The Daily Brief
Today
Good morning. The heaviest development is the escalation toward open war on the Arabian Peninsula. Iran-backed Houthi rebels have seized an island at the entrance to the Red Sea and extended their hold on the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the chokepoint at the southern reaches of the waterway, after consolidating gains along Yemen's western coast and resuming fighting with the Saudi-backed government. With Saudi oil exports threatened, Riyadh is reportedly urging President Trump to strike the rebels, and Washington has already sent more than 100 advisors to prop up its Saudi ally, deepening Tehran's war with the United States.
The imperial frame extends outward. Fareed Zakaria used The Washington Post to tear into Trump's "dangerous fantasy" that he can still negotiate rationally with Vladimir Putin. To the north, Carney answers Trump's trade war by advancing Canada's own imperialist agenda — intensifying worker exploitation and forging closer ties with European powers rearming for war on Russia.
At home, the repression runs through the counter-terror machine. The Justice Department is ramping up an investigation into whether former officials conspired years ago to undermine Trump. ICE detained a man who has lived in the U.S. more than 25 years and was not even its intended target, his attorney says. The administration used a secretive court, dormant for three decades, for the first time to deport a woman to Afghanistan who conceded being an "alien terrorist"; DHS posted, then deleted, a racist AI image of a Sikh man telling him to self-deport.
A man has been arrested in the death of Tasia Fortune, the 29-year-old Black woman found hanging from a tree in Mississippi last month. And as the Republican midterm convention doubles down, one analysis lays out how everything Trump wants to do causes inflation while August proved brutal for consumers and September looks worse — the bosses' program billed to workers.
Zoom out: As Washington pours more than 100 advisors into a widening war against Iran-backed forces in Yemen, the same administration turns its counter-terror machinery on migrants and its investigators on perceived enemies at home.