Israel and the United States are now at war with Iran, a conflict framed by both leaders through a stark and self-serving moral binary. In the words of Benjamin Netanyahu, it is cast as a “necessary fight between good and evil.” For Donald Trump, the illegality of the war is beside the point. It is waged instead in the ideological spirit and cruelty of the Crusades, fueled by religious fervor and animated by what David Smith writing in The Guardian, has called a celebration of the “capacity to inflict violence.” What this religious framing obscures is the political reality that this is, in large part, Netanyahu’s war, one he has long prepared by casting Iran in apocalyptic terms as a successor to Nazism. But as Fintan O’Toole suggests, something even more disturbing is at work: in Trump’s hands, the war is severed from any coherent political or moral rationale, reduced to a hollow spectacle of destruction, a language of power emptied of meaning itself. Yet this emptiness is not benign. It signals at once a profound political weakness and an unrestrained embrace of state violence, a politics of dispossession and a logic of disposability that, if left unchecked, points toward the reemergence of camps as instruments of governance, cloaked in the moral certainties of religious dogmatism.

A far-right conspiracy theorist turned high-ranking official at the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) claims to have once teleported to a Waffle House.

Gregg Phillips, who in December was appointed to lead Fema’s office of response and recovery, has spoken on “multiple podcasts” about being teleported against his will, CNN reported on Friday.

The Trump administration is drastically undercounting the price tag of the U.S. war with Iran, peddling fragmentary estimates that offer Americans a skewed understanding of the costs.

The Pentagon on Thursday said the U.S. spent about $11.3 billion in just one week of its war on Iran; Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett similarly put the figure at $12 billion on Sunday.

But these sums are dwarfed by estimates offered by experts in the costs of war, lawmakers experienced with the Pentagon budget, and two government officials briefed on Operation Epic Fury who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Over less than two weeks in Lebanon, more than 800,000 people have been forced to flee their homes and towns due to relentless Israeli bombings and blanket evacuation orders that are not sparing anyone.

These mass displacements are deepening people’s vulnerabilities, including those of people who have not been able to return home since previous displacements. Ghina, a young person who fled from Odaisseh on Lebanon’s southern border, is one of the thousands who remain internally displaced since 2023. She now lives with her family in a shelter, known as the Montana shelter by its residents, in a town called Marwaniyeh located near Saida, Lebanon’s third-largest city.