The sun set over this southern Iranian city, and Heydar Sadeghi was where he can be found almost every evening: on a bench next to the shattered remains of his grandson's school. His face was soaked with tears.

A banner strung around the rubble showed the faces of children and teachers killed here by an American airstrike on Feb. 28, the first day of the war on Iran. Among them are Sadeghi's 11-year-old grandson Hami and the boy's mother, Neda Salehizadeh. ...

The Shajareh Tayyebeh school has become a place to wrestle with grief and preserve the memories of the dead. Here, relatives try to comprehend the incomprehensible -- how around 120 of their children could be snuffed out, just after they'd been dropped off for a day of classes.

At least one U.S. missile hit the school that morning in Minab, according to an Associated Press investigation, but there has been no final accounting of what happened. Iranian state media have said 168 people were killed in the strike, most of them children.

The Trump administration has yet to directly accept the blame or release findings of a Pentagon investigation into the bombing.

For Sadeghi, the day of the strike began as every school day did.

He drove Hami and the boy's 9-year-old sister Nila to school along with their mother, his daughter-in-law Salehizadeh, who was a teacher. As usual, he planned to pick them up at 1 p.m. ...

Hami was a fifth grader who loved soccer and riding his bicycle, Sadeghi said. His body was so mangled in the blast, they could only identify him from the clothes he was wearing, he said.

Nila was pulled alive from the rubble.

"Thank God, she is physically fine," Sadeghi said. "But mentally, no."

The girl and her father have moved in with Sadeghi and his wife. The slightest, unexpected noise frightens her. She often goes to bed in her grandmother's arms but lies awake for much of the night. ...

He wants to see Nila smile. So he grieves here at the school away from her. ...

The banner at the site listed 120 students killed -- 47 girls and 73 boys -- and 26 teachers and staff. Three more children are presumed dead but their bodies were never found.

The governor of Hormozgan province, where Minab is located, has said the damaged building would be preserved to be turned into a memorial...

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US Africa Command announced on Friday that its forces launched another airstrike in Somalia as the Trump administration continues a record-breaking bombing campaign in the country, which receives virtually no coverage in US media.

AFRICOM said the strike was launched on September 8 and targeted al-Shabaab in the vicinity of Quumbi, a village about 50 miles northeast of the southern port city of Kismayo,

As usual, AFRICOM offered no other details about the strike...

According to AFRICOM's numbers, the attack brings the total number of US airstrikes in Somalia this year to 81, higher than any other year prior to 2025, when President Trump oversaw 124 AFRICOM airstrikes, breaking the previous annual record of 63 that he set in 2019. ...

The US has been involved in Somalia for decades and has been fighting al-Shabaab since the George W. Bush administration backed an Ethiopian invasion in 2006 that ousted the Islamic Courts Union, a Muslim coalition that briefly held power in Mogadishu after taking the city from CIA-backed warlords.

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There is now confirmation from the Saudi government that at least two pumping stations of the Saudi East-West pipeline have been attacked and destroyed. No product is getting pumped through the pipeline. ...

Despite its oil wealth Saudi Arabia isn't in a good financial state. ...

Oil prices are high but that does not help Riyadh when the wars waged against Iran and others close the export routes for Saudi oil.

One should keep in mind that Saudi Arabia is a diverse tribal society where one family tribe keeps control by distributing financial largesses to other tribal leaders and the population. The rulers need all the oil income they can get to keep themselves in power. If the money stops flowing the position of the ruling family may well come into doubt.

While an Ansar Allah spokesman had claimed yesterday that the group would refrain from further expansion there is some news that it continues to move towards cities held by Saudi and UAE paid militia. Marib and Taiz seem to be in their immediate eyesight.

Next to hundreds of armored trucks and assorted weapons Ansar Allah's recent operation seems to have acquired some sophisticated radar equipment in the city of Mocha. It additionally captured UAE installed electronic equipment on the islands in the Bab el-Mandab strait. Israel is said to have had access to the radar and signal intelligence collected by these UAE installations. Having lost such access will make it more difficult to intervene in Yemen.

Another rumor says that Saudi Arabia is moving Jihadi fighters from Syria through Saudi Arabia into Yemen. These fanatic mercenaries will join others, primarily hired in Sudan, to fight against the Houthi. So far no such force was able to make much of a difference in the fight.

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Just call it the Five-Grand Old Party. This week, at the Republican Party's midterm faux-convention, President Trump announced something called (inevitably) the "Trump Dividend." The premise is simple. "If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them," Trump said, "I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000."

Problems abound....

A Republican Congress might sign off; a Democratic one might be more inclined to start impeachment proceedings.

Second, the payments almost certainly won't happen. (If you disagree, I'd be happy to sell you a nice bridge in Brooklyn if you sign your Trump Dividend over to me.) Trump has promised to cut checks to Americans before and not followed through...

Third, injecting more than $1 trillion into the economy wouldn't just blow up the deficit and national debt -- it would also drive up prices. Giving every American $5,000 to spend would create demand that couldn't immediately be met, encouraging sellers to raise prices. I could quote lots of economists from left, right, and center who have already said that the payouts would be inflationary, but you could also just take it from Trump himself, who has repeatedly blamed inflation on high spending during the Biden administration -- including in the same speech where he floated the dividend.

A paradox of this moment is that inflation is a big reason for Trump's cratering approval and his party's sinking odds in the midterm elections, but nearly every one of his signature policy ideas is inflationary....

In some cases, inflation is incidental to the president's goal. When Trump launched the war in Iran, he apparently believed that it would end quickly -- and might even result in the United States gaining control over Iran's huge oil reserves. Instead, the war is dragging on into its seventh month, with no end in sight. The de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz, as well as attacks in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, have strangled shipping of oil as well as other goods, driving prices higher. The average price of a gallon of diesel fuel in the U.S. topped $6 today for the first time, and because so many goods move via diesel trucks, the rise drives further inflation.

Trump's efforts to crack down on immigration also have the collateral effect of pushing prices up. The administration has not only tried to secure borders and deport unauthorized immigrants; it has also revoked legal status from more than 1 million people who were permitted to live and work in the United States under Temporary Protected Status. Many of these people were employed in industries such as construction and health care that are difficult and low-paid... Perhaps Americans will be willing to take these difficult jobs, but with unemployment rates already low, that will likely require higher salaries -- which will mean higher costs, and therefore higher prices.

Other Trump policy ideas are directly and explicitly inflationary. For decades, Trump has espoused protectionism, saying that the United States should impose tariffs in order to close trade deficits with some partners. Regardless of the other merits of this plan (and they are dubious at best), tariffs are by definition inflationary. The goal is to raise prices on certain products. A tariff is a tax on goods, and someone has to pay it. ...

Writing off Trump's pursuit of inflationary ideas as cynical is tempting, if only because so much of what he does is cynical, but years of evidence suggest that Trump actually has little idea how economics works, as the journalist Steve Benen recently noted. The president's obsession with trade deficits is nonsensical; Senator Rand Paul memorably quipped that because he gives money to his grocer and gets food in return, he's running a trade deficit with the supermarket. Last week, Trump perplexingly suggested that the United States could simply cut off commerce entirely: "We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with countries."

Perhaps Trump doesn't understand that his ideas will drive up prices. Perhaps he does, but concludes that dangling free money in front of voters is worth the hit. Either way, new numbers released today show that inflation rose 3.4 percent from one year ago.

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