(Image credit: Getty Images)

By Jake Roach

The President says to “let Data Reign” if communities “want to be successful and rich.”

Donald Trump doesn’t appear to be a fan of the data center backlash that has swept the nation. Posting on his Truth Social platform, the President said that communities that reject data centers only do so because “they want to end up being backwards and poor,” and posited that China “could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement.” The comment comes amid a wide, albeit unorganized, pushback to data center buildouts in the United States that’s left local communities and municipalities reckoning with an unanticipated and rapid infrastructure buildout.

Local pushback has been widespread and consistent across the country. Earlier this month, an Amazon data center came under fire for circumventing public feedback based on old laws. Since April, leaders across the nation have received an elevated number of credible death threats related to data centers since April. And last month, the number of local bans on data center developments crossed over 500 within the United States.

The President says to “let Data Reign” if communities “want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place.” Presumably, the President missed a comma after “taxes” and does not mean that data centers will lower the number of jobs available. The economic argument surrounding data centers is a tough issue to quantify, though it’s not completely detached from reality.

A July study from Georgia Tech found that data center developments increase local employment by 3.5%, total wages by 5%, business establishments by 4.7%, and median household income by 1.9%. Further, the developments reduce unemployment rates. Critically, however, the study found that these benefits mainly show up in metropolitan areas, calling the benefits in rural areas “negligible.” The study also highlights that data centers often employ fewer than 100 permanent workers, with specialized services “imported from outside the country.”The research also looked into trade-offs with electricity prices, finding that prices rise an average of 5% after a data center is built in a community.

[…]

Via https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/trump-says-communities-that-reject-data-centers-want-to-end-up-being-backwards-and-poor-president-claims-china-could-not-be-happier-with-ai-data-center-backlash-in-the-us

Comments by Brian Shilhavy
Health Impact News

A Health Impact News reader reached out to me today about a Substack Page named The Leah Files, and Leah’s most recent posts about Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick’s efforts to intentionally crash the U.S. dollar and replace it with digital stablecoins.

Leah claims to have 20 years of experience in intelligence as a former CIA and NSA employee. She also has a YouTube channel.

Leah appears to have discovered the Trump Administration’s plan to crash the U.S. Dollar and profit from it, and her research appears to be rock solid.

Some of this information I already knew, but she covers the most recent actions by Bessent and ties the pieces together, which was a real eye-opener for me, so I decided to feature her work here on the Health Impact News network.

She gives great background on Scott Bessent and how he has a history of destroying countries’ currencies, and profiting from it.

This is what she wrote regarding Bessent and the actions he took as the U.S. Treasury Secretary during a 13-day period in August of 2026:

Between August 11 and August 24, 2026, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent executed a sequence of decisions that, taken together, amount to the most aggressive restructuring of the American financial system in modern history. He did it in thirteen days and it’s being buried in the news…for good reason.

I am quoting extensive excerpts from her two-article series, and I encourage you to support her work (I did).

THE CURRENCY KILLER: SCOTT BESSENT

He broke five currencies and made billions. Then, he got the keys to the USD. All while having connections to Epstein and Ehud Barak.

by Leah

Excerpts:

Between August 11 and August 24, 2026, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent executed a sequence of decisions that, taken together, amount to the most aggressive restructuring of the American financial system in modern history. He did it in thirteen days and it’s being buried in the news…for good reason.

On August 11, Bessent killed the Corporate Transparency Act and ordered the FinCEN beneficial ownership database deleted. Three days later, the President’s family crypto company received a federal bank charter.

Three days after that, Bessent published rules requiring every stablecoin in America to hold its reserves in Treasury bills. The national debt crossed $40 trillion the next day.

On August 19, he doubled the Treasury’s bond buyback program, the same mechanism he once used to make $3.5 billion breaking Japan’s currency. And on August 24, he announced “Operation Economic Outcast” and threatened to cut entire countries off from the dollar system.

I built a model to measure how close the United States is to a currency crisis.

I took the seven indicators that preceded every major currency collapse since 1992 and checked the U.S. against each one. Unfortunately, all seven are present. The historical record says that has never happened without a crisis following within twenty-four months.

The model turned out to be the easy part. The harder thing to explain is what I found behind the numbers: a system that appears designed not just to weaken the dollar, but to profit from the weakening. And the man running it has spent forty years doing exactly that to other countries.

The Man Behind the US Dollar

Scott Bessent’s career has one through line. He finds countries whose governments are weakening their own currencies, he bets against those currencies, and he collects when they break.

He started on George Soros’s team in the early 1990s. In 1992, Soros shorted the British pound on Black Wednesday and made a billion dollars in a single day.

Bessent was part of that trade, living in London and running the London office at the time. He went on to become Soros Fund Management’s chief investment officer, where he ran what the Wall Street Journal called the most profitable currency bet in the fund’s history: the yen.

Japan’s government had been buying its own bonds to suppress interest rates, which had the side effect of weakening the yen. Bessent recognized the pattern, shorted the currency, and made $3.5 billion when it crashed.

[…]

He left Soros in 2015 and started his own fund, Key Square Capital, running the same strategy. Then Donald Trump nominated him for Treasury Secretary, and the man who had spent his career betting against vulnerable currencies was handed control of the most important one on earth.

What he has done since become the US Treasury Secretary with control of the US Dollar is worth a closer look.

He crashed the Iranian rial from 700,000 to 2 million per dollar through sanctions. Rice prices in Iran went up 60% and beef went up 150%. The broader conflict cost American consumers $53 billion in higher gas prices, according to the Dallas Fed.

He used between $20 and $40 billion in American taxpayer money to prop up Argentina’s peso ahead of a political ally’s midterm elections.

He blockaded Cuba’s economy and tourism collapsed by half with rolling blackouts becoming a permanent normalcy.

[…]

The pattern is consistent. When the target is an adversary, he destroys their currency. When the target is an ally, he props theirs up with American money.

In both cases, the American public pays.

Seven Out of Seven

As an economist, I have studied historical currency collapses for years and I found that eery major one in modern history followed a pattern. I identified seven indicators that were present before the collapse. And I wanted to know how many of those indicators are currently present in the United States.

The answer…all of them.

In the historical record, four of these indicators meant a crisis was likely. Five meant it was almost certain.

I found all seven.

Operation Economic Outcast

On August 24, Bessent held a press conference and announced what he called “the single greatest financial offensive ever marshaled against an adversary.”

He sanctioned nearly 60 corporations, individuals, and vessels connected to Iran. He introduced five new categories of secondary sanctions targeting digital assets, cryptocurrency, gold, aviation, and shipping. He seized $1 billion in Iranian cryptocurrency.

Then he said:

“Any entity that facilitates money laundering on behalf of Iran will be removed from the U.S. dollar system. The clock just started ticking.”

When asked whether Chinese banks would be exempt, he said

“no one is above the reach of U.S. sanctions.”

The Treasury Secretary of the United States just threatened to cut entire nations off from the dollar. He did this while actively weakening the dollar through buybacks. While the debt just crossed $40 trillion. While he had just gutted the financial transparency system, and while the President’s family owns the only federally chartered private digital dollar in existence.

Countries that get cut off from the dollar system still need a way to transact in dollars. The only private digital dollar with a federal bank charter is USD1, owned by the Trump family.

Bessent is driving countries away from the dollar while the President’s family owns the replacement.

The Digital Dollar Play

Let’s play connect the dots.

On January 23, 2025, Trump signed an executive order banning any federal agency from creating a Central Bank Digital Currency. No government digital dollar, ever. He eliminated the only thing that could have competed with a private one.

Two months later, his family’s company, World Liberty Financial, launched USD1, a private stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar and backed by Treasury bills. The Trump family receives 75% of net profits. Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, owns 49%. USD1 now has $4.6 billion in circulation.

In May 2025, Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund routed a $2 billion investment in Binance through USD1 specifically. That single transaction represented 75% of USD1’s total market cap at the time. Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s Middle East envoy, announced the deal from a stage in Dubai.

Congress then passed the GENIUS Act, which requires every stablecoin issuer in the United States to back its tokens with Treasury bills maturing within 93 days. This means every dollar of USD1 in circulation must purchase government debt. Brookings projects that stablecoin holdings of Treasury bills could reach $2.3 trillion by 2030.

On August 14, the OCC, run by Trump appointee Jonathan Gould, granted World Liberty Financial a conditional federal bank charter. The President’s family crypto company can now issue USD1 directly, with federal authority.

Now let’s follow the money through the loop.

The President banned the government from building the competition, then the Trump family built the product. His appointee gave them a bank charter.

Congress passed a law requiring it to buy government debt. His Treasury Secretary is weakening the real dollar to drive adoption of the digital one, and his Treasury Secretary is now cutting countries off from the dollar system, pushing them toward the private replacement his family owns.

Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure reported $1.4 billion in crypto income. That is more than he made from real estate. $550 million came from World Liberty Financial token sales. $600 million came from meme coins. His family has taken at least $1.2 billion in cash from WLF in sixteen months.

Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter reviewed the disclosures and said this level of conflict “would be a violation” for every other executive branch employee.

But there is no enforcement mechanism for a sitting president.

The Epstein Connection

There is one more thread, and it is the one that explains why the financial transparency infrastructure had to be destroyed.

In August 2024, a hacker group called Handala breached the personal email archive of Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel.

Barak was one of Jeffrey Epstein’s closest associates. He visited Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse dozens of times, invested in companies alongside Epstein, and has never denied the relationship.

The emails were published by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a legitimate transparency organization. Journalists Jack Poulson and Harrison Berger spent months going through them and published their findings in September 2025.

What they found was a direct, documented financial relationship between Ehud Barak and Scott Bessent.

The emails show Barak communicating with senior Soros Fund executives about Bessent’s currency trades. They used code names.

Bessent was referred to as “Sterling.” A major yen trade was called “Ichiban,” the Japanese word for number one. There are emails from August 2013, December 2013, May 2014, February 2015, and May 2015 documenting meetings, fund seeding discussions involving $100 million to $450 million, and ongoing financial coordination between Barak and Bessent.

Barak’s corporate structure was designed by Darren Indyke, Epstein’s personal lawyer. Epstein’s Southern Trust Company invested 50% into the entity. The same entity that took consulting payments from Bessent’s fund is the same entity that controlled where Epstein’s money went.

Bessent is also blocking the release of $1.5 billion worth of Epstein’s Suspicious Activity Reports: 4,725 flagged wire transfers from JPMorgan and $378 million from BNY Mellon. Senator Ron Wyden introduced the PETRA bill to force their release. A Republican senator blocked it.

Wyden called Bessent “a willing participant in a cover-up.”

And he is.

On August 11, Bessent killed the Corporate Transparency Act and deleted the FinCEN database. Three days later, the bank charter was approved.

The man with documented financial ties to Epstein’s business partner is not just running the Treasury, he is dismantling the infrastructure that would allow anyone to trace what is happening now.

Read the Full Article at The Leah Files.

THE CURRENCY KILLER PART II: HOWARD LUTNICK

How Howard Lutnick Built the Infrastructure For America’s Largest Financial Conflict of Interest

by Leah

Excerpts:

THE OTHER HALF OF THE SCHEME

In Part I of “The Currency Killer”, I showed you how Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is using the same tools he deployed as a hedge fund manager to manipulate the US bond market. He doubled the Treasury buyback program to $4 billion per operation.

[…]

But in summary, he is, in my opinion, one of the worst of the worst of this administration.

[…]

His firm has a client that matters more than any other in this Currency Killer series. That client is Tether, the largest stablecoin in the world, with $185 billion in circulation. Cantor Fitzgerald is Tether’s primary custodian, holding $141 billion in US Treasury bills backing Tether’s reserves.

[…]

Via https://healthimpactnews.com/2026/treasury-secretary-scott-bessent-just-restructured-the-american-financial-system-to-destroy-the-u-s-dollar/

29 August 2026 by Larry C. Johnson

My friend, Karl Miller, is out with a great piece that exposes Trump’s claims about Venezuelan oil as a massive case of gaslighting. I am summarizing his piece, which is titled,“Venezuela Oil: The Physical Barrel and the Capital Bill,” because it is not publicly available via a link.

On 27 August 2026, President Trump announced what he called the biggest oil deal in world history — a US–Venezuela agreement giving the United States majority control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan reserves, which he said would “substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans.” The pitch landed with gasoline near $4.09 a gallon, about 27% higher than a year earlier and on track for the most expensive August on record, as a six-month Iran war and the Hormuz disruption kept a fifth of world supply under strain — and with the midterms two months away.

Independent analysts noted the arithmetic fails on that timeline: the 30 to 50 million barrels Trump floated is less than half a day of global consumption, the 65 billion is an in-ground estimate rather than available supply, and any price effect would take years. Miller’s briefing goes underneath that objection to the more fundamental one: Venezuelan crude is the wrong substance to fix the shortage Americans feel at the pump. It is not a magical fix. In the near term it is not a fix at all.

The point most likely to be missed

The shortage that bites right now is in product — diesel and jet fuel — and extra-heavy Venezuelan crude is not product. It is refinery feedstock. You cannot relieve a middle-distillate shortage with a barrel that still has to be diluted, blended, upgraded, coked, and hydroprocessed before it yields a usable gallon of anything.

This is why the “turn Venezuela on” reflex fails on its own terms. Even setting aside whether Caracas can produce more, the barrels that already exist do not add supply where the market is tight. Prompt US cargoes would largely be diverted from Venezuela’s current buyers — China, India, Europe — not created on top of global production. That reshuffles refinery slates and trade routes; it does not repair a physical shortage. A barrel moved from a Chinese refiner to a US one is a change of address, not a new barrel, and certainly not a new gallon of jet fuel.

Why the feedstock gap is binding

The nature of the crude is the reason. Roughly three-quarters of Venezuelan production through 2028 is expected to be heavy, extra-heavy, or bitumen, with the Orinoco Belt supplying about 60%. That material is the raw input at the very front of the conversion process; the finished distillate barrel sits many capital-intensive steps downstream — coking and hydroprocessing capacity, hydrogen, refinery uptime, yields, distribution — none of which a cargo of Merey crude supplies. The price tells the same story: Merey 16 averaged $67.36/bbl in July 2026, about $12.35 under the OPEC basket, the market pricing in the cost of converting this crude into something useful. Venezuela cannot repair a current crude or middle-distillate shortage, because the missing piece was never the crude.

The supply side only reinforces it

Nor can the volume be conjured quickly. July 2026 output was near 1.1 million b/d — about a third of the 3.4 million b/d peak of 1998 — and the system that would lift it has been hollowed out: the EIA documents pipelines over 50 years old, power outages, constrained diluent, and impaired refineries, with PDVSA estimating some $8 billion for pipelines alone. Rystad puts full-cycle breakevens at $70–$80/bbl or higher and its base case adds only about 194,000 b/d through 4Q 2028; a return toward 3 million b/d would take well over $150 billion across 10–15 years. Large in-ground reserves, Miller stresses, are not deliverable supply — and the 65 billion barrels in the President’s announcement is exactly that kind of number: a resource estimate, not a delivery schedule.

The revealed preference: what the majors already told the White House

The strongest confirmation is not a model but the behavior of the companies that would have to fund the rebuild. At the White House on 9 January 2026, shortly after the US removal of Maduro, Trump insisted the industry would spend more than $100 billion to rebuild Venezuela’s oil sector. The room did not agree. ExxonMobil’s Darren Woods told the President to his face that Venezuela is, as it stands, “uninvestable” — that durable legal frameworks, commercial terms, and stability must come first, and that Exxon would send only a technical team to assess. ConocoPhillips’ Ryan Lance said the system needs major restructuring first; both firms had their assets expropriated under Chávez, and by 30 January both Exxon and Chevron said they had no plans to raise Venezuela spending that year. The figures put before that meeting matched Miller’s: Rystad estimated roughly $110 billion merely to double output by 2030, and closer to $185 billion to climb back toward 2000-era levels.

The one enthusiast underscores the point. Chevron — the sole US major already producing there, at nearly 250,000 b/d under a special license — says it could raise flows about 50% in under two years, but even that lifts Venezuela’s total only to just above 1.1 million b/d, against a peak near 4 million. Smaller entrants like Hunt Oil and SLB signed the first fresh PDVSA deals in August, but the supermajors best equipped to finance a rebuild are, on the record, declining to write the checks. When the people holding the capital call a resource uninvestable, it is not a near-term supply solution.

Venezuela is a long-duration heavy-crude redevelopment option, not an emergency supply source — and specifically not a fuel solution. Existing cargoes can be rerouted, but that changes trade maps without adding a net barrel or a finished gallon; meaningful new production is years and well over a hundred billion dollars away, and the firms who would fund it have said so out loud. Whatever the “biggest oil deal in world history” is worth over a decade, it will not lower the price of diesel or jet fuel this year. The distillate shortage will not be solved in Caracas.

[…]

Via https://sonar21.com/feedstock-is-not-fuel-why-venezuelan-crude-cannot-fix-the-diesel-and-jet-shortage/

By Chadwick Moore

New York’s Amish community is issuing an ultimatum to state bureaucrats: leave us alone or we’re packing up our buggies for greener pastures.

The threat has been sparked by a vaccine mandate fight that the 25,000 strong religious community is taking all the way to the Supreme Court.

It takes place as state Health Department officials continue to slap thousands in fines on tiny, one-room parochial Amish schools which have refused to comply with a Cuomo-era vaccine decree.

“Have we gotten to a place where we aren’t going to make room for the Amish anymore?” Hiram Sasser, an attorney representing six plaintiffs in the case, Miller v. McDonald, asked.

“When you think of Americana—apple pie, fireworks—the Amish are on that list. They’re part of the American fabric. They’re a good litmus test of our religious liberty and our tolerance,” Sasser claimed to The Post.

In 2019, following a measles outbreak in an Orthodox Jewish community, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo rescinded religious exemptions for school vaccine mandates—making it the second state to ever do so, behind California.

Post-COVID, two other states, Maine and Connecticut, removed religious exemptions while West Virginia never had them.

New York state law requires kids to receive between 24 and 27 jabs to attend K through 12 schools, according to the DOH vaccine schedule.

Upstate Amish parents—who generally teach their children in small classes in one-room schoolhouses which receive no public money—have been in court since 2024 fighting Cuomo’s mandate.

Two years earlier the state began issuing $2,000 fines for non-compliance. Three schools listed as plaintiffs in the lawsuit—Shady Lane school in Clymer, NY; Pleasant View in Heuvelton, NY and Dygert Road School near Canajoharie—together have racked up $118,000 in fines.

Their attorneys tell The Post every Amish school in the state is in the same situation; the DOH refused to answer The Post’s questions about how many other schools had been fined.

New York has the nation’s fifth largest Amish population, with an estimated 25,000 individuals. Their lawyers say if they are unsuccessful at the Supreme Court, they are leaving the state for good; possibly destined for Pennsylvania, which has the largest Amish population in the country at around 95,000.

For one, the only way the community would be able to meet the fines is if the state confiscated their land to pay them according to Aaron Siri, another attorney representing the plaintiffs.

“Watch ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ It’s the one-room schoolhouse and Laura Ingalls Wilder teaching the kids. It’s a way of life that use to predominate across America, but the Amish are still holding on to it. We’ve acknowledged that as a nation and given them their space this whole time. And now that’s being tested,” claimed Sasser.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the NYC-based 2nd Circuit—which had ruled against the Amish last year—strongly insisting the majority Democrat-appointed tribunal take another look.

However, the 2nd Circuit reissued its original decision and now the Amish will officially petition SCOTUS to hear their case again next month, their lawyers say.

Amish culture generally forbids both litigation and injectables. “The Amish really don’t want to be in this position. They don’t want to be engaging in this lawsuit in any way at all. But they’ve been left with no choice,” Siri told The Post.

In a handwritten letter shared with The Post, plaintiff Ezra Wengerd of Canajoharie, 55, an Amish father of the very conservative Old Order sect explained his community’s refusal to comply with DOH directives.

“We, as a peace loving religious group, are sincerely sorry that we are causing the state a prob [sic]. We are indeed grateful to the state of NY for the many privileges freedoms and protections they have blessed us with, for many years,” Wengerd wrote.

“Our Almighty God wants us to fully put our faith and trust in Him. Which is in conflict to put our trust in vaccines. We are also commanded to not be conformed to this world,” the letter continued.

As luck would have it, when the Amish do end up in court, they have a good track record of victories.

In Minnesota, Ohio and Pennsylvania Amish plaintiffs prevailed in state-level cases from the 1980s to 2020s involving photo IDs, buggy safety equipment and building codes—each time granted reasonable workarounds when the modern hooey of photography, reflective tape and septic tanks threatened their way of life.

But when the Amish return to SCOTUS they won’t have a slam dunk case, Wayne State University law professor Christopher Lund Told The Post.

“The claim in these cases is: you are only entitled to a religious exemption if the law isn’t neutral or generally applicable,” said Lund. “The argument the plaintiffs are making here is, if you’re going to exempt people with medical needs, you also need to exempt people with religious needs.” 

The 2nd Circuit has been on a streak slapping down people who’ve challenged vaccine mandates, ruling against at least five other recent plaintiffs fired from their jobs for refusing COVID-19 jabs on religious grounds.

It’s a topic SCOTUS would rather not touch, either.

“I think the [Supreme] court’s always been hesitant about vaccination cases. And when we had church closure cases during COVID the court showed a lot of deference to medical authorities,” said Lund.

“But the state isn’t just thinking about the Amish, it’s thinking about everyone together. I think the Amish are probably a very sympathetic set of plaintiffs, but the state is thinking more widely,” he added.

An NY DOH spokeswoman said in a statement to The Post, its responsibility “is to protect public health, keep New Yorkers and their families safe and enforce the law fairly and equitably,” adding the DOH is “committed to eliminating serious illness and unnecessary deaths caused by vaccine preventable diseases” and school immunization requirements are “based in science.”

[…]

Via https://nypost.com/2026/08/26/us-news/amish-threaten-mass-exodus-from-new-york-over-vaccine-fight-which-is-heading-to-the-supreme-court/

By Al Jazeera Staff

30 Aug 2026

The exchange of attacks is the first flare-up in violence between the two sides since late July.

Iran says it launched missiles at two US bases in Jordan following a US attack on Larak Island in southern Iran earlier on Sunday.

In a statement reported by Iranian news agencies on Sunday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said the combined missile and drone operation, which it called “Punishment of the Aggressor”, hit the King Hussein and Al Azraq bases in Jordan.

The exchange of attacks is the first flare-up in violence between the two sides since late July.

The IRGC said the strikes “destroyed the technical and repair infrastructure, as well as the enemy fighter deployment sites”, inflicting significant damage.

Jordan reported intercepting eight missiles soon after the IRGC announced the attack.

“Air defence systems intercepted eight missiles that breached the Kingdom’s airspace at dawn today, Monday,” the Jordanian military said in a statement.

No injuries were reported at either base.

In a further development on Monday, the IRGC said it shot down a US MQ-9 Reaper drone over the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran’s Fars and Mehr news agencies cited a statement from the IRGC that said that its air defences had intercepted “a long-range American MQ9 drone” over the Strait of Hormuz, which then fell into the Gulf.

In his first comments since the US attack on Iran’s Larak Island, President Masoud Pezeshkian said that Tehran was “not looking for war”, but would “never sit still in the face of any aggression” either.

Pezeshkian made the comments as he was leaving for Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, to attend the summit of the heads of state of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation countries.

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated video on his Truth Social platform on Monday, seemingly depicting the bombing of Iran’s Kharg Island.

The footage shows an oil storage tank and an oil tanker exploding, as watched from aircraft above.

“Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!! President DJT,” the post reads.

There was no other evidence that the Iranian energy hub was under attack.

Before the war started, Kharg Island handled the majority of Iran’s oil exports, making it a vital economic node.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to seize or destroy the island since the start of the war.

The strikes risk renewing the military confrontation as Washington shifts from its bombing campaign to a financial pressure strategy on Tehran, and as the US-Israel war on Iran enters its seventh month.

On Monday, the US military denied that its Sunday attacks were an “act of aggression”.

US Central Command (Centcom) said on X that the US took “limited, precise action” to prevent Iranian forces from laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz and blamed Iran for the attacks.

Iran’s Fars news agency said that the attack by the “American-Zionist enemy” killed and injured soldiers, without providing a figure.

In recent weeks, Washington has been claiming control over the Strait of Hormuz, saying that millions of barrels of oil have passed through the waterway under US military protection despite Tehran’s blockade.

Still, attacks on ships in the strait have been reported almost daily, and Iran has maintained that the waterway is closed.

Sunday’s strikes show that the US is still willing to use military force despite the intensified sanctions to pressure Iran to make concessions over its nuclear programme and claims of control over Hormuz.

Iran has previously responded to similar US attacks by launching missiles and drones at military bases hosting US troops in neighbouring countries.

Last week, the administration of US President Donald Trump announced a push to isolate Iran financially by threatening secondary sanctions against countries and companies that do business with Tehran.

But Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth has warned that the US is prepared to use military force if necessary.

US officials have been touting what they describe as Tehran’s loss of control over the Strait of Hormuz, while arguing that Iran is on the verge of economic collapse due to sanctions and the US Navy’s blockade of its ports.

Tehran, however, has remained defiant, stressing that it is prepared for a long conflict.

On Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi dismissed reports that the US is managing to get large amounts of oil through the strait.

“Our intelligence shows major efforts to game energy markets,” Araghchi wrote on X. “US Govt elements use gullible media to influence prices for personal gain and keep [Trump] mired in a losing war. Israel-aligned actors also promote war with rosy assessments. U.S. consumers feel the real bottom line.”

Despite the reports of the US ending – or at least easing – Iran’s control of the strategic waterway, oil prices have remained high amid supply uncertainty.

The average price of one gallon (3.8 litres) of petrol in the US is still more than $4, up from less than $3 when the US and Israel launched the war on Iran in late February.

The skyrocketing energy prices, which are driving up inflation in the US, could hurt Trump’s Republican Party’s chances of maintaining control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.

[…]

Via https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/30/us-strikes-irans-lark-island-in-first-attack-in-weeks