August 13 2026 News

Hamas plans to participate in the upcoming Palestinian elections, a senior official from the Iran-backed terrorist organization told Hamas-operated Al-Aqsa TV on Wednesday. Hussam Badran, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, said the group would participate as part of a broad national coalition. On Hamas’s future priorities, Badran said the group remained focused on the status of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Jerusalem. The mosque, located on the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, has been at the center of growing tensions, with Arab and Muslim countries condemning the increased presence of Jewish worshippers and prayers at the site last week.

Democratic Socialists of America national co-chair Megan Romer called for dismantling of the State of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian state, while justifying the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023.

The Strait of Hormuz is "under Iran's control and management," the recently appointed head of Iran's Basij paramilitary unit said on Thursday, a day after US President Donald Trump said the United States had "total control" of the strategic waterway.

Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport will install Islamic foot wash stations inside bathrooms at the facility, according to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. The project was officially registered with Texas regulators on July 31, according to documents detailing the project. The installation of the Wudu ablution stations is expected to be complete by the end of the year.

The U.S. Army has assigned an existing air-defense unit to begin preparing for the Golden Dome homeland missile defense mission, giving the emerging architecture its first known operational Army formation. Lt. Gen. John Rafferty, commander of U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command and Joint Task Force-Gold, said the unit will support testing and experimentation as the Pentagon targets an initial capability around mid-2028, moving Golden Dome closer to becoming an operational defense network.

Identity fraud powered by deepfakes is about to get a lot worse, with one report projecting a 495% increase by the end of 2026. At that pace, deepfake attacks are on track to become the single biggest social engineering threat organizations have to deal with.

The past few days have seen a string of initiatives related to brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) announced in China, involving parties ranging from state insurance companies to investment banks and local governments. On Wednesday, PICC Property and Casualty – a major state-owned insurer – announced it had signed the nation’s first commercial insurance policy covering the invasive surgery often needed to implant a BCI in a patient’s brain.

Japanese police have begun using court-issued physical-inspection warrants to compel facial unlocking of smartphones in investigations where officers believe evidence could be deleted remotely. Osaka Prefectural Police used the approach while investigating members of Natural, an illegal employment-placement group whose communications app allowed remote deletion of messages. Officers sought access to devices during a search-and-seizure operation so they could preserve information before it was erased. The warrant instructed officers to ask a suspect to unlock the phone and, if the person refused, hold the person’s face between 20 and 50 centimeters from the device for about one second. The procedure was designed to trigger the phone’s facial authentication without requiring the suspect to disclose a passcode. In the Osaka case, the physical-inspection warrant gave police a defined legal route to use the suspect’s face for access. It also places biometric device unlocking within the rules governing searches of a person’s body, rather than treating it solely as a demand for digital credentials.

Birth rates have fallen below replacement level across most of the world, with the global fertility rate having dropped by more than half since 1950. Across OECD nations, women now average just 1.46 children—far below the roughly 2.1 needed for one generation to replace itself. China has entered its fourth consecutive year of population decline, South Korea's population has been shrinking since 2019, and countries including Japan, Italy, Greece, Cuba, and Thailand are already experiencing depopulation. Even nations such as Britain and Australia increasingly depend upon immigration to offset the widening gap between births and deaths. Current projections indicate the world's total population could begin declining by the mid-2080s (Lord, I hope we aren’t here).