💥 🇺🇸 🚀 Insane footage filmed from a nearby restaurant shows tonight’s explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn at Cape Canaveral Launch Complex 36 (LC-36).

📎 OSINTdefender

🇺🇸🇮🇷⚡️ — The Iran war was a clear mistake, and Trump must admit he was wrong, according to Foreign Policy magazine.

➡️ The publication argues that instead of admitting the error, Washington continues to avoid confronting the reality of its failure.

🇺🇸 The Economist: People fleeing calamity have a right to seek safety—but that does not mean access to a rich country’s labour market

The rules for refugees arose haphazardly. The UN Refugee Convention of 1951 applied only to Europe, and aimed to stop fugitives from Stalin being sent back to face his fury. It declared that anyone forced to flee by a “well-founded fear” of persecution must have sanctuary, and must not be returned to face peril (the principle of “non-refoulement”). In 1967 the treaty was extended to the rest of the world.

Most countries have signed it. Yet dwindling numbers honour it. China admits fewer refugees than tiny Lesotho and sends North Koreans home to face the gulag. President Donald Trump has ended asylum in America for nearly everyone except white South Africans, and plans to spend more on deporting irregular migrants than other countries spend on defence. Western attitudes are hardening. In Europe the views of social democrats and right-wing populists are converging.

The system is not working. Designed for post-war Europe, it cannot cope with a world of proliferating conflict, cheap travel and huge wage disparities. Roughly 900m people would like to migrate permanently. Since it is almost impossible for a citizen of a poor country to move legally to a rich one, many move without permission. In the past two decades many have discovered that asylum offers a back door. Instead of crossing a border stealthily, as in the past, they walk up to a border guard and request asylum, knowing that the claim will take years to adjudicate and, in the meantime, they can melt into the shadows and find work.

Voters are right to think the system has been gamed. Most asylum claims in the European Union are now rejected outright. Fear of border chaos has fuelled the rise of populism, from Brexit to Donald Trump, and poisoned the debate about legal migration. To create a system that offers safety for those who need it but also a reasonable flow of labour migration, policymakers need to separate one from the other.

Around 123m people have been displaced by conflict, disaster or persecution, three times more than in 2010, partly because wars are lasting longer. All these people have a right to seek safety. But “safety” need not mean access to a rich country’s labour market. Indeed, resettlement in rich countries will never be more than a tiny part of the solution. In 2023 OECD countries received 2.7m claims for asylum—a record number, but a pinprick compared with the size of the problem.

The most pragmatic approach would be to offer more refugees sanctuary close to home. Typically, this means in the first safe country or regional bloc where they set foot. Refugees who travel shorter distances are more likely one day to return home. They are also more likely to be welcomed by their hosts, who tend to be culturally close to them and to be aware that they are seeking the first available refuge from a calamity. This is why Europeans have largely welcomed Ukrainians, Turks have been generous to Syrians and Chadians to Sudanese.

🔗 https://archive.fo/20250710133845/https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/07/10/scrap-the-asylum-system-and-build-something-better

🇨🇺🇧🇷🇲🇽 Cubans Abandon the American Dream

As conditions on the island worsen, people are leaving—just not for the United States.

One of the goals of the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against Cuba—including a comprehensive oil embargo, expanded U.S. Defense Department contingency planning, a U.S. indictment of former Cuban President Raúl Castro, and increasing calls on Capitol Hill for a military intervention—is to foment internal dissent that would lead to the toppling of the communist regime on the island. But the efforts have failed so far because emigration, Cuba’s most reliable release valve for dissent, remains functional despite U.S. efforts to shut it down.

In previous periods of political and economic crisis, most Cuban migrants went to the United States. But a growing share is now heading to Latin America, including Brazil and Mexico. These destination countries bear the downstream costs of U.S. policy toward Cuba, giving them leverage that could shape their responses to Washington’s future actions in the hemisphere.

his changing migration pattern is largely the result of the Trump administration’s restrictive approach to relations with the island. Since returning to office in January 2025, Trump has implemented a maximum pressure campaign against Cuba and imposed limits on Cuban emigration to the United States.

The White House has included Cuba on a list of 39 countries subject to full or partial travel restrictions, as well as on a list of 75 countries facing an indefinite freeze on visa processing. It also terminated a humanitarian parole program designed to facilitate eligible Cubans’ legal entry into the United States and ended bilateral migration talks that occurred regularly under former U.S. President Joe Biden.

These measures mark a departure from decades of U.S. policy. In the years following the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s, there were repeated outflows of Cuban migrants during periods of crisis. The United States was the primary destination.

Early episodes included the 1965 Camarioca boatlift, during which Cuban leader Fidel Castro, seeking to rid the island of dissidents, allowed Cubans with relatives in the United States to depart from the northern port of Camarioca. The boat crossings were later ended by a U.S.-Cuba agreement establishing the more formal Freedom Flights program, which consisted of twice-daily flights between the two countries that ultimately brought hundreds of thousands of Cuban refugees to the United States.

Later waves of migration followed a similar pattern. The 1980 Mariel boatlift—a larger, more chaotic version of the Camarioca boatlift—saw an estimated 125,000 Cubans leave the island. Years later, the 1994 Balsero crisis unfolded during Cuba’s so-called “special period,” when roughly 35,000 Cubans fled severe economic depression caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Throughout these episodes, Cuban authorities allowed large-scale departures to alleviate domestic pressure. The latest exodus, which began in 2021, has seen between 1 and 2 million Cubans leave, according to most estimates.

The Trump administration has so far been successful in keeping Cuban migrants from entering the United States. Irregular border encounters with Cuban migrants have dropped by 99 percent compared to similar periods under Biden. But data from elsewhere in the hemisphere indicate that Cubans are still leaving the island in large numbers, albeit for new destinations.

In Brazil, Cuban asylum applications nearly doubled from 22,288 in 2024 to 41,919 in 2025, making Cubans 55 percent of all asylum-seekers in the country and the single largest nationality group among applicants. Farther north, in Mexico, Cubans accounted for 23 percent of all humanitarian visitor cards issued by Mexican immigration authorities from January through November 2024. From January through July 2025, that number jumped to 78 percent—the clearest signal that Cubans are entering the Mexican asylum pipeline in numbers that Mexico has never experienced.

🔗 Foreign Policy

🇱🇧⚔️🇮🇱 Two more Iron Dome air-defense launchers were taken out by Hezbollah fiber-optic-guided FPV drones.

The attack took place on May 23, and Hezbollah has just released the footage.

Number of Iron Dome launchers destroyed has risen to 7 (6? one might've been a decoy)

🔗 Egypt's Intel Observer (@EGYOSINT)

🇸🇦🤝🇮🇷 Iranian opposition/monarchist news outlet, Iran International, based in London, received a 650 million pound Sterling bailout from a Saudi investment fund

The company that owns UK-based broadcaster Iran International received £650mn of debt relief from its shareholders, strengthening the balance sheet of the prominent platform for anti-regime voices.

The previously unreported debt-for-equity swap in December shored up the finances of the network, which claims to be the most watched Persian news channel and has burnt through hundreds of millions of pounds since it was founded with backing from British-Saudi investors in 2017.

It came shortly before mass protests erupted across Iran, marking the start of a turbulent period in which the regime killed thousands of demonstrators in a brutal crackdown. Weeks later the US and Israel launched a war on Iran, assassinating its longtime supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran International — which employs about 700 people globally — broadcasts into Iran from London through satellite, radio and a massive social media following. Critics accuse it of pushing a pro-war narrative and using its reach to promote Reza Pahlavi, the US-based son of the last shah.

The network has not disclosed the source of its funding, a decision that has long unsettled some of its journalists, who have privately raised concerns about its editorial decisions, said a person with direct knowledge of its operations.

Iran International’s parent company, Volant Media UK, has lost more than £410mn in the past five years and it owed related entities about £482mn, according to its last set of accounts covering the financial year ending December 2024. Volant also runs a separate network called Afghanistan International.

Volant says it is editorially independent, has never received state funding from Saudi Arabia, Israel or elsewhere, and is backed by a consortium of private, commercial investors. It declined to comment on their identity.

Filings for Volant in the UK’s corporate registry show that an allotment of 648mn shares, valued at £648mn, was issued on December 13.

A separate confirmation statement shows that on the same date all of Volant’s original 50,000 shares were transferred from the British-Saudi film executive Adel Abdulkarim Alabdulkarim, who serves as Volant’s company director and secretary, to offshore company Info-Cast Cayman Limited.

The sole director of Info-Cast Cayman is Saleh Hussain Aldowais, according to Cayman corporate records consulted this month. A person with that name is the chief operations officer of state-backed Saudi Research and Media Group, the kingdom’s biggest media organisation. SRMG did not respond to requests for comment.

🔗 https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.ft.com/content/9d8dccaa-8a7d-452e-bdfc-786a07da5f8e

🇮🇱⚔️🇱🇧 New reporting from Reuters indicates that Israel has issued evacuation orders covering 20% of Lebanon, far beyond the "buffer zone" it previously announced to the Litani River.

More than half of the evacuation orders were *north* of Litani. Some evacuation orders were given for areas north of the Zahrani river.

Gaza tactics in Lebanon.

55 killed, 187 injured in Israeli attacks on Lebanon on Wednesday.

The Lebanese Ministry of Health announced today 3,324 killed and 10,027 injured across the country since March 2nd.

Over 25 people killed in Israeli attacks across Lebanon on Thursday, L’Orient Today reported.

🔗 https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-israel-has-emptied-southern-lebanon-far-beyond-front-lines-2026-05-28/

🇷🇴❌🇷🇺 Romania expelled the Russian consul in the port of Constanța and closed down the Russian consulate in the city as a response to the drone attack last night.

🔗 https://www.gandul.ro/actualitate/nicusor-dan-avem-acorduri-pentru-echipamente-care-urmeaza-sa-vina-in-curand-consulatul-federatiei-ruse-se-va-inchide-20907080