by Priya Sridhar | Sep 24, 2026 | Iran, News, World
A new letter from the acting secretary of the U.S. Navy has revealed troubling details about conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln — including that there were eight reported suicide attempts from service members of the carrier strike group tied to the USS Lincoln.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, received the letter from acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao on Tuesday in response to her request for information about the USS Lincoln’s long deployment that included combat operations in the Iran war.
According to the letter that was obtained by MS NOW, Cao wrote that there have been eight suicide attempts made by service members of the carrier strike group, which includes the USS Lincoln, the squadrons that are embarked on it and its accompanying destroyers.
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USS Lincoln sailors ‘feel as though they has been forgotten’ by Trump admin: Sridhar
September 4, 2026 / 11:20
Cao said one sailor went overboard from the USS Lincoln in early August. That sailor was rescued by an air wing search and rescue helicopter, treated by the ship’s medical team and transferred off the ship for follow-on care.
“The Sailor’s family was notified according to standing notification policies,” the letter states.
MS NOW has exclusively spoken to the wife of the sailor who went overboard. She said Navy leaders did not tell her that her husband had jumped off the ship until five days after the incident.
MS NOW reviewed texts between the wife and the husband’s chain of command that show she was not notified of what had transpired until Aug. 7. Her husband jumped on Aug. 3.
The wife also shared with MS
by Steve Benen | Sep 23, 2026 | Maddowblog, White House, World, World News
At an event in Las Vegas last month, Donald Trump offered some rather candid comments about his perspective on Venezuelan oil. “We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela, and we’re getting along great with them,” the president said. “Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela. … It’s the old-fashioned way, right? It’s the old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?”
As the Republican characterized it, the United States is entitled to a foreign country’s natural resources, not as the result of a diplomatic agreement but because we launched a military attack on it.
The White House has been credibly accused for months of treating Venezuela more as a U.S. colony than as an independent foreign nation, and those public comments certainly didn’t help. Trump nevertheless repeated the rhetoric again Tuesday while speaking to the United Nations General Assembly. MS NOW reported as part of the network’s live blog coverage:
Trump hailed the oil deal struck between the U.S. and Venezuela last month, after American forces captured then-President Nicolás Maduro in January. Under the agreement, the U.S. will have majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s oil reserves, a deal that the White House said “secures our energy dominance for the next century — all at zero cost to the United States.”
“When you add the United States and Venezuela together, we have more than 60% of the oil in the world,” Trump said. “So, it’s perhaps the biggest deal.”
He added, in an apparent summary of the White House’s position, “‘To the visitor belong the spoils,’ you’ve all heard that.”
Trump: “In January, at my
by Zeeshan Aleem | Sep 22, 2026 | Business, culture, Opinion, World
In the wake of spooky incidents of artificial intelligence agents defying their creators’ commands and rules, the great fear of the day is the prospect of rogue superintelligence that turns on humankind — and extinguishes it. But a recent incident in which the United States reportedly almost sparked a war with China based on false intelligence generated by AI reveals that there is a far more immediate threat to worry about: the fallibility of humans.
CNN, citing four sources familiar with the episode, reported that this spring a special operations command analyst put together an urgent intelligence report claiming that “a Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.” The implications of the report pushed the U.S. to serious action — members of the U.S. military were “preparing to board the ship” and “military planes were in the air.” But at the last minute officials dug a little further into the report and found that a chatbot the analyst had used had “inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying.” (U.S. Special Operations Command Pacific and the Pentagon did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.)
The U.S. was astonishingly close to a military confrontation with the world’s second most powerful country based on what appears to have been an AI hallucination. That we got so close to accidentally triggering a global war should drive home the point that the imminent threat surrounding AI isn’t some runaway malevolent superintelligent entity like Skynet from the “Terminator” franchise. It’s humans misusing AI.
CNN reported that “across the U.S. military and the intelligence community, officials are pushing to weave AI
by Julia Jester | Sep 21, 2026 | Iran, News, World
As countries around the world convene for the United Nations General Assembly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expanding an effort to protect the United States from scrutiny by international organizations for alleged violations of international or humanitarian law.
In recent weeks, the State Department withdrew from the U.N.’s Human Rights Council and has escalated its push to dismantle the International Criminal Court, or ICC.
The U.S. moves come after experts commissioned by the U.N.’s top human rights body determined the U.S. had committed war crimes during the Iran war and as the ICC continues to pursue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against Palestinians in Gaza.
In August, Rubio announced the U.S. was imposing sanctions on ICC President Tomoko Akane, who is from Japan, and senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye, who is from Senegal.
In a July op-ed announcing the U.S. push to dismantle the court, Rubio described those sanctions as part of a campaign to dismantle the ICC “brick by brick.”
Senior U.S. officials placed calls to countries urging them to withdraw from the ICC and reject its authority to prosecute Americans, including putting diplomatic pressure on nations that “enjoy the benefits of the U.S. security umbrella” and rely on U.S. assistance. The U.S. has promised increased scrutiny of countries that refuse to do so.
“At first, it was marketed as a narrow backstop to prosecute the gravest crimes,” Rubio wrote. “Now the ICC and its allies seek a standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the U.S. and other sovereign states—and to prosecute and arrest our citizens.”
The ICC is a last
by Zachary Wacker | Sep 20, 2026 | News, White House, World
President Donald Trump’s dance card is filling up with local and world leaders for his U.N. visit this week — Zohran Mamdani and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are on it — but notably absent from the line-up so far is his main partner in the war against Iran.
Ahead of his speech to the U.N. General Assembly, the Republican president is scheduled to meet with Mamdani, New York City’s democratic socialist mayor, at Gracie Mansion on Monday, the mayor’s office and a White House official told MS NOW Sunday.
This will make their third meeting, but the first on Mamdani’s home turf. In their last meeting at the White House in February, Mamdani — whom Trump has alternately praised and ridiculed — was able to secure the release of a Columbia University student who had been detained by ICE earlier that day.
Beleaguered Ukrainian President Zelenskyy announced Sunday that he, too, will get a meeting with Trump this week.
He said in a post on X that he and Trump spoke Sunday afternoon. “An important conversation, and we got through a lot,” he said. “We agreed to meet in New York, and this meeting could change a lot.”
“There is diplomatic momentum,” Zelenskyy said, adding, “The peace track is our number one priority.” His comments came as Ukraine waged a massive drone attack against Moscow on the final day of Russia’s first wartime parliamentary election.
One major leader missing from Trump’s U.N. sidelines docket this week is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even as the conflict with Iran has significantly expanded throughout the Middle East.
A senior U.S. official told MS NOW that “the prime minister’s presence
by Christine Leuenberger | Sep 20, 2026 | culture, Opinion, World
President Donald Trump has generated a steady stream of headlines since returning to office by renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” and Lake Ontario “Lake America,” while also calling for other changes to the maps Americans use every day. At the recent GOP midterm convention, he whipped up the crowd with a recitation of cartographic modifications, including the as-yet-aspirational transformation of New Mexico to “New America.”
It’s easy to dismiss these moves as political theater, just more fodder for social media outrage or late-night comedy. But history teaches us that maps and the names, territories and landmarks they include or exclude always have political consequences, shaping identities, cultural belonging, territorial claims, education and international relations. Maps may appear to be objective and unbiased representations of the world, but they are inevitably, inherently selective.
For example, throughout history, governments have used the practice of naming territories and bodies of water to advance nationalist goals and assert territorial claims and aspirations. With Russia’s occupation and annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russian maps were remade to include Crimea as part of Russian territory to assert political authority. Trump’s effort to remake maps similarly speaks to their power to advance particular territorial visions and his expansionist “America First” agenda.
Throughout history, governments have used the practice of naming territories and bodies of water to advance nationalist goals and assert territorial claims and aspirations.
This muscular nationalist agenda can also be found in the way Trump is going about his renaming project. Traditionally, geographic name changes in the United States are reviewed by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and, if approved, enter the Geographic
