpires that the new scheme by the US’ European allies for American arms supplies to Ukraine under the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) programme is stalling. Despite $4.5 billion flowing into the US Treasury under PURL as of March, no contracts have been signed so far.
Finally, the ‘Graham bill’ imposing oil sanctions on Russia may not after all pass before the legislative recess which begins on August 10, as it has become part of a bargaining chip between the Democratic and Republican parties. If consideration of the bill drags on and if the Congress comes under Democratic Party control, the ‘bipartisan consensus’ over the bill may well wither away even as Lindsey Graham becomes a distant memory. The White House is in no hurry to pass the bill.
However, such ‘feel good’ signalling notwithstanding, fundamental disagreements over key terms of a peace settlement continue to prevent Moscow and Kyiv from resuming full-fledged dialogue. Due to the escalating conflict over Iran, Washington is currently unable to exert the necessary pressure on Kyiv. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are expected to visit Kyiv in the second half of August.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s attacks on civilian infrastructure within Russia are only intensifying, against the backdrop of Russia’s Duma elections. Russia’s retaliatory missile strikes have reached a massive scale.
The bottom line is that the chances of Moscow agreeing to Kyiv and Washington’s new terms are low. So, the nascent negotiation process would inevitably return to square one, which in turn will trigger another round of escalation. Perhaps, Russia anticipates such an eventuality.
One positive factor is that Trump himself would seek to achieve at least interim results in the negotiations before the mid-term congressional elections. But then, a powerful lobby representing the US military-industrial complex advocates a continuation of the conflict.
The Kremlin meeting on Wednesday and the reshuffle of army commanders steering the special military operation in Ukraine messages that negotiations can only become feasible when the parties are willing to make mutual concessions, and for that to happen, two pre-requisites of the situation are needed, namely, Russia’s battlefield victory and regime change in Kyiv.
Did the US military take down a civilian plane?
RT | August 5, 2026
The US military’s GPS jamming exercises have been directly implicated in a fatal plane crash for the first time, after an air ambulance flew into a mountain range in New Mexico while its guidance system was scrambled.
Details of the crash, which took place in May, were revealed in a recent preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The report explains how the jamming exercises interfered with multiple aircraft, pushing air traffic controllers to the breaking point as they attempted to reroute flights using traditional means of navigation. Amid the confusion, a medevac flight with four people on board strayed miles off course, crashing into mountains at full speed on a moonless night.
What happened to the plane?
Shortly after 11 PM on May 13, the crew of a Beechcraft King Air 90 air ambulance were given a straightforward mission: fly for roughly 20 minutes from Roswell to Sierra Blanca Regional Airport, pick up a patient, and transport them to Albuquerque for treatment. Two pilots and two nurses boarded the turboprop aircraft and took off, flying west.
Within minutes, controllers noticed that the plane was flying 1,000 feet above its assigned altitude. The plane’s captain informed controllers that he had lost GPS signal, and controllers responded by ordering him to correct his altitude, fly north, and await alternate directions to Sierra Blanca, where he would perform an instrument landing – using radio beacons to line up with the runway and descend at the correct angle.
Meanwhile, controllers got in touch with the military and requested that the jamming exercise be paused.
What was the military doing?
Some 40 miles away, at the White Sands Missile Range, the US Air Force’s 746th Test Squadron was holding its annual NAVFEST drills. These exercises bring together electronic warfare (EW) units from multiple branches of the armed forces, engineers from the defense industry, and teams from other NATO states to practice GPS interference, navigation, and drone defense on a desert plain once used to test atomic bombs.
Prior to the crash, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) warned aircraft operators that GPS could be affected up to 400 miles from the exercises between May 12 and May 18.
A map showing GPS interference around White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on the night of the crash © GPSJAM
How did the plane crash?
As the plane continued north, controllers informed the captain that they would send vectors – a series of compass headings – to align the plane for landing “in a couple minutes.” However, the controllers were busy redirecting four other aircraft that had lost their GPS, and the vectors never came.
At eight minutes past midnight, the pilots spotted the runway lights at Sierra Blanca, roughly 31 miles to their southwest. They decided to navigate visually to the airport, informed controllers, and turned towards their destination. Apparently, they never intended to approach from this direction, and didn’t notice the 10,000-foot Capitan Mountains between them and the runway.
Controllers informed the military that it could resume jamming, and the plane descended towards Sierra Blanca, its altimeter still reading 600 feet higher than the plane’s actual altitude. As the mountains rose out of the darkness and obscured the distant runway, the pilots attempted to pull up, but were unable to avert disaster.
The plane slammed into the mountainside, instantly killing everyone on board and igniting a forest fire that took almost a month to extinguish.
What has the US military said?
The US Army did not respond to questions from the Associated Press, and has not released a public statement on the crash in the almost two months since the NTSB’s report was published.
Much about the incident is still unknown. It is unclear whether the pilots were aware that the FAA had warned about potential GPS interference, whether their ground proximity warning system – which should have told them to climb to avoid the crash – was affected by the jamming, and why they were unaware of a large mountain range in the area.
The NTSB’s report is preliminary, and the board will not identify the precise cause of the crash until its investigation concludes next year.
Are more flights at risk?
The crash marked the first time that GPS jamming by the US military has been implicated in a fatal accident. However, civilian aircraft have been affected by jamming exercises before. In March of last year, airliners approaching Washington DC’s Reagan International Airport received warnings from their planes’ Traffic Collision Avoidance System, instructing them to immediately descend to avoid hitting non-existent traffic in their paths. It later emerged that electronic warfare testing by the US Secret Service caused the false alerts.
Such incidents will likely become more common, as the Pentagon increases its spending on, and testing of, EW equipment. Since at least 2020, the US has been aware that its military trails Russia and China in developing and integrating EW systems, and lawmakers have pushed the Pentagon to close the gap.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict has demonstrated just how wide that gap is, even between the US and its own client regime in Kiev. In a conflict where every Ukrainian advance in drone technology is countered by Russian EW specialists within weeks, and vice versa, US weapons systems – including GPS-guided shells and missiles – were rendered “useless” by mid-2023, according to media reports.
Since then, the Pentagon has asked Congress to fund more electronic warfare experiments in the US, and last year, the Army published its first ever Comprehensive Electromagnetic Warfare Strategy, promising to embed EW systems into every unit of the branch by 2028.
The US has the world’s busiest airspace, with more than 44,000 flights handled by the FAA every day. It is inevitable that a growing number of these flights will be affected by electronic warfare in the future, and that the risk to civilians will increase as the Pentagon tries to catch up with its adversaries.
The Galling Gallium Chokehold: Why the US Cannot Produce Precision Missiles and Fully-Functional F-35s
By Larry C. Johnson | SONAR21 | August 3, 2026
Kudos, again, to Kevin Wamsley of Inside China Business. Based on his latest podcast (see below) I did some additional digging. The substance of his video briefing is shocking and alarming, at least for US policymakers and weapons manufacturers. There is a single thread running from the empty nose cones of America’s newest stealth fighters to the laboratories where China is building the internet of the 2030s. That thread is gallium — a soft, silvery byproduct of aluminum refining that almost no one outside a materials-science department thinks about, and that the United States does not produce at all.
A metal America stopped making
The top line from the US Geological Survey is stark: the United States has had no primary domestic gallium production for decades, and its net import reliance sits at 100 percent. China, by contrast, controls the overwhelming majority of global output — figures commonly cited run from 94 to 98 percent of raw production. The reason is structural, not incidental. Gallium is extracted as a byproduct of bauxite and zinc processing, industries China dominates. A country cannot simply decide to make gallium; it must first build the aluminum and zinc industries that yield it, then the extraction, refining, wafer, and packaging lines on top. That is a decade-plus undertaking, not a budget line.
This dependency became a weapon in December 2024, when Beijing banned exports of gallium, germanium, and antimony to the United States, explicitly prohibiting sales to US military end-users. It was retaliation for American semiconductor export controls, and it landed on a Pentagon that, by the USGS’s own accounting, had no gallium in the National Defense Stockpile to fall back on.
One crucial update the alarmist version of this story often omits: in November 2025, as part of a broader trade truce between Presidents Trump and Xi, China suspended the civilian portion of that ban until late November 2026, moving those exports to a licensing regime. But the suspension came with a catch that matters enormously — the prohibition on exports to military end-users stayed in force. So the civilian supply reopened on Beijing’s sufferance, revocable at will, while the weapons-makers remained cut off. The chokehold didn’t release; it was repositioned.
The fighters with counterweights where radars should be
The most vivid symptom of this dependency is also the most easily misunderstood. It is true — confirmed through photographic evidence and industry reporting, though initially denied by the Department of War — that F-35s built from Lot 17 onward are being delivered with counterweights, literal ballast, in their nose cones where radars belong. Reporting has put the number affected in the hundreds.
But the cause is more tangled than “China cut off the gallium.” The immediate culprit is the delayed development and certification of the AN/APG-85, the next-generation radar meant to replace the older AN/APG-81. The APG-85 is built on gallium-nitride (GaN) technology, which delivers far higher power and better thermal efficiency — and demands roughly 82 kilowatts, forcing structural, cooling, and power redesigns to the aircraft’s forward fuselage. Jets from Lot 17 were redesigned to accept the APG-85 and can no longer take the old APG-81. When the new radar slipped, those aircraft had nowhere to turn but counterweights.
Gallium supply is the aggravating factor layered beneath that engineering delay: GaN radars use far more gallium than their predecessors, the DLA has struggled to source it as Japan and Germany lack the capacity to fill the gap, and prices have surged. The honest framing is that America faces a radar-development problem and a materials problem, and China’s monopoly sits underneath both. Meanwhile, China has moved its own J-20 fighter to a next-generation radar reportedly built on the same GaN technology — the qualitative gap the APG-85 was meant to open is instead narrowing.
The vulnerability extends well past one airframe. Gallium nitride underpins the high-power jammers on the EA-18G Growler, the F-35’s own electronic-warfare suite, and the large ground-based radar arrays of the kind destroyed during the fighting in the Persian Gulf. The Pentagon’s supply chains reportedly touch Chinese suppliers across a vast share of weapons components — the dependency is systemic, not a single point of failure.
The same monopoly, pointed at the future
Here the story turns from defense to something larger. The same industrial base that lets China throttle radar production also lets Chinese researchers race ahead on the technology expected to define the next quarter-century of connectivity: 6G.
The headline achievement is real and was published in Nature. A team led by scientists from Peking University and the City University of Hong Kong built what they describe as the world’s first “all-frequency” 6G chip — a device roughly 11 by 1.7 millimeters that integrates the entire wireless spectrum from 0.5 to 115 gigahertz onto a single chip. That span previously required nine separate radio systems. In testing it exceeded 100 gigabits per second on a single channel, which independent write-ups translate to roughly 500 times the real-world speed most users get from 5G today, and it can retune across 6 gigahertz of spectrum in 180 microseconds to hop clear of interference. The researchers built it not from gallium but from thin-film lithium niobate, using a photonic-electronic design, and they intend to shrink it into plug-and-play modules for phones, base stations, drones, and IoT devices.
The strategic point survives the technical correction. Whether the enabling material is gallium in a radar or lithium niobate in a transceiver, the pattern is the same: China increasingly controls both the raw inputs and the pipeline of scientists and engineers turning them into deployable systems. And 6G’s importance is not really about consumers. Few individuals need to download a library of films in seconds. The demand comes from industry — precision robotics, advanced manufacturing, private industrial networks, integrated sensing, low-altitude drone economies — the very sectors where China has already built commanding positions. 6G’s promised leap in speed, latency, and integrated sensing is a boon precisely to the industrial base China is busy consolidating.
The standards are the prize
There is one more dimension that outlasts any single chip. 6G has not yet been standardized worldwide; the global protocols are still being written, precisely because the systems are still being built. Standards bodies — 3GPP, the ITU, the O-RAN Alliance — are only now moving 6G from research into formal specification, with first specs targeted around 2029 and commercial networks around 2030. Whoever builds the working systems first shapes the standards everyone else must adopt.
The Trump administration has recognized the stakes, declaring 6G foundational to U.S. national security, foreign policy, and economic prosperity, and setting a policy of American leadership — directing work on spectrum, commercial applications, and diplomatic coalitions to back the U.S. position. The Boston Consulting Group projects that 5G’s roughly $1 trillion in economic output could grow toward $18 trillion by 2035, with 6G enabling entirely new enterprise models and large-scale AI across manufacturing, cities, healthcare, and public safety.
But intent collides with the same wall. The United States cannot lead in building what it cannot supply. Leadership in 6G requires the mining, refining, fabrication, and — above all — the tens of thousands of trained engineers applying the technology at scale. China is doing that work now. America is still debating how to start.
The bottom line
Strip away the hyperbole and a hard core remains. Today, U.S. contractors cannot reliably put advanced radars on hundred-million-dollar aircraft, in part because China controls a metal America stopped producing forty years ago. Ten years from now, on current trajectory, anyone who wants the best phones, drones, or robots may find the critical components — and the standards they run on — routed through that same country. Supply chains are the whole game, and so are the researchers who turn raw materials into markets. That is the argument, and the uncomfortable part is how much of it is simply true.
Here is Kevin’s video:
Featured Video
Saudi Arabia, Turkey & Pakistan Sign Defence Pact
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
What the War on Chlorine Dioxide Reveals About Medicine
For over a century, remarkable therapies have been suppressed to maintain a medical monopoly at the expense of humanity
A Midwestern Doctor | The Forgotten Side of Medicine | August 6, 2026
Story at a Glance:
Modern medicine is built around costly, narrowly approved drugs that treat (but rarely cure) specific disease franchises, with regulatory approval correlating more strongly with money spent than with real therapeutic value.- To enforce this, for over a century the same institutions, backed by vast fortunes, have repeatedly sidelined broader or cheaper therapies that threatened those franchises.
- The same playbook is used again and again—once a therapy threatens a market, claims of “no evidence” or doctored research amplified by the media will allow regulators to clamp down on the “dangerous and unproven” therapy until it becomes forgotten to history.
- In this article, I will illustrate how the exact same playbook was used again and again on numerous transformative medical discoveries endorsed by leading physicians of the era, resulting in nearly every one (e.g., UVBI and numerous cancer treatments) becoming largely forgotten despite immense evidence behind them.
- This same playbook was used throughout COVID-19 to eliminate the off-patent therapies that threatened the boondoggle. One of these, chlorine dioxide, was not only repeatedly shown to eliminate COVID outbreaks, but also to do the same with malaria, where it likewise was banned.
- Pierre Kory and Jenna McCarthy’s recent book The War on Chlorine Dioxide provides a critical body of evidence that chlorine dioxide has treated a myriad of challenging conditions, and that each time it did, a robust censorship apparatus erased those discoveries and retaliated against the discovers—providing a poignant illustration of the medical monopoly in action.
Note: this book is not on Amazon and can only be ordered here.
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Saudi Arabia, Turkey & Pakistan Sign Defence Pact
- China to launch regular shipping to Europe via Russia’s Northern Sea Route – Rosatom
- When the coloniser calls resistance terrorism
- Bipartisan Senate bill ties LAF funding to Hezbollah disarmament
- Turkiye restricts Black Sea traffic as drone attacks on commercial vessels spike
- Inside Israel’s pyramid of spies
- Let them eat burritos: Out of touch influencers risk all for Trump war
- Musk blocks Ukraine from using Starlink for deep strikes in Russia – Atlantic
- Col Doug Macgregor: All Out War w/Iran Getting Unavoidable
- Former US negotiator: America faces major ‘strategic defeat’ as Iran tightens control over Hormuz
- If Americans Knew
- Gaza: UNICEF reports a small, “highly fragile” uptick in aid supplies – Daily Update
- Tucker Carlson unveils 10-point manifesto amid third-party speculation
- Unicef: At least 300 children reportedly killed in Gaza in past 300 days
- The Briton who helped 6,000 Jews move to Israel
- Sewage, trash, rodent catastrophe in Gaza
- Trump Undercuts His Own Peace Plan while Israel Ramps Up Killing in Gaza
- Israel’s detention of children in West Bank rises sharply – Daily Update
- Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power
- Lebanon: Israel’s Killing of Journalist an Apparent War Crime
- New party emerging on opposition to U.S. wars, AIPAC, and corporate money
- No Tricks Zone
- Uncertainty In Estimating Solar Forcing Across The Arctic Is 100-350x Larger Than CO2’s Alleged Climate Impact
- Farce Of The Week: Germany’s Weather Site Donnerwetter.de Attempts To Measure The Rhine River’s Temperature!
- Analysis: Robert Koch Institute’s Heat Death Model Is “A Joke”… Deaths “Assumed” To Be Due To Heat
- New Research Finds Increasing CO2 Induces Cooling In The Lower Atmosphere Over The Arctic
- Germany’s Industrial Suicide… Grid Agency Prepares Secret Power Rationing Plans Amid Electric Power Bottlenecks
- ECMWF Models Throwing Cold Water On Extreme Germany Heat Wave Forecast Next Week
- Greenland’s Ice Sheet Was Supposed To Be Rapidly Melting Away. It Hasn’t Been.
- Global Temperature Trend Has Cooled Over The Past 6500 Years, Scientists Have Found
- Wind Energy Means Going Back To The Middle Ages, Says German Professor Horst-Joachim Lüdecke
- New Study: A 40-Fold Increase In Earth’s Main Greenhouse Gas Contributes To Cooling The Ocean
Aletho News 