August 18 2026 News

U.S. special envoy Jared Kushner delivered a stark ultimatum to Hamas on Monday, warning that the terrorist group must honor its commitments to disarm in Gaza or face an Israeli military operation to "finish the job."

While Hormuz remains a highly contested issue in the negotiations, President Trump issued an odd warning to Oman, which has been negotiating with Iran over the strait for the past several weeks. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the s--- out of them,” Trump was reported by Yingst as saying.“I don’t think they [Oman] behaved very well, but we’d handle them very easily, just like we do others,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office hours later.

Turkey’s mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is a step toward the ultimate ambition of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan: to make Ankara a powerhouse across the entire territory of the old Ottoman Empire. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, signed in Mecca on August 7 by Erdogan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, commits the three countries to a NATO-type alliance among Sunni states that would treat an attack on any one of them as an attack on all. The agreement gives Turkey access to assets it could not easily replicate on its own: Pakistan’s implicit nuclear deterrent and military capabilities, Saudi Arabia’s vast financial resources and influence across the Arab and Muslim worlds. Egypt has also been floated as a possible new member.

Russia has threatened to retaliate after British-made drones were used for the first time by Ukraine in strikes against Putin.Moscow’s embassy in London warned the UK would pay a ‘higher price’ if it becomes more involved in the war in eastern Europe. According to Russian state media, the embassy accused the UK of ‘deliberately betting on an escalation of the Ukraine crisis, while hypocritically claiming to be striving for peace’.

U.S. Central Command announced that it is expanding the scope of its one-way attack drone force to include other countries and new types of drones that operate at sea and underwater. The new “Task Force Falcon Strike” is the “first-ever multi-domain, multinational attack drone task force,” the Pentagon stated. It follows Task Force Scorpion Strike’s use of loitering munitions, commonly referred to as kamikaze or one-way drones, against Iran.

One in every 100 identity check failures involves a deepfake document, image or liveness video, according to LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Deepfakes are now one of the fastest-growing fraud vectors worldwide with millions predicted to appear in fraud attempts in 2026 and passports, driver’s licenses and national IDs are the most faked identity documents. The global fraud prevention specialist says it has seen a 180% year-on-year increase in attacks and warns that the quality and sophistication of deepfake documents and images improves daily. Juniper Research estimates the number of digital ID verification checks carried out globally will reach 100.4 billion in 2026, up 16% year on year.

Amazon has been caught scanning and destroying a large shipment of rare books so it can train its AI models. In an investigation by 404 Media, a bookseller suspected that an order they received for 1,000 books on Biblio, a marketplace where buyers can remain anonymous, was for an AI company. So to get to the bottom of the mystery, they agreed to place an Apple AirTag between the pages of one of the volumes. They tracked the shipment to a site at a massive Amazon warehouse in Nevada, where workers say their job is to strip the spines off of books they receive so they can quickly scan their pages, destroying them in the process.

The AI manager of a San Francisco-based boutique shop has fired its first human employee. Andon Market, an experimental AI-managed retail space, first opened in April in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow neighborhood and is overseen by the AI agent called Luna. Andon Labs, the parent company for Andon Market, announced on Friday that Luna had fired its first employee, citing repeated lateness, abandoning shifts at the last minute, throwing merchandise in the garbage, and taking home a company credit card. Despite repeated infractions, it wasn’t until after repeated probing from Andon Labs engineers that the AI agent determined these were fireable offenses that went against the employee handbook the AI itself had written, per the San Francisco Standard. The goal of the shop is more to see whether an AI agent can effectively run a retail store alongside customers and human workers than to make money. The shop has lost $40,000 so far. Andon Labs says it’s preparing for a world where “organizations are run autonomously by AI.

According to Campus Reform, “The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) College of Nursing is accepting applicants for a fellowship carrying a $5,000 stipend that trains emergency department clinicians to provide so-called “reproductive healthcare,” including abortion-related procedures. “Abortion is not healthcare or reproductive health; rather, it’s an evil act." The Reproductive Advocacy and Diversity in Advanced Nursing Training (RADIANT) ED fellowship combines online training and in-person simulations to teach “clinical skills to manage essential reproductive healthcare.” This is just the latest woke evil ideology that has hijacked institutions of “higher learning.”