The vessel’s operators told Vanguard it stored weapons for security firms protecting ships at sea from pirate attacks, according to BBC Verify.
The plan involved Chinese companies shipping weapons through third-party countries to conceal their origin, the sources said, according to the report.
The report said it was unclear whether any arms sales had taken place or what weapons may have been shipped to Iran before or after the start of the war.
Iran's parliament is reviewing a bill that requires the government to pay €50 million to any individual or entity that kills US President Donald Trump in retaliation for the killing of Iran's leader and commanders, a senior lawmaker said on Thursday.
Ebrahim Azizi, head of parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, told the state TV that lawmakers had prepared several bills since the start of the March war, including one on “countermeasures by military and security forces.”
“We believe the vile president of the United States, the ominous and disgraceful Zionist prime minister, and the CENTCOM commander must be targeted and subjected to reciprocal action,” Azizi said.
“This is our right,” he added. “Just as our Imam was martyred, the president of the United States must be dealt with by any Muslim or free person.”
Azizi said the bill stipulates that “if any natural or legal person carries out this religious and ideological mission, the government is obliged to pay €50 million as a reward.”
Earlier in March, a mass text message sent to mobile users in Iran promoted what it described as an “international campaign to reward the assassination of Trump,” according to screenshots of the message shared with Iran International.
The message urged recipients to register their support through a website and to confirm participation by sending a number via SMS.
Tehran-based Didban Iran reported that the campaign has gained around 290,000 supporters, with total pledged amounts reaching $25 million.
In February, an undercover video shown in a Brooklyn courtroom was released capturing an alleged Iran-linked operative describing a 2024 plot to assassinate Trump.
The operative who prosecutors say tried to hire two men to kill Trump for $5,000 upfront demonstrated the plan by placing a vape pen on a napkin to signify his “target,” the hidden camera video released by the New York Post shows.
In November 2024, the US Department of Justice unsealed criminal charges regarding a thwarted plot by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to assassinate Trump prior to the 2024 presidential election.
Trump has been a target for assassination threats since he ordered the 2020 killing of Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force in Iraq.
“The United Kingdom, France and 24 partners support collective diplomatic, economic and military capabilities to secure the waterway,” the statement published by the UK Ministry of Defense said.
It said defense ministers and representatives from 38 countries met on May 12 in support of an “independent and strictly defensive” mission focused on protecting shipping and mine-clearance operations.
“Freedom of navigation under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) must be protected,” the statement added.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog canceled a planned trip to New York where he was due to deliver a commencement address and receive an honorary degree, Ynet reported on Thursday.
The Jewish Theological Seminary said Herzog would instead address the ceremony virtually and would be awarded the honorary degree at a later date in Israel.
The cancellation came amid criticism and protests from pro-Palestinian activists over his planned appearance, according to the report. Herzog’s office, however, said the decision was unrelated, citing recent foreign travel and scheduling constraints.
"The Chinese side said they are not in favor of militarizing the Straits of Hormuz and they're not in favor of a tolling system, and that's our position... It's good that we have alliance, or at least agreement, on that point," Rubio said.
.@SecRubio: "The Chinese side said they are not in favor of militarizing the Straits of Hormuz and they're not in favor of a tolling system, and that's our position... It's good that we have alliance, or at least agreement, on that point." pic.twitter.com/ehhk7pbBgv
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 14, 2026
by Miranda Devine
Jihadis and cartels are targets of the new White House counterterrorism strategy, but so too are Antifa, Trantifa and other violent domestic left-wing anti-American groups.
It’s a sharp departure from the Biden administration’s sinister national strategy on counterterrorism that pretended groups like Antifa didn’t exist and instead targeted Catholics at traditional Mass, parents questioning gender ideology at school board meetings and Donald Trump supporters who, President Joe Biden told us repeatedly, were “ultra-MAGA,” “semi-fascist” domestic terrorists.
Hence the Jan. 6 Capitol riot by unarmed Trump supporters, most of whom committed no violence and many of whom did not even enter the Capitol, became the biggest investigation in FBI history under Biden, prompting one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in American history.
Thankfully, President Trump’s White House counterterrorism director, Sebastian Gorka, has reoriented national security back toward violence, rather than vague “anti-government” or “anti-authority” sentiment, which can be easily — and was, under Biden — weaponized politically.
“We’re just basing our threat assessment on reality, whether you’re trying to kill journalists, whether you are creating disorder against the rule of law in our country, or do I have to mention the name of my friend Charlie Kirk?” Gorka told me on “Pod Force One.”
“Do I have to talk about the multiple left-wing attempts to kill President Trump?”
“We’re not going to whistle past the graveyard. We’re not going to say that doesn’t exist.”
“We are going to use every legal tool in our 17 intelligence agencies, in our domestic law enforcement through the DOJ, to prevent the violent left-wing lunacy from taking another life, whether it’s a journalist, whether it’s a president, or whether it’s a brave patriot like Charlie Kirk simply engaging in civilized debate on a college campus. We will not allow people to use force against those they politically disagree with.”
It’s welcome news to the majority of Americans who have felt trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare since 2020’s “Summer of Love,” when organized left-wing militias and well-funded Antifa-style terrorists hijacked Black Lives Matter protests and tried to turn them into a violent overthrow of Trump.
They got their wish, and part of Trump’s 2020 defeat — or his inability to win enough votes to overcome the Democrats’ sly election rigging — has to be attributed to the general sense of chaos and unrest created by his ideological opponents.
The same tactic has spiraled into the present day, with evolving causes hijacked to justify the violence.
It started with racism and so-called white supremacy, defunding the police, abortion, transgender ideology, anti-ICE and anti-Israel, which has morphed this week into masked terrorists hunting Jews on the streets of New York and assaulting children outside synagogues.
And as Gorka explicitly says in his new counterterrorism strategy, this onslaught of left-wing violence eventually brought us to targeted assassinations, including conservative activist Kirk, health care CEO Brian Thompson, and Israeli Embassy staffers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim.
Yet the establishment media, and Democratic leaders and their administrative stooges, have downplayed the violence, pretended it didn’t exist, or tacitly condoned it, while exaggerating right-wing violence, despite data, including from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, showing record highs in left-wing violence.
The result is a permission structure to normalize the political violence of the “Luigi left,” as numerous recent polls have shown.
For instance, a YouGov poll last September found 25% of “very liberal” Americans say violence can be justified to achieve political goals, compared with 3% of “very conservative” Americans.
Gorka’s blunt, 16-page strategy memo released Wednesday pledges to “prioritize identifying and neutralizing violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro transgender and anarchist …
“As real threats were ignored or underplayed, Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk [in September 2025] by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”
Transgender shooters like Robin Westman, who slaughtered two children at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis in August 2025, have targeted schools and churches, while the mainstream media have blurred their gender, suppressed key details, and downplayed an emerging pattern of transgender violence, presumably out of some misplaced fear that people in an already vulnerable community will be tarred with the same brush.
But Americans are smart enough to understand that, just as not every young loner turns into a Thomas Crooks, it is a minor subset of transgender individuals who turn violent.
In any case, the Trump administration’s reality-based new focus is welcomed by Andrew Kolvet, who was Kirk’s right-hand man at Turning Point USA and has taken over hosting “The Charlie Kirk Show.”
“This is a huge topic for us, obviously, because Charlie was assassinated by somebody that had a romantic relationship with a trans-identifying person in Utah,” Kolvet says, pointing to the last message Kirk sent to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller the day before Kirk was murdered.
Miller quoted from the message in a special episode of “The Charlie Kirk Show” the day after Kirk was murdered: “The last message that Charlie sent me was … that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country. And I will write those words onto my heart and I will carry them out.”
“People ask me, what emotions I’m feeling right now … There’s incredible sadness, but there’s incredible anger. And the thing about anger is that unfocused anger or blind rage is not a productive emotion. But focused anger, righteous anger, directed for a just cause, is one of the most important agents of change in human history.”
It’s one thing to vow to crack down on left-wing radicals, but they are swimming in an ideological soup that is not too different from Democratic talking points — see alleged gunman Cole Allen’s manifesto after the latest assassination attempt on Trump.
How does Gorka plan to target a diffuse ideology?
“We do everything in the bounds of the Constitution and upholding freedom of speech. [But] freedom of speech does not extend to inciting violence … We are going to map out these individuals, we are going to identify them, we’re going to find [their sources of funding]. The money trail is the most important thing.”
As per usual, the left-wing media’s response to the new counterterrorism strategy was alarmist hyperbole in defense of their pet revolutionaries.
The Guardian dismissed the memo as a “bizarre” and “unhinged” attack on “the president’s enemies, the Biden administration, transgender people and some Islamist groups.”
Mother Jones’ headline was even more dishonest: “Counterterrorism Now Officially Means Targeting Trans People.”
The left needs to wake up and disown the menace it has been coddling.
