Airstrikes on Yemen’s Sanaa International Airport on Monday were intended to stop Iran and the Houthis from breaking a decades-long air blockade and opening an uncontrolled air link between Tehran and its Yemeni proxy, regional analysts said — a corridor they warn could let Iran resupply the Houthis directly with weapons for future campaigns against Saudi Arabia and Israel. 

The Houthis accused Saudi Arabia of carrying out the strikes and vowed to retaliate, with a spokesperson claiming the period of “de-escalation” between Riyadh and the terror group was over. Later Monday, the group said it had fired on Saudi Arabia’s Abha International Airport. 

Iran netted nearly $5 billion in the 22 days after Washington and Tehran signed their memorandum of understanding on June 17, according to a new report from the Jewish Institute for National Security of America.

The findings come as President Donald Trump announced on Monday that the U.S. would reimpose its naval blockade on Iranian ports effective July 14 at 4 p.m. ET, with an added 20% U.S. toll on all shipping through the strait. 

Darline Graham Nordone, the sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), was appointed by South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster on Monday to serve out the remainder of her older brother’s Senate term through January 2027.

McMaster, a Republican, announced his decision to appoint Graham’s sister to fill the vacancy caused by his sudden passing over the weekend at a press conference from the Statehouse in Columbia, S.C., alongside Nordone and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), a close ally of both Graham and President Donald Trump. 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani vowed on Monday to maintain ties with a controversial political operative behind the imploded campaign of Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, whom a former romantic partner accused of rape, leading him to drop out of the race.

Morris Katz and his consulting firm Fight Agency gained a reputation as political wonder-workers after assisting in Mamdani’s 2025 campaign and then in the socialist sweep of New York’s congressional primaries last month. But following the high-profile collapse of Platner’s candidacy, members of the Democratic Socialists of America began circulating a petition calling for a boycott of Katz’s services.

The Trump administration plans to launch a major diplomatic offensive against the International Criminal Court, furthering the White House’s longtime battle against the international organization, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Monday. The ICC poses a threat not just to American sovereignty, but to the American way of life, Rubio said, as he pledged to deploy American diplomatic power to sanction and target the body. 

“For 250 years, Americans have governed ourselves as a free and sovereign people,” Rubio said in a video, which was accompanied by an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. He described America’s legal system as “the essential and indispensable feature of our form of government,” but cautioned that “powerful people in far away places want to take that away from us.” He warned of shadowy “unelected globalist bureaucrats who claim their power is almost unlimited,” unless the U.S. acts quickly. 

President Donald Trump declared on Monday that the U.S. will take control of the Strait of Hormuz and said Washington will institute a 20% fee on all cargo passing through the waterway “for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World.”

“The Hormuz Strait is OPEN, and will remain OPEN, with or without Iran,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as ‘THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,’ but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped.”

James Fishback, the GOP candidate for Florida governor whom critics call “openly racist” and “openly antisemitic,” ostensibly sits at the opposite end of the political spectrum from the likes of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

But the far-right and far-left politicians share more than just an aversion to Israel — they also overlap in donors, Jewish Insider has found. 

As President Donald Trump returned to Washington on the first Sunday of the new year, he was joined by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who had traveled to the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate a day earlier to be with Trump after he ordered the operation that deposed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Graham, 71, had been encouraging Trump since returning to office last January to take a more aggressive posture toward the Maduro regime, and vigorously defended the president’s decision to launch a series of strikes targeting Venezuelan boats that the Trump administration alleged were carrying drugs meant to reach U.S. soil. By late October, he was calling on Maduro to flee Venezuela and cede power as tensions between Trump and the dictator escalated.