What to know about the Iran war today:
o U.S. forces on Sunday struck two Iranian launchers on Larak Island, according to U.S. Central Command spokesman Commander Tim Hawkins. It's the first military action in a month against Tehran.

o The Iranian government said Saturday the country would stand "firm" against what it called "unjust" sanctions and "conspiracies."

o Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian finally admitted some vulnerability to economic sanctions on Saturday, the first senior official in the country to do.

o President Trump this week insisted Iran is "begging to make a deal," but Iranian leadership has publicly downplayed the impacts of the new sanctions. Mr. Trump initially said the war would last six weeks, but now says it will take "as long as necessary."

4:20 PM
U.S. military strikes 2 Iranian launchers on Larak Island, U.S. official says
U.S. forces struck two Iranian launchers on Larak Island earlier Sunday, according to U.S Central Command spokesman Commander Tim Hawkins.

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces were observed preparing to launch rockets with sea mines into the Strait of Hormuz, Hawkins said. CENTCOM said it completed clearing sea mines from the shipping routes in the Strait last week.

Larak Island is just a few miles off Iran's coast, and Tehran had been forcing ships to pay fees to pass safely.

The IRGC in a statement through Iran's state broadcaster claimed "The martyrdom and injury of several of our fighters and compatriots," The Associated Press reported.

The statement said the attack will "result in punishment of the aggressor."

2:32 PM
Tanker ship struck in Strait of Hormuz, U.K. military agency says
An unknown projectile struck a tanker ship in the Strait of Hormuz, in a section of the waterway north of Khasab Oman, said the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Organization, an agency run by the British military. The incident happened on Saturday, according to the agency.

The agency said the ship had been moving inbound and no casualties or environmental impact had been reported. It cited unspecified military authorities.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

10:46 AM
Iran's supreme leader calls for regional unity
Iran's new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, urged Muslim cooperation and unity in a letter to religious leaders from Islamic countries attending a conference in Tehran, Iran's official IRNA news agency reported.

Khamenei called the U.S. and Israel enemies of all Islamic nations. "My enduring and repeating advice to rulers of Islamic nations is to know your real enemy, understand its plans and confront it," he wrote.

Six months after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, killing Khamenei's father and other senior leaders, Khamenei has not been seen publicly.

The war has exposed deep divisions in the Muslim world after Iran struck targets in neighboring Gulf Arab countries and restricted movement through the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran has opposed the U.S. military presence in neighboring nations.

7:40 AM
United Airlines to resume flights to Tel Aviv from San Francisco
United Airlines is set to resume direct flights from San Francisco to Tel Aviv, Israel, in March 2027.

According to Reuters, the airline plans to resume flights on March 27, 2027, with three weekly flights. The flights on the route were halted earlier this year at the start of the war in Iran.

Earlier this month, United announced plans to resume flights on its New York/Newark to Tel Aviv route on Sept. 9, while flights from Chicago and Washington, D.C. are expected to resume in October.

Last week, United announced it will add 10 international routes starting in 2027, extending the carrier's flight network to new destinations in Europe and Asia. The route expansion is the largest in the airline's history, according to United.

"We've been adding a lot of new cities each year in the past several years," CEO Scott Kirby told "CBS Mornings" co-host Gayle King in an interview. "It's more this year, partly because the aircraft manufacturers have caught up."

2:29 AM
Iran's Supreme Leader urges Gulf rulers to identify their "real enemy"
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei urged the leaders of Gulf countries to identify their "real enemy," in a written message published Sunday.

The statement, which was published on Khamenei's telegram account to mark to birthday of Prophet Muhammad, called for unity among Muslims worldwide and mutual defense against enemies.

Ayatollah Khamenei has not been seen in public since the start of the U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iran in February which killed his father and previous supreme leader. Khamenei is believed to have been injured during those attacks.

11:40 PM
Trump's oil and gas stock trades continued during Iran war, filings show
President Trump's investment accounts have continued to purchase and sell stock holdings in oil and natural gas companies while he oversees the U.S. war with Iran, according to his financial disclosure filings through the second quarter of 2026.

As the Iran war continued, paused for a ceasefire and then restarted, Mr. Trump has purchased and sold oil and gas stocks worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to the most recently available data from the Office of Government Ethics.

Mr. Trump has a vast portfolio with holdings in all 11 sectors, and a CBS News investigation showed that in the first three months of the year, his accounts executed about 3,600 stock or securities trades, worth a total that ranged between $212 million and $695 million.

Read more here.

4:52 PM / August 29, 2026
UAE to inspect Egyptian bank's branches after U.S. sanctions
The state-owned Central Bank of the UAE said Saturday it would inspect a major state-owned Egyptian bank's branches, after Washington said it would cut off the Egyptian institution's operations in the Gulf state from the U.S. financial system as it tries to choke Iran off economically.

"For Banque Misr branches in the UAE, the Central Bank has decided to conduct a special and urgent examination that includes a forensic/in-depth lookback covering the period referred to in the statement issued by the U.S. authorities," it said in a statement.

The move comes after U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Friday in a statement that Iran's "enablers cannot continue to enjoy access to the U.S. dollar and the global financial system."

He said Banque Misr, Egypt's second-largest bank, in the UAE had "decided to find out the hard way," and Washington was "taking the first step in holding it accountable for its continued, egregious support of the Iranian regime."

The Treasury Department's action will only take effect after a month-long public comment period.

Bessent earlier this week vowed that the U.S. is declaring an "economic D-Day" on Iran, warning of harsh consequences for countries that do not join the campaign.

3:00 PM / August 29, 2026
Elizabeth Warren calls out Trump for close ties to oil companies as profits soar amid war
Sen. Elizabeth Warren made pointed remarks toward President Trump and the Iran war during a get out the vote rally for Ed Markey, the junior senator from Massachusetts, implying oil companies aligned with the president have benefited from the war.

"He is the most corrupt president ever in American history. That's the fact," the Democrat said. "So the question becomes: What do we do about that? When Donald Trump starts a war with Iran and his oil buddies, who gave him a million dollars for his campaign. When they start making profits like crazy, then our job is to call it out and fight back. That's what we do."

There's no question oil companies have profited massively from the war. ExxonMobil reported second quarter profits of double what they were last year, over $14 billion. Chevron quadrupled profits in the second quarter versus 2025, now up to $12.1 billion.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has continued to purchase and sell stock holdings in oil and natural gas companies while he oversees the U.S. war with Iran, according to his financial disclosure filings through the second quarter of 2026. The president's holdings have jumped from a range of $13 million to $46 million at the start of this year to $17 million to $61 million by mid-August, according to Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee.

The White House said Mr. Trump is not involved in his trades.

"You want to lower the price of gasoline? End the war in Iran. Just end it," Warren said Saturday.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who spoke at the same rally, echoed Warren's comments.

"[Trump] said, 'I am opposed to endless wars.' That's what he said, and then he, without provocation, attacked Iran," the independent from Vermont said. "We've been in a war now for some five-plus months. Thousands of innocent men, women and children in Iran, Lebanon, elsewhere are dead. Eighteen American servicemen are dead. The bill is going higher and higher. That war is going to cost us hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars."

2:40 PM / August 29, 2026
Hezbollah continues to resist talks with U.S., Israel about disarming, embassy says
Hezbollah is showing no signs of stopping its fight against Israel in southern Lebanon.

The Iran-backed militia has refused to negotiate with any of the parties to the trilateral agreement signed in late June aimed at allowing Israel to leave security in southern Lebanon to the Lebanese army.

"When Hizballah decides it is ready to do so, it can talk with the Lebanese state, with whom we are already in dialogue and tell them it is ready to turn in its weapons. Then we could try to bring the views close to each other," the U.S. Embassy in Beirut said Saturday on X.

"But as it stands, Hizballah so far does not want to talk to the Lebanese state, nor talk to us, nor talk to Israel, because it is simply taking orders from Iran," it continued.

Even as the actual fighting cools between the U.S. and Iran, there has been no letup in the fighting between the Iranian proxy and Israel in southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah has not been party to any of the negotiations between the Lebanese government, Israel and the U.S. over a lasting peace in Lebanon. Hezbollah has outright rejected all of the deals negotiated between those three sides. Israeli troops were intended to withdraw from parts of southern Lebanon, to be replaced by the Lebanon army, according to the trilateral agreement. But Israel has shown no signs of withdrawing, saying it will only do so once Hezbollah is completely disarmed.

At least 4,350 people have been killed and another 12,310 injured in Lebanon since violence broke out between Israel and Hezbollah on March 2, according to the Lebanon Ministry of Public Health.

12:41 PM / August 29, 2026
Iranian speaker mocks claims of U.S. taking out 130 million barrels of oil: "Liar liar pants on fire"
The speaker of Iran's Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, resorted to schoolyard taunts against U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Saturday as Iran takes issue with claims the U.S. is getting millions of barrels out of the Strait of Hormuz.

Ghalibaf, one of the United States' most consistent agitators in the Iranian regime, responded "Liar liar pants on fire," to Bessent's social media post earlier this week claiming the U.S. had guided 130 million barrels of oil out of the Persian Gulf in the last two weeks, while Iran has moved out zero barrels.

The taunt from Ghalibaf followed an X post earlier in the day by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who said Iranian surveillance showed the U.S. was trying to "game energy markets," presumably in reference to overstating how much oil was being taken out of the strait.

Ghalibaf made two more claims in the same post, telling Bessent to check Moody's Analytics' latest estimation that the war with Iran has cost the U.S. at least $130 billion, and claiming the quantitative trading firm Jane Street lost $130 million trying to short sell oil futures. It's not clear where Ghalibaf came up with the second claim, but Moody's did estimate the war has cost $130 billion as of mid-June.

Bessent has increasingly become a target of derision for the Iranian regime in the wake of Monday's announcement of severe new sanctions.

11:42 AM / August 29, 2026
War about destroying regime, not nuclear enrichment, IRGC official says
A senior member of the IRGC is disputing the United States' alleged goal in the war, saying it had nothing to do with nuclear ambition.

"Those who consider war the result of enrichment have not read history correctly," Sardar Jowani, deputy political director for the powerful paramilitary group, told Fars News, a semiofficial news agency. "Those who say that if we had stopped enrichment there would have been no war either lack precise historical knowledge or are deprived of proper analysis."

Jowani instead blamed the war on the U.S. wanting to overthrow the Islamic Republic.

President Trump has repeatedly stated the only goal of the war is to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. However, the U.S. had already done significant damage to the Iranian nuclear program last year with several massive airstrikes on enrichment locations.

9:17 AM / August 29, 2026
Iranian foreign minister accuses U.S. government of gaming energy markets
Abbas Araghchi, Iran's foreign minister and one of the country's most important leaders, accused the U.S. government of misleading its people through the media for their own gain.

"Our intelligence shows major efforts to game energy markets," he wrote on X. "U.S. Govt elements use gullible media to influence prices for personal gain and keep POTUS mired in a losing war."

Araghchi wasn't any more specific in his accusations, but it appears as though he was referring to President Trump's claims this week that the U.S. is taking out millions of barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz with help from the Navy. Mr. Trump said 24 ships were escorted out of the Persian Gulf in one night a few days ago.

"U.S. consumers feel the real bottom line," Araghchi wrote on Saturday.

Oil prices have remained steady this week, with Brent crude remaining below $90 a barrel the last several days. Before the war, the cost was in the $70 a barrel range, but the cost also spiked over $110 a barrel earlier in the war.

5:13 AM / August 29, 2026
Iran's president admits sanctions impacting economy
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has admitted that U.S. sanctions on his country are hurting its economy, despite just days ago insisting they would achieve nothing.

"Some say sanctions have no effect at all; to those people, I really don't know what to say," Pezeshkian told state TV in an interview late on Friday.

"We are in a war situation, and we must accept these wartime conditions," he added.

On Monday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent laid out plans for the "economic asphyxiation" of Iran, warning of dire consequences for countries that do not join the American campaign.

4:47 AM / August 29, 2026
Iran vows to resist U.S. sanctions
The Iranian government vowed on Saturday to resist what it calls "unjust sanctions" and "conspiracies" as it said it seeks diplomacy with the U.S..

"The diplomacy of the Islamic Republic of Iran will be pursued on the basis of the three principles of dignity, wisdom, and expediency, with an emphasis on standing firm against the conspiracies and unjust sanctions of the American-Zionist arrogance," the Iranian cabinet said in a statement.

It added defense and diplomacy are "inseparable" to protect national interests.

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Posted by Temmy
Sun, August 30, 2026 11:56pm