Author: Blazingcatfur

Billions of dollars of highly sophisticated military equipment has been lost or significantly damaged since the U.S. and Israel began striking thousands of targets across Iran more than three weeks ago. The bulk of the damage on the ground has been caused by Iranian ballistic missiles and drones.

Battle damage and replacement of losses over the first three weeks of the war likely costs roughly $1.4 billion to $2.9 billion, according to Elaine McCusker, a top Pentagon budget official during the first Trump administration who has been tracking the cost of the conflict for the American Enterprise Institute. The higher estimate includes damage to a Qatari radar housed on a U.S. air base in the country.

Iranian-linked hackers have claimed responsibility for breaching FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email account and publishing private images and documents online, according to a Justice Department official who confirmed the intrusion and said the materials appear authentic.

The hacking group, known as Handala Hack Team, announced the breach on its website Friday, boasting that Patel had been added to its list of “successfully hacked” targets. The group has previously presented itself as a pro-Palestinian vigilante operation, though Western cybersecurity researchers assess it as a front for Iranian government-linked cyber units.

For every day the war in the Middle East drags on, the crisis in energy markets deepens. The price of everything from gas and oil to jet fuel and plastics is rising sharply.

That crisis is set to get dramatically worse over the next week or two.

Energy shipments stopped in their tracks on February 28 when the war began and Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz. But plenty of ships made it out to sea in those final days before the conflict began. The last of them should arrive in Japanese and Korean ports sometime over the next 8-10 days.

After that, there’s nothing coming.

Police say the instigators could have mimicked a Russian model of attack which involves paying recruits with cryptocurrency

Police investigating the arson attack on Jewish ambulances in north London are examining whether it may have been directed by Iran using proxy operatives recruited online, sources said.

Investigators believe that those behind the attack may have followed a model used by Russia, recruiting so-called “useful idiots” through online criminal networks and paying them in cryptocurrency.

Iran has made use of proxies to launch attacks across Europe, including by Chechen and Turkish gangsters, and is also suspected of deploying Iranian expatriates to conduct surveillance on dissidents in the UK.