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Event With Links to Oil Industry Teaches Judges “Healthy Skepticism” of Climate Science

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Abrahm Lustgarten
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Event With Links to Oil Industry Teaches Judges “Healthy Skepticism” of Climate Science

For many months, conservative lawmakers and political operatives have been targeting the scientists and lawyers behind the Climate Judiciary Project, a program meant to educate the courts about climate science, alleging that their effort constitutes a conspiracy to influence federal judges and persuade them to rule against the oil industry.

Now, just as congressional investigators are escalating a formal inquiry into the project, a separate program closely aligned with the fossil fuel industry and free-market conservatives is hosting a symposium for 150 judges in Nashville, Tennessee. The program, run by the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, also aims to educate judges, but in a way that prioritizes American business interests and questions climate science. 

The dueling efforts come as a number of significant lawsuits seeking to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate damages are making their way through the courts and as oil-industry-aligned attacks on climate policies, and the legal arguments supporting them, have been sharply increasing.

ProPublica reported in April that political operatives connected to the conservative activist Leonard Leo were coordinating an effort across 11 states to pass laws shielding fossil fuel companies from liability for climate harm. In the past three weeks, similar liability waiver bills have been introduced federally in both the House and the Senate. Last week the Florida attorney general’s office launched an investigation into alleged judicial influence by the organization that oversees the Climate Judiciary Project, the Environmental Law Institute, a nonpartisan legal scholarship group funded until recently by the Environmental Protection Agency. 

These developments come on the heels of a campaign last winter to get the Federal Judicial Center, the publishing body for the federal court system, to retract a roughly 90-page chapter devoted to climate science from the latest volume of its technical manual for judges. Twenty-two Republican attorneys general wrote to Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, demanding that the committee investigate the center’s publication of material about how to weigh scientific evidence about climate and the weather because the chapter’s authors appeared to be biased. In their letter, they noted the authors work for Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and alleged the chapter was influenced by Michael Burger, the executive director of the center who works closely with the law firm Sher Edling, which represents several climate plaintiffs. The Republican attorneys general also noted that some staff at the Sabin Center work with the Environmental Law Institute and the Climate Judiciary Project. Although the chapter had been peer reviewed and approved by the Federal Judicial Center, as well as by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the center retracted the climate chapter in February.

On April 28, Jordan went a step further, issuing letters accusing Burger, the Environmental Law Institute and Sher Edling of bias, conspiracy and collusion. Jordan demanded that the three parties produce private communications, receipts and records of funding sources, and that the recipients sit for interviews before the committee.

A close-up photo of a man wearing a blue shirt and tie.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio leaves a House Republican Conference meeting in the U.S. Capitol in March. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images

The Sabin Center, Jordan wrote, is “producing materials to be used to bias federal judges about novel climate-related legal theories” and coordinating to bring climate-related litigation to court. The activity raises questions about “the integrity and independence of the judicial process” and “ex parte contact with courts,” Jordan wrote, referring to the improper conduct of contacting a judge without opposing counsel present to argue issues related to a pending case. 

Neither Sher Edling, the Sabin Center nor Burger responded to a request for comment. A representative for the Environmental Law Institute stated in an email that the Climate Judiciary Project “does not participate in litigation, coordinate with any parties related to any litigation, or advise judges on how they should rule on any issue or in any case. The goal of CJP is to provide judges with the tools they need to understand climate science and how it arises in the law.”

Jordan’s office replied to a request for comment by reasserting the statements in the letters it sent, and it did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

Amid the allegations of impropriety and conflicts of interest though, the program at George Mason University has scarcely been noticed.

The George Mason conference, called the “Judicial Symposium on Scientific Methodology, Expert Testimony, and the Judicial Role,” opened the day after Jordan sent out his letters and will continue through Saturday, May 2. It is run by the university’s Law and Economics Center, which oversees a project called the Judicial Education Program. The center is funded in part by ExxonMobil, which is a defendant in several of the climate lawsuits. ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment. 

The conference includes speakers who have filed amicus briefs — filings by people who aren’t part of the case but have a strong interest in its outcome — in favor of the oil industry in several of those cases, as well as at least one lawyer who has represented fossil fuel companies in court. The reading assignments prepared for the judges include a Substack post by a notable climate contrarian accusing the authors of the retracted climate chapter in the federal court’s reference manual of including material by Burger and hiding his authorship. They also include a law journal argument that a key tenet of climate science used to identify the cause of disasters should be inadmissible in their courtrooms. One session, titled “Debates on the trustworthiness of tools to evaluate science in the courtroom,” focuses entirely on the federal courts’ reference manual. 

In an emailed response to ProPublica, Donald Kochan, the executive director of George Mason’s Law and Economics Center, which organized the event, presented the symposium as a robust and objective discussion. The program’s advisory board, he wrote, is a politically and jurisprudentially diverse group including “some of the most progressive jurists in the country, including on climate issues.” Kochan, who did not respond to a list of specific questions, added that lectures are by leading academics on science and law and that he invited the authors of the judicial reference manual to speak but they declined, as did several others who he suggested would have represented more centrist viewpoints on the climate issue.

The conference is one of dozens of meetings, retreats and “intimate weeklong gatherings” that are regularly hosted by the Law and Economics Center as part of an initiative to instill free-market values and greater knowledge of the economic consequences of policy in judicial decision-making. In 2016 the law school renamed itself after the former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the center expanded with $30 million in gifts, adding faculty and scholarships and launching additional “colloquia.” The center today runs several parallel initiatives under the umbrella of the Judicial Education Program, each aimed at gathering judges together and educating them. The symposium on science and evidence is one of these events.

A crowd of people in business attire look on as two men pull a curtain down from a larger-than-life statue of Justice Antonin Scalia with his arms crossed.
A statue of former Justice Antonin Scalia is unveiled at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School in 2018. Katherine Frey/The Washington Post via Getty Images

According to an internal fundraising document from 2020 obtained by ProPublica, the gatherings are often luxurious all-expenses-paid affairs, created to foster lasting relationships and opportunities to network with judges. The document included a solicitation for more than $930,000 sent by the center to the Charles Koch Foundation, a libertarian organization that provides grants to universities and scholars. At the time of the proposal, more than 5,000 judges representing all 50 states had attended at least one of the organization’s programs, the document stated.

The goal of the symposium, according to the document, is to sway judges toward a libertarian economic viewpoint in their rulings — the very sort of “biasing” that Jordan accused the Sabin Center and the Climate Judiciary Project of. 

“The goal of this project is to expose judges to the intellectual history of the role of capitalism, economic freedom, and a constitutionally limited government as fundamental features of a liberal society,” the document says. It is also to establish a community of like-minded justices “with synergistic effects on the judiciary as a whole” and to influence the outcome of cases that come before the courts. Judges, the fundraising proposal continues, “urgently need to cultivate an understanding” of economic analysis and its relevance to the legal system if they “are to issue decisions that advance the rule of law and America’s free enterprise system.”

According to the George Mason University website, the Law and Economics Center’s 2025 funders include DonorsTrust, a dark money pass-through organization meant to shield the identity of contributors. DonorsTrust is often used by organizations tied to Leo, who brought George Mason a $20 million gift, in addition to $10 million from the Charles Koch Foundation, that made expansion of the law school’s program possible. 

This weekend’s symposium in Nashville is one of the most significant parts of the center’s outreach to justices. According to the 2020 fundraising letter, the goal of such gatherings is to challenge the status quo on science. The conference “will give judges a rounded understanding and healthy skepticism of the invocations of ‘science’ that lurk in the background of lawsuits they are hearing,” the center’s then-director wrote, and it will help judges understand that “so much of what passes as ‘science’ for leverage purposes never has to face tests for rigor, reliability and quality in front of a neutral arbiter.”

One of the symposium’s events prominently features Philip Goldberg, a managing partner at the law firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon and the special counsel to the National Association of Manufacturers’ policy lobbying arm, the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, which the group describes as “the leading voice of manufacturers in the courts.” MAP, as it is called, has publicly rejected the claims in a landmark case that the city of Honolulu brought against Shell, ExxonMobil and other oil companies alleging they misrepresented the risks of using their fuels and are responsible for the damages they have caused. Goldberg authored a brief for the group that was submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court on the case in 2024.

Goldberg, who did not respond to a request for comment, has also authored briefs in climate liability cases brought by the city of Baltimore against BP and other fossil fuel companies — a case won by the defendants in March — as well as a case brought by Boulder County in Colorado against Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil, which alleges the companies misrepresented the risks of using fossil fuels. Lawyers from Shook, Hardy & Bacon are also present at the conference. Other lawyers at the firm wrote a brief in favor of Chevron in a case brought by Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. (The oil companies dispute the allegations and each of these cases is ongoing.)

For its assigned reading for a session on the judicial manual, the symposium offered an article by the political scientist Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Pielke wrote that he found evidence that the true authorship of a significant part of the climate chapter in the reference manual was obscured. He used the Claude artificial intelligence program to run an analysis comparing the chapter’s text to a paper co-authored by Sabin’s Burger and said he found a correlation. 

“Michael Burger did not write any of the text in the climate science chapter nor did he have any control over the content and scope,” one of the chapter’s two authors, Jessica Wentz, who has denied the chapter was biased, wrote to ProPublica. The other author did not respond, and Burger declined to comment. 

The conference did not offer readings from the climate chapter of the manual itself, which is still available on the website of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Nor did it offer readings from the United Nations climate science authorities or climate-related readings from any other peer-reviewed scientific journal.

In its final session, the symposium features attorney Matthew Wickersham of the firm Alston & Bird, which has served as counsel for Chevron in several lawsuits. Wickersham did not respond to a request for comment. The only reading assigned to justices for that session is a paper Wickersham wrote in the Rutgers Law Record in 2025 about why attribution science — the field of study that makes it possible to link climate disasters to specific amounts of pollution and their sources — should never be admitted in court.

Japan-Australia frigate deal about far more than 11 warships

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IwPost
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Japan-Australia frigate deal about far more than 11 warships

The signing of the “Mogami Memorandum” aboard the JS Kumano frigate docked in Melbourne on April 18, 2026, marks a pivotal geopolitical moment, one that signals a tectonic shift in the Indo-Pacific security architecture.

Japan has, in effect, shed the constraints of its post-World War II pacifism to emerge as a major global exporter of defense equipment.

Under the agreement, valued at up to A$20 billion (US$14.4 billion), Tokyo has committed to supplying 11 next-generation Mogami-class frigates (Upgraded Mogami/06FFM) to the Royal Australian Navy.

Japan’s Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi and Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles jointly inaugurated what is now widely viewed as the most integrated north–south defense axis in the region.

The procurement scheme is notably ambitious. The first three vessels will be entirely built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Nagasaki to meet an accelerated delivery schedule by December 2029. The remaining eight will be constructed in Henderson, Western Australia.

This decision concludes a prolonged contest in which Japan outmaneuvered Germany’s MEKO A-200 proposal, as well as bids from South Korea and Spain.

Canberra ultimately favored Tokyo due to the maturity of its design, schedule reliability, and superior automation technology, allowing operations with a crew of just 92, roughly half that of conventional frigates.

For Japan, this contract marks redemption after its failed bid for Australia’s Soryu-class submarines a decade ago. More importantly, the Mogami deal serves as a geostrategic instrument to anchor Australia within a quasi-alliance, a de facto alignment aimed at balancing China’s growing military assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific.

Bilateral relations have evolved well beyond trade, entering a phase defined by shared strategic doctrine, particularly the concept of “deterrence by denial,” designed to prevent conflict in maritime theaters before it can escalate.

This strategic convergence did not emerge overnight. Since the declaration of a Special Strategic Partnership in 2014, Tokyo and Canberra have methodically built a robust legal and operational framework.

The culmination came with the Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA), enacted in 2023, which streamlines the deployment of troops and defense assets across each other’s territories. It represents Japan’s first such defense agreement with a country other than the United States since 1960.

A quasi-strategic alliance

The deepening of ties is rooted in shared vulnerabilities, particularly concerning the security of sea lines of communication (SLOC). Australia functions as a critical supplier of energy and minerals to Japan, providing roughly one-third of its LNG needs and two-thirds of its industrial minerals.

Any disruption in the South China Sea or the Strait of Malacca would force reliance on alternative routes along Australia’s eastern seaboard and through the Vitiaz Strait, lifelines essential to Japan’s economic survival.

Consequently, Australia’s capacity to secure its northern maritime approaches is not merely a regional concern, but a direct Japanese national interest.

Both countries are now embedded in overlapping multilateral security frameworks. These include the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) alongside India and the United States, as well as close coordination under the Trilateral Strategic Dialogue (TSD).

Australia has also opened pathways for Japan’s participation in AUKUS Pillar II, focusing on advanced capabilities such as autonomous underwater systems, artificial intelligence, and quantum technologies.

The Framework for Strategic Defence Coordination (FSDC), launched in late 2025, institutionalizes this partnership further, encompassing intelligence-sharing and long-term defense policy alignment.

This dense network of strategic cooperation distinguishes Japan’s relationship with Australia from its engagements elsewhere in Asia. In Southeast Asia, Tokyo relies on the Official Security Assistance (OSA) mechanism — providing, for instance, air surveillance radars and patrol vessels to the Philippines to enhance maritime domain awareness in the South China Sea.

While Manila signed an RAA with Japan in 2024, that cooperation remains focused on baseline defense capacity and humanitarian assistance, rather than the deep industrial integration seen with Australia.

Australia occupies the apex of Japan’s hierarchy of “like-minded countries,” largely due to strategic symmetry and full interoperability with US and NATO standards.

Canberra is viewed as a partner capable of high-end combat operations, whereas engagements with countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines focus on maritime diplomacy, sovereignty patrols, and archipelagic security.

The Mogami differentiation

These distinctions are starkly reflected in the technical specifications of the Mogami frigates being supplied. The Australian variant, the “Upgraded Mogami” or New FFM, is significantly more lethal than the versions discussed with Indonesia.

It is equipped with 32 Mk 41 Vertical Launch System (VLS) cells capable of carrying up to 128 Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles (ESSM), and it is integrated with the US weapon systems such as the Naval Strike Missile (NSM) and potentially Tomahawk cruise missiles.

By contrast, Japan’s proposed cooperation with Indonesia, covering eight vessels, split between Japanese and domestic production, centers on the standard 30FFM or a modified variant. This version emphasizes patrol and surveillance functions in archipelagic waters.

Indonesian frigates are projected to carry only 16 VLS cells, with sensor suites optimized for independent operations in shallow seas. The cost differential is equally significant: Australian units average around A$1.8 billion each, reflecting extensive technology transfer and the upgraded OYQ-1 combat management system, whereas Indonesia’s version is designed to be more economical and scalable for domestic production.

Functionally, Australia’s Mogami fleet is intended to operate as part of an integrated combat system alongside U.S. and Japanese Aegis destroyers in high-intensity conflict scenarios in open waters.

For Indonesia, however, the platform serves as a tool to assert physical presence in exclusive economic zones, emphasizing operational efficiency and minimal crew requirements, without adopting long-range offensive capabilities that could trigger regional sensitivities.

This divergence underscores Japan’s “tailoring” strategy in defense exports: deploying a common technological platform but calibrating capabilities to match each partner’s risk profile and geopolitical role.

Japan’s seriousness in expanding defense exports is further evidenced by domestic legal reforms. Under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, Tokyo has relaxed its “Three Principles on Transfer of Defense Equipment,” enabling the export of lethal systems to strategic partners.

Australia has been the primary beneficiary, but the ripple effects are visible elsewhere, from radar system transfers to Mongolia to ongoing discussions about supplying used frigates to the Philippines.

ASEAN’s strategic calculus

The Japan-Australia axis is poised to become a decisive factor in shaping the Indo-Pacific balance of power.

In the East China Sea and around Taiwan, the deployment of 11 advanced Australian stealth frigates, equipped with superior anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities, will complicate Chinese submarine operations attempting to breach the “First Island Chain.”

This adds a critical defensive layer to Japan’s energy supply routes, ensuring resilience even amid escalation in the South China Sea.

For China, this emerging axis represents a direct challenge to its incremental “salami-slicing” strategy. Beijing has criticized the agreement as a catalyst for an arms race and the formation of an exclusive, NATO-like bloc in Asia.

Yet from the perspective of Tokyo and Canberra, this integration serves as strategic insurance, particularly against potential fluctuations in U.S. commitment to the region amid domestic political shifts in Washington.

The implications extend beyond the immediate actors. For ASEAN countries, the deal carries a strong magnetic appeal. Australia’s success in securing access to Japan’s most sensitive defense technologies could set a precedent for others, including Vietnam and Indonesia, to reassess their defense procurement strategies.

Japanese systems offer a compelling middle path: high-end combat performance combined with industrial reliability, without the political constraints often attached to Western platforms or the limitations imposed by sanctions on Russian systems.

Ultimately, the Mogami agreement is not merely about deploying advanced warships. It represents the construction of a broader defense innovation and manufacturing ecosystem between two middle powers determined to avoid marginalization in great-power competition.

The Japan-Australia axis, anchored by the Mogami frigates, lays the groundwork for a more horizontal and resilient regional security order, one no longer dependent on a single hegemonic anchor.

In the years ahead, the integration of Japanese sensors, American missile systems, and Australian shipbuilding capacity will define a new strategic reality, one that any actor seeking to alter the Indo-Pacific status quo through coercion will have to reckon with.

Ronny P Sasmita is senior international affairs analyst at Indonesia Strategic and Economic Action Institution, a Jakarta-based think tank.

Infrasound waves stop kitchen fires, but can they replace sprinklers?

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IwPost
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Infrasound waves stop kitchen fires, but can they replace sprinklers?

In a makeshift demonstration kitchen in Concord, California, cooking oil splatters in and around a frying pan, which catches fire on an unattended gas stove. Within moments, a smoke detector wails. But in this demonstration, something less common happens: An AI-driven sensor activates and wall emitters blast infrasound waves toward the source of the fire in an attempt to put it out.

The science of acoustic fire suppression, which has long been known and documented in scientific literature and the press, works by vibrating oxygen molecules away from a fuel source, depriving the fire of a critical component needed for combustion.

Indeed, after just a few seconds of infrasound, the tiny kitchen blaze goes out.

The demonstration I witnessed took place in the presence of numerous firefighters and officials from Contra Costa County Fire Protection District, the state’s premier wildland firefighting agency (CAL FIRE), and invited journalists.

“We were able to not just point-and-shoot like a fire extinguisher; we figured out how to run it through ducting and distribute it like a sprinkler system,” said Geoff Bruder, co-founder and CEO of Sonic Fire Tech, during the presentation.

The company’s goal is to replace sprinklers, which are effective at stopping fires but can also do significant water damage to a property. Sonic Fire Tech appears to be the first company trying to commercialize the science of acoustic fire suppression. Its executives have already been touring Southern California; Wednesday’s event was the first in the northern half of the state.

The company aims to make this infrasound technique mainstream in both commercial (for instance, a data center, where sprinklers would damage electronics) and in-home installations, given that sprinklers are already required in all new California homes built in 2011 and later.

Sonic Fire Tech also hopes to produce a backpack-based system that could be worn by wildland firefighters headed out into the field.

“We are making meaningful technological improvements on a monthly basis,” Stefan Pollack, a company spokesperson, emailed Ars after the event.

But two experts who spoke with Ars raised serious questions about the potential for this technology to supplant traditional sprinklers in a home. They are even more skeptical as to whether the technique can be effective in an uncontrolled wildfire situation, where flames can grow very quickly.

The infrasound system in action

Sprinkler replacement?

Sonic Fire Tech says that its system is as good as, if not better than, traditional sprinklers for many applications.

“Sonic Fire Tech is in fact intended to replace interior residential sprinklers,” Pollack told Ars. “The demo showed a critical benefit of SFT over water sprinklers in suppressing a kitchen fire, which represents about half of all residential fires. This is also applicable to commercial kitchen fires and other common grease and chemical fire applications.”

The company’s press releases tout infrasound’s advantages over sprinklers. “Traditional residential sprinklers activate several minutes only after heat rises to a threshold, can discharge large volumes of water that damage interiors and electronics, and require plumbing infrastructure that adds cost and complexity,” says one release. “Sonic Home Defense, by contrast, deploys in milliseconds and uses inaudible low-frequency infrasound waves to disrupt the chemistry of combustion before flames can spread, with no water, no chemicals, and no risk of flooding the interior of the home being protected.”

The goals sound great, but they do raise questions among outside observers.

“Sprinklers have a well-established role,” Nate Wittasek, a Los Angeles-based fire protection engineer, emailed Ars. “They apply water directly to the fuel, cool the space, slow or stop flashover, and give people time to get out while reducing risk to firefighters. Sound may knock down a small flame, but it does not cool hot surfaces or wet fuel. That raises real questions about re-ignition, smoldering fires, hidden fires, and fires that are partially blocked by contents.”

Water sprinklers have been around for a long time. The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), a well-known industry nonprofit, was founded in the late 1800s to develop a uniform standard for sprinklers. The latest iteration of those guidelines, known as the “13D” standard, is well documented and widely adopted.

A recent press release from Sonic Fire Tech states that the company has “secured third-party validation of its system as a viable NFPA 13D-equivalent alternative to conventional residential sprinklers.”

The company told Ars that it has been evaluated by James Andy Lynch (who was present at the demonstration) and his team at Fire Solutions Group, a Pennsylvania-based consultancy, to establish Sonic Fire Tech’s bona fides.

Sonic Fire Tech declined to provide Ars with a full copy of Lynch’s report, citing “confidential and patent-pending information,” but it did send Ars the two-page executive summary.

This document states that “the Sonic Fire Tech system is capable of delivering extremely rapid fire detection, meaningful suppression or extinguishment, and consistent performance across a variety of installation configurations.”

But the summary lacks any kind of detailed explanation of which tests were run and under what conditions. It also concludes that “additional testing and optimization are recommended to further expand the range of validated applications,” adding that Sonic Fire Tech’s products have the “potential to complement or, in certain applications, serve as an alternative to traditional suppression systems.”

“Equivalency [to the 13D standard] can only be approved by the appropriate authority having jurisdiction and requires technical documentation be submitted demonstrating the equivalency,” Jonathan Hart, NFPA Technical Lead, Fire Protection Technical Resources, emailed Ars.

To date, Sonic Fire Tech has not publicly provided this information.

Wittasek said that if Sonic Fire Tech is going to claim that its product is as good as or better than the NFPA 13D standard, it should be able to provide a whole range of specifics, such as “who validated it, what test protocols were used, what fire scenarios were included, and how success was defined.”

“I would want to see full-scale testing that includes typical residential fires like furniture and mattress fires, cooking fires, electrical fires, and attic or exterior ember exposures,” he added. “It should also cover different conditions like open and closed doors, varying ceiling heights, crosswinds, obstructed fuel packages, and whether the fire comes back after the system shuts off.”

Similarly, Michael Gollner, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert in fire dynamics, told Ars there’s simply not enough information yet to show that this technology works better than sprinklers.

He pointed to a 2018 academic paper, which found that “acoustics alone are insufficient to control flames beyond the incipient stage.”

By contrast, “Fire sprinklers are extensively tested and certified by standards developed by the fire safety community over many years,” he emailed Ars. “I think this product needs to demonstrate the same or better performance with the same reliability before it can be considered to replace any existing safety measure. While I am absolutely supportive of out-of-the-box thinking, lives are truly at stake, and new technologies must carefully demonstrate effectiveness and reliability before being entrusted by society.”

Dozer time

As for the Contra Costa County firefighters who hosted the demonstration, they are curious to see more. Deputy Fire Chief Tracie Dutter told Ars that the agency does not recommend specific products, but it does try to understand the uses that new technology can have.

“Sonic representatives indicated they are exploring opportunities to partner with fire departments to test this technology on a bulldozer,” Dutter said.

“The District would be open to testing this system on one of our dozers,” Dutter added, to “better understand its limitations and potential failure points.”

With new tech like this, firefighters also want to understand what “long-term maintenance requirements” it has, whether “routine testing or calibration is required to ensure reliability,” and “how system failures such as a malfunctioning detector or acoustic generator are identified and communicated to an owner.”

Will the Bennett-Lapid Alliance Reshape the US-Israel Relationship?

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Will the Bennett-Lapid Alliance Reshape the US-Israel Relationship?


As elections near, the opposition alliance clarifies leadership in Israel while raising questions about how a new government would manage ties with Washington

Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Former Prime Minister Yair Lapid will run together in Israel’s next election, a move that reshapes the opposition camp and places Bennett at its center, at least for now.

“I think that ship has sailed,” said Ofir Dayan, a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, speaking with The Media Line, when asked whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still seen in Washington as irreplaceable. “When Bennett and Lapid replaced Netanyahu in 2021, I think it became clear that Netanyahu is not irreplaceable.”

When Bennett and Lapid replaced Netanyahu in 2021, I think it became clear that Netanyahu is not irreplaceable

Michael Koplow, chief policy officer at Israel Policy Forum and a senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, said the picture looks different depending on where one looks.

There are definitely warning signs in Congress … and that’s where it probably makes a difference who the prime minister is

“At the institutional level, under this administration, it’s very stable, and I don’t think that will change no matter who’s leading the Israeli government,” he told The Media Line. “But when you get past the level of the president and the administration, there are definitely warning signs in Congress … and that’s where it probably makes a difference who the prime minister is.”

The framework, known as Together, brings back the same two leaders who headed Israel’s short-lived unity government in 2021–2022. The arrangement now is more defined. Bennett is expected to lead the list. Lapid, who heads Yesh Atid, moves into a secondary role.

At first glance, the move looks straightforward. In practice, it raises a different set of questions—both inside Israel and in Washington—about how such a partnership would function and how a different government would approach relations with President Donald Trump. It gives the opposition a clear front-runner, but Israel’s system is not built around a single candidate. Governments are formed through blocs that must assemble a majority after the election.

Dr. Assaf Shapira of the Israel Democracy Institute told The Media Line that, from the narrow perspective of Bennett and Lapid, the alliance is a success. “If we are talking about the particular interests of Lapid and Bennett and their parties, then it is a success,” he said. “It will bring them only gains.”

For Lapid, Shapira said, the deal protects Yesh Atid from a steep decline. “The party, according to the polls, was about to crash,” he said, adding that some polls had placed Lapid’s party near the electoral threshold. “Now, Lapid secures his place in the next Knesset. He secures the fact that he will be the deputy of a list that will certainly be a large list.”

Shapira said Lapid could also return to the foreign policy role most naturally associated with him. “If Bennett forms a government, I think there is a good chance that we will see Lapid as foreign minister,” he said. “You cannot know, but that seems a little like his natural role in the next government, and that may also be relevant to the United States.”

If Bennett forms a government, I think there is a good chance that we will see Lapid as foreign minister

For Bennett, the gain is different. Before the merger, Bennett was not the undisputed leader of the opposition camp, Shapira said. He was still competing for that position, including with Gadi Eisenkot, the former army chief who has moved into politics with a strong security profile.

The joint list, at least for now, seems to settle that question. “Now, with this union, Bennett is the leader of the bloc,” Shapira said. “There are still six months until the election, but at the moment it looks like Bennett is completely the leader of the bloc, and he positions himself as the main, almost the only, competitor to Netanyahu.”

Shapira pushed back on the idea that the move reshapes the electorate itself. “I don’t see how this union can bring additional voters from Likud,” he said. “There is probably no one who was debating whether to vote Bennett or Likud and now says, after Bennett united with Lapid, I will definitely vote Bennett.”

In his view, the impact is mostly internal. The alliance may consolidate support within the camp but not necessarily expand it. Some voters from Lapid’s side could drift toward Yair Golan and the Democrats. On Bennett’s right, some could move toward Avigdor Liberman or back toward Eisenkot.

“From the point of view of the bloc, I don’t think it changes very much,” Shapira said. “It does not bring voters. It does not scare voters away. That is how it looks now, at least.”

It does not bring voters. It does not scare voters away. That is how it looks now, at least

The larger effect, he said, may be psychological. If Israelis see the Bennett-Lapid list polling near Likud, or even ahead of it, that could create enthusiasm. “The very fact that people will suddenly see in the polls a list, the Together list, that is like Likud, maybe even in some polls bigger than Likud, that is something that can create enthusiasm,” Shapira said. “And that enthusiasm is important. It has importance in itself.”

Beyond Bennett and Lapid, much remains unresolved. “We don’t know what will happen, for example, with Gantz—whether he runs separately, whether he unites,” Shapira said, pointing to the open questions surrounding Benny Gantz, the former defense minister and IDF chief of staff who leads National Unity.

He added that other configurations remain possible, including moves involving Yoaz Hendel, a former communications minister, or Avigdor Liberman, who continues to operate independently. “There is still uncertainty,” Shapira said. Eisenkot’s next move could also affect the map.

Part of the difficulty is understanding what “center” means in the Israeli context. Yesh Atid defines itself as a centrist party, but Shapira said the term no longer functions in Israel the way it might in other political systems. “Lapid defines himself as a center party. That is nice. It is not a center party,” he said. “There is almost no center today in Israel.”

Since 2022, Shapira said, Israeli politics has been divided less by classic left-right debates and more by the fault line around Netanyahu, the judiciary, liberal democracy, and the role of legal institutions. “You can call it the Bibi bloc and the anti-Bibi bloc,” he said. “You can call it a bloc that supports the Supreme Court and a bloc that opposes the Supreme Court. You can call it a bloc that supports liberal democracy and a bloc that supports ethnic democracy, or electoral democracy.”

In that division, Shapira said, Lapid is not really in the middle. “Lapid is on a specific side of this political map,” he said. “There is nothing to do about it.”

The question for Washington is whether a Bennett-led government would change the substance of US-Israel relations or mainly the tone. Dayan said the relationship with President Trump is currently shaped by the unusually close bond between Netanyahu and the American president.

“You can’t underestimate the value of personal connection,” Dayan said. “President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu are good friends. They have been working together for many years, so it has influence.”

President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu are good friends. They have been working together for many years, so it has influence.

That does not mean Bennett could not work with President Trump, Dayan said. But it would not be the same. “Even if future Prime Minister Bennett will have great relations with President Trump, still he doesn’t have that advantage of working with President Trump and being friends with him for so many years,” she said. “So, obviously, that’s going to change.”

Dayan said the current Israeli opposition is viewed in Washington with “some sort of an ambivalency.” The Trump administration is close to Netanyahu, especially his inner circle, leaving little room for the opposition to build direct channels. “There is no light between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Donald Trump,” she said. “So, the opposition is not really very much in touch with the American administration.”

At the same time, she said, Washington knows Bennett and Lapid. President Trump has publicly praised Lapid, and the opposition is not unknown in Republican circles. “They are aware of them and have some sort of relations with them, even if not working directly together,” Dayan said.

Koplow also pointed to the unusual nature of the relationship between President Trump and Netanyahu, describing it as distinct from past US-Israel dynamics. “I don’t think there’s ever been a president and a prime minister who were so tightly linked … and who went out of their way to also give each other such high levels of political support,” he said.

That dynamic, he added, may be difficult to replicate under a different Israeli leader. “They seem to have this bond that I don’t think you’ll see with Trump and a different Israeli prime minister.”

They [Netanyahu and President Trump] seem to have this bond that I don’t think you’ll see with Trump and a different Israeli prime minister

On security, Dayan argued, the relationship is more institutional and less dependent on any single leader. The war with Iran strengthened already close ties between the Israeli and American security establishments, she said. “In terms of security, the relationship is super close, super intimate,” she added . “And I think it will stay this way for the near future, again, unless something drastic changes in the administration.”

But politics is different. Dayan said Bennett and Lapid would likely be less confrontational toward a future Democratic administration than Netanyahu, especially because Netanyahu’s image has become deeply polarizing in parts of the United States. “Netanyahu’s image became toxic in certain American circles,” she said. “Not necessarily just the policies of the Netanyahu government, but Netanyahu himself. He is portrayed as the prototype of an illiberal leader.”

Koplow noted that while a change in leadership could affect perceptions, it would not necessarily transform policy outcomes. “On a policy level, any Israeli government is going to have to listen to the US government,” he said. “If Trump says that there has to be a ceasefire … it doesn’t matter who the Israeli prime minister is.”

If Trump says that there has to be a ceasefire … it doesn’t matter who the Israeli prime minister is

With President Trump, however, the issue would be more delicate. Dayan said Bennett’s policies are not necessarily far from Netanyahu’s on core issues. “Let’s face it, Bennett and Netanyahu agree on most policy issues,” she said. “The issue is going to be what is the approach with which the prime minister’s office is approaching the American presidency and the American administration.”

Dayan also raised another possibility: Bennett might be better placed than Netanyahu to resist some American pressure. “Netanyahu has a soft spot with Trump,” she said. “Trump knows he can pressure Netanyahu, and there are many things that Bennett might be better positioned to refuse Trump than Netanyahu is, because Netanyahu feels like he owes Trump for things they did together in the past.”

Bennett might be better positioned to refuse Trump than Netanyahu is

Asked whether President Trump could intervene politically in Israel’s election, Dayan said it is possible. “I think it is likely,” she said. “I don’t know that it will happen.” At a minimum, she said, “we will see Trump saying that he wants Netanyahu to remain in office.”

For now, the Bennett-Lapid alliance has clarified the leadership of the opposition but not the outcome of the election. For now, the move mainly gives the opposition a clearer structure, with Bennett at the top. Whether that turns into a majority is still an open question.

“It’s good for both Bennett and Lapid,” Shapira said. “In terms of the blocs, I don’t think it changes very much.”

90210 Star Reveals Shocking Secrets from Hit Show

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90210 Star Reveals Shocking Secrets from Hit Show


It’s the kind of behind-the-scenes drama fans of Beverly Hills, 90210 never saw coming.

Tori Spelling is pulling back the curtain on a shocking moment from the iconic ‘90s series — revealing that future Oscar winner Hilary Swank was left in tears after being abruptly fired from the show.

Speaking on her 90210MG podcast, Spelling, now 52, recalled the emotional day in 1998 when Swank’s time on Beverly Hills, 90210 came to a sudden end. And according to her, it was anything but quiet.

“She was hysterically crying,” Spelling said, remembering the moment her co-star returned from a meeting with producers.

Swank, who played single mom Carly Reynolds during the show’s eighth season, had grown close to Spelling behind the scenes. The actress — who was married at the time to Chad Lowe — often leaned on Spelling for support.

“I was kind of her safe place on set,” Spelling shared, adding that the two frequently spent time together off-camera.

But everything changed in an instant.

According to Spelling, Swank was called into a meeting with producer Paul Waigner — and came back devastated.

“She walked into my dressing room crying and said she got let go,” Spelling revealed.

Even more heartbreaking? Swank reportedly feared her entire career was over.

“She was like, ‘Oh my God, if I get fired off of 90210, I’m never gonna make it,’” Spelling recalled.

At the time, the firing blindsided everyone on set — including Spelling herself, who said there were no warning signs.

But what looked like a crushing setback would soon turn into one of Hollywood’s greatest comeback stories.

Just months later, Swank landed the life-changing role of Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry — a performance that earned her an Academy Award and catapulted her into A-list status. She would go on to win a second Oscar for Million Dollar Baby, cementing her place among Hollywood’s elite.

Looking back, even Swank admitted the experience was painful at the time.

In a past interview with Conan O’Brien, she said she was “devastated” by the firing — especially since the show had already lost major buzz following Luke Perry’s departure.

“I got fired off a show that no one watches,” she said at the time, recalling her mindset.

But within two months, everything changed.

Swank now sees the moment as a turning point — proof that sometimes a setback is actually a setup for something bigger.

And if Spelling’s memory is any indication, that tearful breakdown inside a dressing room may have been the first step toward Oscar history.

Donroe Doctrine is becoming everything China feared

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Donroe Doctrine is becoming everything China feared

On April 28, the State Department issued a joint statement “in solidarity with Panama” in response to an uptick in detentions of Panama-flagged vessels at Chinese ports, which it characterized as “a blatant attempt to politicize maritime trade.”

This comes on the heels of a targeted lawfare campaign by American and Panamanian officials to dispossess Chinese logistics infrastructure at the Balboa and Cristobal terminals, and within a broader maritime context that has seen the US blockade the Strait of Hormuz, enter a defense partnership with Indonesia and put out aggressive statements about Peru’s Port of Chancay.

The co-signatories on the statement include Costa Rica, Bolivia (more on that later), Paraguay, Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago.

It’s difficult to overstate the irony of this about-face on Panama. Just months ago, the US was pursuing a two-pronged strategy of diplomatic coercion via bilateral security dialogues and lawfare through a highly politicized audit of Chinese concessions near the Panama Canal.

This culminated in an utterly predictable Panamanian Supreme Court ruling against port operator CK Hutchinson, resulting in its eviction and replacement with a subsidiary of the Danish logistics firm Maersk.

Recall that the Trump administration’s opening position in these negotiations was threatening to retake the Panama Canal by force, and the State Department’s lofty rhetoric about defending Panama’s “sovereignty” and rejecting “politicization” starts to ring hollow.

The co-signatories joining the US in this declaration of “freedom” may seem random; however, they map perfectly onto America’s long-term economic and security priorities in the region.

Guyana is the world’s breakout producer of sweet light crude and is benefiting from new investments downstream amid America’s blockading of the Persian Gulf, while Trinidad is a major producer of petrochemicals like urea and ammonia.

Costa Rica is a reliable American ally that operates the most technologically advanced port in the Caribbean, and Paraguay is likely in the mix as the only remaining South American country that recognizes Taiwan.

But perhaps the most interesting co-signatory is Bolivia, a landlocked Andean nation that seems irrelevant to defending maritime “security” in the Caribbean – until one considers America’s long-term energy goals.

Bolivia sits on top of the world’s largest lithium reserves, but the high magnesium-to-lithium ratio in its source brine requires capital-intensive (and largely experimental) processes for extraction.

There is also the logistical challenge of moving thousands of tons of lithium across hundreds of kilometers of rough terrain to Chilean ports on the Pacific and, finally, up through the Panama Canal.

To put it lightly, these factors put a massive premium on every ton of lithium bound for export to manufacture electric vehicle (EV) batteries and grid-scale energy storage systems. Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz is clearly aware of this.

His recent decision to replace the head of the state-owned lithium company, Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos, signals that he is willing to break off deals made with China and Russia under Bolivia’s previous socialist government,  provided that Western capital can offer a guaranteed market.

For Paz’s foreign ministry, signing a US-directed statement recognizing Panama as a “pillar of our maritime trading system,” is a low-friction, transactional diplomatic play.

Bolivia’s potential as a commodity export powerhouse depends on cooperation with its longtime rival, Chile, for port access. (Chile has its own highly profitable lithium sector, and is the reason why Bolivia has no coastline to begin with).

By aligning with the United States against China, Bolivia is signaling to countries like Panama and Chile that it is willing to play by the same American-directed rules as everyone else, in exchange for access to their logistics infrastructure.

Of course, America’s diplomatic maneuvering in Panama and Bolivia cannot be understood in a vacuum. In the Persian Gulf, the US military is blockading the flow of flagship light and heavy crude to Asian markets.

Meanwhile, the State Department is working diligently in the Caribbean to dispossess Chinese logistics capital through diplomatic coercion and lawfare.

In this context, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the objective of the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” is not to benevolently integrate the US and Latin America’s economies, but to force capital out of West Asia and back to the Western Hemisphere by establishing new maritime trade routes.

Whether or not the US will succeed is impossible to say, but it should not be assumed it is by accident that the State Department is promoting a new maritime consensus with Latin American countries that produce the primary inputs for energy, agricultural and logistics industries, as well as “green” metal and mineral commodities – many of which have recently rebuffed Chinese investment offers.

At this point, anyone who still views America as a neutral arbiter or policeman of global maritime trade is willingly ignoring reality. The US military is seizing ships in West Asia, while the State Department simultaneously demands that China play by its rules in Central and South America.

The moment Trump abdicated America’s responsibility to defend the Persian Gulf under the Carter Doctrine, the romantic notion of a “free” global maritime commons died.

In the long run, this is likely to be to the benefit of China and other coastal nations, but in the short term, it has created unprecedented instability in the global maritime order, which the State Department is fully prepared to capitalize on in the service of America’s energy, agricultural and mining interests.

Scorpions go terminator mode and reinforce their weapons with metal

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Scorpions go terminator mode and reinforce their weapons with metal

Scorpions are armed with dual front pincers (technically known as chelae or pedipalp appendages) and a venom-injecting telson, or stinger, on the posterior of their tail. These things look dangerous enough on their own, but a chemical examination showed they contain metals like zinc, manganese, and iron.

“That the metals are there has been known since the 1990s,” said Sam Campbell, a biologist at the University of Queensland, Australia. “What we didn’t know was whether scorpions evolved to be like that or if it was accidental and they were just picking the metals up from the environment.”

To answer this question, Campbell and his colleagues examined how metals are distributed across the stingers and pincers of different scorpion species. Based on their data, detailed in a recent study published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface, there was nothing accidental about it.

Mapping the weapons

Campbell’s team focused on 18 scorpion taxa selected from a large collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. To map the molecular structure of the scorpions’ weaponry, the researchers used high-resolution scanning electron microscopy coupled with micro-X-ray fluorescence imaging. These methods allowed them to build color-coded maps of all the stingers and pincers, with individual metals localized in extremely high detail. Based on these maps, the team could reconstruct metal enrichment patterns within the weapons.

In most of the studied specimens, zinc was highly concentrated at the extreme tip of the aculeus, the needle-like envenoming structure. “Zinc has all to do with hardness and ensuring that we retain the strength of the tip of the stinger,” Campbell explained. Just below this zinc-fortified tip, manganese often became the dominant metal in a distinct region lower in the aculeus.

The purpose of manganese in the region below the aculeus, the team speculates, is probably to improve the flexibility and absorption of vibrations. Having both metals arranged in this way turns the stinger into a biological spear capable of punching through tough hides or exoskeletons of prey. “It makes sense because a scorpion’s sting is quite aggressive and produces quite a lot of force, so the stinger has to take it without snapping,” Campbell said.

The team noticed a similarly clever metal arrangement in the pincers. Zinc and iron enrichment was present only in the granular rows of the chela, specifically in the jagged, tooth-like bumps called denticles on the movable outer segment. The layout resembled a samurai sword, where the hardest material is concentrated mainly along the cutting edge. “When these denticles, these teeth pop up, we see the enrichment and then, in the entire area around them, all the rest of the claw, there is no metal whatsoever,” Campbell said.

But when Campbell and his colleagues took a deeper dive into species-to-species variations in the scorpions’ weaponry design, they encountered yet another layer of complexity. “One of the things that made me want to do this investigation is that scorpions are all very different,” Campbell said. “They have different sizes and shapes of their pincers and their stingers, and there are significant differences in their behavior.”

The team wanted to learn whether these differences are reflected in scorpions’ patterns of metal enrichment in their weaponry. It turned out they are.

Metal allocation

Scorpion species use their pincers and stingers in different ways. Species in the Buthidae family use their stingers for hunting prey and usually have long and slender pincers with relatively weak crushing power. On the other hand, adults of the Pandinus imperator species, known as the Emperor Scorpion, use the stingers only for self-defense and rely on their robust, massive claws to subdue and crush insects, young mice, and small lizards they feed on.

Going into the study, the team hypothesized that pincers built for generating high crushing force would contain the highest levels of metal to provide maximum hardness, while enrichment in the weaker, slender pincers would be lower. While this held true for zinc, the correlation was the exact opposite for iron.

“The reason we suspect this is the case is that, rather than providing hardness to the claw, the iron enrichment has more to do with abrasion resistance,” Campbell said. When a scorpion with large beefy pincers hunts, it can usually just crush its victim outright. Scorpions with long, slender claws need to hold onto a wrestling, fighting prey for longer to give the venom from their stings time to start working. As for zinc, the enrichment in the chelae was greater in species with reduced crushing power, most likely to compensate for their morphological weakness.

Another finding of the study was the inverse correlation between zinc uptake in the stinger and the claws. If a scorpion species has highly zinc-enriched pincers, its stinger is relatively zinc-poor, and vice versa. “It’s not that they just choose to reinforce one weapon over the other,” Campbell said. “I think this is an evolutionary drive toward reinforcing the weapon that is used the most.”

Still, there are some weapon design problems that evolution failed to solve and questions we have not yet answered. “One of the really interesting things that you see in scorpions in the wild is that their stingers can actually snap,” Campbell said.

Design trade-offs

The point at which the stingers usually snap, the researchers say, is at the zone where zinc enrichment at the tip abruptly stops and transitions into manganese. “It’s quite an interesting weakness for them to have in that region, and I don’t have a real theory or answer to why it is so,” Campbell said.

One idea the team floats is that zinc and manganese are limited resources, so scorpions can only reinforce the most critical parts of the stingers instead of spreading the metals across their entire exoskeleton.

Going deeper into the reasons behind what appears to be a design flaw in an otherwise neatly built stinger is one thing Campbell wants to focus on in the future. But the team thinks there’s more to learn.

“We were using museum specimens, and we only picked one from each species,” Campbell said.

The downside of this approach is that the study did not capture variations in metal-enrichment patterns between different individuals of the same species. These variations, Campbell acknowledged, may be significant in scorpions, which in general have strong sexual dimorphism—females are typically much bigger than males.

Another angle the study did not cover is whether metal enrichment changes across the scorpions’ lives. Scorpions undergo several molts, shedding their exoskeletons to grow and transition into a new stage, or instar. “There was a study that showed in the first instar, when the scorpion is born, there is no metal enrichment,” Campbell said. “The metal starts to come to the stingers by the second instar.”

The challenge in answering questions like these, Campbell thinks, is that scorpions are notoriously difficult to study. They are nocturnal, they often live in deserts, and they burrow underground.

“We don’t 100 percent know what their behavior is,” Campbell said. “It would be good to make true correlations between what we observe in the wild, how they interact with their environment, and what we find in their exoskeletons in the lab. That would be a huge, huge study to try.”

The team’s study on metal enrichment in scorpions’ weapons is published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2025.0523

Old and new Gulf faultlines exposed by Iran war

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Old and new Gulf faultlines exposed by Iran war

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced on April 28 that it will leave the global oil producers’ cartel OPEC. Its decision is the latest sign that the war in the Middle East has not only deepened animosities between Iran and its Gulf neighbors, but among the Gulf states too.

Founded in 1960, OPEC is a rare success story among multilateral organizations in the region. Its policies paved the way for Gulf oil producers to have enough funds to buy back or renationalize their oil resources and finance the spectacular development of their states.

The organization has survived all major revolutions and wars in the region thus far, though Qatar left in 2019 when it was blockaded by its Gulf neighbors.

Saudi Arabia, the largest oil producer in OPEC, holds substantial leverage within the group. This has led to tension with the UAE, which has for some time pushed for higher production quotas for itself, given its spare capacity. These efforts have been to no avail.

However, its decision to leave OPEC is about more than merely frustration with the organization.

Though it was very close to Saudi Arabia in the mid-2010s, the UAE has in recent years drifted apart from its larger neighbor. This has been driven by a number of regional issues, including the countries’ diverging strategies in wars in Yemen and Sudan, and their respective relations with Israel.

The UAE normalized relations with Israel in 2020, while the Saudis say they will only normalize once a Palestinian state is established.

The two countries have also recently become serious economic competitors. And although both states have been hit hard by Iran in the current war, the conflict seems to have accelerated their rivalry.

A map of the Gulf region.
Iran responded to US-Israeli attacks in February by launching strikes on countries around the Gulf and blockading the Strait of Hormuz. Peter Hermes Furian / Shutterstock via The Conversation

Saudi Arabia is the largest and richest country in the Gulf. But many of its transformative economic projects require political stability and a high oil price to succeed.

The war has exposed the limits of its policy of tentative outreach to Iran, and of its partnership with a US that is so closely allied with Israel. So, the Saudis have strengthened defense ties with nuclear-armed Pakistan.

These deepening ties have been met with dismay in the UAE, which has close ties to India. The Emiratis have been critical of Pakistan during the war, calling on Islamabad to condemn the Iranians more forcefully – something that is not possible due to Pakistan’s role as a mediator in peace negotiations.

At least partly in frustration at its response to the war, the UAE recently demanded that Pakistan repay a US$3.5 billion loan. Saudi Arabia immediately came to Pakistan’s rescue by providing financial support.

The UAE’s announcement to leave OPEC coincided with a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council in the Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh, where members sought to find common ground on the Iran war. This was a major affront to the Saudis.

Other Gulf frictions

The war has sparked other frictions in the Gulf, including reviving old tensions between the UAE and Iran over three islands – Abu Musa, Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb – that Iran occupied at the time of Emirati independence from Britain in 1971. These islands strengthen Iran’s strategic position along Gulf shipping lanes.

The UAE has long claimed sovereignty over the islands, while Iran claims they were always part of its territory. Iran’s control of the three islands is thought to be part of a secret deal between Britain and the Shah of Iran around 1970, whereby the shah would renounce a claim Iran maintained to Bahrain in return for the islands.

This and other historic border disputes in the region, including between the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman, remain some of the most sensitive topics in modern Gulf history. For a forthcoming book on the rise of the Gulf states, I have tried to access relevant UK Foreign Office documents, but have had numerous freedom-of-information requests denied on closed material dating back to the 1960s and earlier.

Damaged buildings on Kuwait's Failaka Island.
Failaka Island off Kuwait’s coast remains partially abandoned due to the heavy damage that was inflicted during the 1990 Iraqi invasion. Sebastian Castelier / Shutterstock via The Conversation

The northern Gulf state of Kuwait has also been hit hard during the conflict. Here, many attacks seem to have come from Shia militias based in Iraq. These attacks have revived traumatic memories of Iran-linked political violence in the 1980s, and Iraq’s invasion in 1990.

States that cannot bypass the closed Strait of Hormuz – such as Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar – have experienced the most economic damage from the war. To balance its budget, Bahrain is already dependent on aid by wealthier Gulf states. The UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman, on the other hand, have the geographical means to bypass Hormuz.

Oman, which controls one side of the strait, may well benefit in the long run. This could either be through a new arrangement with Iran to charge vessels a toll, or because its ports on the Arabian Sea will increase in significance – perhaps even resurrecting some of Oman’s former glory, when it was a major regional power. This is not something neighboring UAE and Saudi Arabia would like to see.

The reckless US-Israeli attack on Iran has thus opened up old faultlines, and could create new ones between states around the Gulf. It is also undermining the few avenues of regional cooperation that remain. This makes a fragmented and dangerous region even more so.

Toby Matthiesen is senior lecturer in Global Religious Studies, University of Bristol

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Alliance Breaker: How Trump Is Torching the West’s Friendships

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The Alliance Breaker: How Trump Is Torching the West’s Friendships

Something remarkable is happening in the corridors of Western power. America’s closest allies are no longer whispering their frustrations behind closed doors. They are shouting them from parliamentary podiums and press conferences — and Donald Trump is shouting back. The transatlantic alliance, built painstakingly over eight decades, is cracking in real time.

The proximate cause is the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, launched on February 28, 2026, without consulting NATO partners, the United Nations, or even Washington’s most loyal friends. But the rupture runs deeper than any single conflict. It reflects a White House that appears either strategically indifferent to its allies or actively contemptuous of them.

“The Americans Clearly Have No Strategy”

No moment crystallized the breaking point more sharply than German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s candid remarks to students in Marsberg, northwestern Germany. “The Americans clearly have no strategic plan,” Merz said, comparing the conflict to past U.S. misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq and describing Washington’s approach as “ill-considered.”

He went further, suggesting that the U.S. was being “humiliated” by Tehran’s negotiating tactics — a remarkable public indictment from a chancellor who had, until recently, been one of Washington’s more hawkish European allies.

Trump’s response was volcanic. He wrote on Truth Social that Merz “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” and threatened to reduce the 36,436 U.S. troops stationed in Germany. He then told the chancellor to mind his own backyard: “The Chancellor of Germany should spend more time on ending the war with Russia/Ukraine, where he has been totally ineffective, and fixing his broken Country… and less time on interfering with those that are getting rid of the Iran Nuclear threat.”

The verbal exchange has exceeded all diplomatic norms and shaken the US-European axis to its foundations.

READ: Trump says he is ‘not happy’ with Italy, Spain amid split on Iran

Starmer: “Fed Up” and Saying So

Britain’s Keir Starmer had invested considerable political capital in cultivating a working relationship with Trump. That investment is now a write-down. When asked about Trump’s threats to destroy Iran, Starmer told ITV: “They are not words I would use — ever use — because I come at this with our British values and principles.”

The sharpest language came when Starmer placed Trump alongside Vladimir Putin as co-authors of British economic pain. “I’m fed up with the fact that families across the country see their energy bills go up and down, and businesses’ bills fluctuate, because of the actions of Putin or Trump across the world,” he told ITV News’ Talking Politics. On UK military involvement, Starmer was resolute: “I’m not going to change my mind. I’m not going to yield. It is not in our national interest to join this war, and we will not do so.”

Trump repaid this principled stand by telling The Sun that Starmer “has not been helpful” and that “the relationship is obviously not what it was.” The IMF underscored the material stakes, downgrading Britain’s 2026 growth forecast to 0.8% — a direct consequence of the energy shock unleashed by Trump’s war on British households.

Sánchez and Carney: Europe and Canada Draw the Line

Spain’s Pedro Sánchez emerged as the EU’s most uncompromising critic. After denying U.S. forces use of the bases at Rota and Morón, Trump threatened to sever all trade with Madrid. Sánchez did not flinch. When the ceasefire came, his verdict was withering: “Ceasefires are always good news. But this momentary relief cannot make us forget the chaos, the destruction, and the lives lost. The Government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.”

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered the broader structural indictment. “Geostrategically, hegemons are increasingly acting without constraint or respect for international norms or laws, while others bear the consequences,” he said at Sydney’s Lowy Institute. He called the war “a failure of the international order,” noting pointedly that the United States and Israel had acted “without engaging the United Nations or consulting with allies, including Canada.”

READ: German vice chancellor criticizes Trump’s Iran strategy

American Voices: “We Are Becoming a Laughingstock”

The alarm is not only coming from abroad. Senate Democrats have waged a relentless campaign to reassert congressional authority over a war they regard as illegal, unauthorized, and diplomatically catastrophic.

Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia was precise in his diagnosis: “There was no clear rationale, no clear plan, no effort to engage allies, no effort to include Congress. When you make diplomacy impossible, you make war inevitable.”

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut was more blunt: “We’ve never seen a foreign conflict mismanaged in public like this before. We are becoming a laughingstock worldwide. While at the same time, we are hurting Americans who are now paying billions more in gas prices.”

Senator Tammy Duckworth tied the present catastrophe to America’s postwar pattern: “Our duty is to ensure that our nation never again gets into an ego-driven forever war.” All six War Powers Resolutions brought by Senate Democrats have failed, blocked by Republican loyalty — even as the war cost 13 American lives in its first month and drove U.S. gas prices to $4.30 a gallon.

The Bill Coming Due

Whether Trump’s alienation of allies is strategic deconstruction or simply the improvisation of a leader who mistakes belligerence for strength, the effect is the same.

He has threatened to withdraw the U.S. from NATO. He has punished Spain in trade. He has threatened to withdraw troops from Germany. He has strained the “special relationship” with Britain to near-breaking point.

And Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s warning that Trump would “reexamine” U.S. commitments to allies who did not back the war landed in European capitals like a declaration of conditional friendship.

America’s friends are being driven away. Its adversaries are watching. And the West, for the first time since 1945, is genuinely uncertain whether it can count on Washington.

OPINION: Trump, the creator of national heroes and global icons

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.

Amazon stuck with months of repairs after drone strikes on data centers

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Amazon stuck with months of repairs after drone strikes on data centers

Amazon’s cloud customers will need to wait several more months before the US tech company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. The announcement comes two months after Iranian drone strikes targeted three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—meaning that full recovery from the cloud disruption could take nearly half a year in all.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) dashboard posted an April 30 update describing how its UAE and Bahrain cloud regions “suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East” and are unable to support customer applications. The update also said that “relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations” in a process that “is expected to take several months.”

That wording suggests Amazon will continue to avoid billing AWS customers in the affected regions—ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1—after it initially waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 at an estimated cost of $150 million.

AWS also “strongly” recommended that customers migrate resources to other cloud regions and rely on remote backups to restore any “inaccessible resources.” Some customers, such as the Dubai-based super app Careem—which offers ride-hailing, household services, and food and grocery delivery—were able to get back online quickly after doing an overnight migration to other data center servers.

The fact that AWS expects the full restoration of cloud services to potentially take half a year speaks to the damage inflicted by the Iranian drone strikes. Business Insider previously obtained an internal document that described damage to one data center knocking 14 EC2 cloud server racks offline, in addition to impacting five other server racks. EC2 represents the core AWS service for companies needing virtual servers and scalable computing capacity.

The document also detailed flooding and water damage from the activation of fire suppression systems at one of the AWS data centers and mechanical failures in the facility’s cooling systems.

The latest AWS status update comes just after another data center developer, the London-based Pure Data Centre Group, said it will pause Middle East data center investments until the ongoing Middle East conflict subsides.

The war began on February 28, with US and Israeli attacks on Iran triggering retaliatory Iranian strikes across the region. It has since settled into an uneasy ceasefire period with dueling naval blockades of the Strait of Hormuz shipping chokepoint as a growing economic and energy crisis spreads across the world.

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