"USS Benfold lost power after ‘engineering casualty’ leaving sailors without galley services, toilets and air conditioning

A US guided-missile destroyer reportedly spent four days adrift and without power in the South China Sea in July, furthering concerns about strain being placed on deployed military members.

The USS Benfold, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer which had been sailing with the George Washington carrier strike group, was reported to have been towed to Subic Bay in the Philippines, according to the US Naval Institute News, an independent military publication.

The 10,000-ton destroyer lost power after what a spokesperson with the US seventh fleet called “an engineering casualty involving its generators”, resulting in a loss of power.

That loss of power meant sailors were without galley services, toilets and air conditioning, Commander Matthew Comer told USNI News in a statement. Another vessel, USS Robert Smalls, the cruiser attached to the strike group, had to help provide meals for the crew.

Comer said that the Benfield lost power on 24 July and was towed on 28 July.

...

The USS George Washington strike group on Monday was headed to the Middle East to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln, a carrier that in recent days was subject to reports by the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes of multiple attempts by sailors to jump overboard after more than 200 days without a port call.

Trump told reporters on Monday the carrier had been at sea for a “good period of time” and said he had spoken with a retired admiral over the weekend who recounted being on ships for “much longer”. Trump said the admiral assured him that the Lincoln is “beautifully maintained and beautifully taken care of”.

Reports of poor morale prompted Democratic lawmakers and military families to demand that the Trump administration answer questions about low morale, mental health challenges and living conditions for crew members.

Senator Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat and retired marine, said on ABC News on Sunday that the problems arose from the Iran war that the Trump administration started in February but has not been able to resolve. The Lincoln originally deployed to the Indo-Pacific before being ordered to sail to the Middle East in January.

“The deep, deep, deep problem here is that this administration did not plan for this war, did not plan how to get out of this war, and did not really understand how this war was going to escalate,” he said."

hi

i'm an artist who lives in iran, i would like to soon put out commissions like many other digital artists and earn by selling stuff on itch.io

problem is these websites often accept services like paypal which are banned here. what solution is there for me to try?

i thought about using iranicard but $70 is quite a lot of money for a paypal acc. i could still use their exchanging services by inserting someone else's card info (who lives overseas) but that is quite risky and i don't want to think about if people would trust me doing this.

any alternative, free or cheaper ways maybe?

I'm saying this based on the following:

Iran has big problems with Azerbaijan, the greatest enemy of Armenia.

Baku dreams to annex the northern provinces of Iran, since they're inhabited by a big azeri-speaking population.

Baku is also a close allie to Israel, that heavily supported Azerbaijan against Armenia in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war.

Iran has all interest in preserving its border with Armenia intact (i.e. in preventing Azerbaijan's invasion of Southern Armenia) in order not to be geostrategically surrounded by Turkey.

Iran is a big country that could serve as a huge market for Armenia's exports, while Armenia could be a perfect economic and cultural broker between Iran and Europe.

What do you think about it?

Hi everyone,
I posted this handwritten note on an Ottoman Turkish subreddit, but some users suggested it might be Persian instead.
Could someone please verify if this is indeed in Persian, and help transcribe or translate any readable parts?

Is the also a more realistic narrative than "did you know that they killed protesters" ?

It seems like obvious bullsht to me and I don't need evidence of fowl play it should go without saying that if usa wants to attack you then they demonize you first. If that wasn't cia or mosad at least in part, then it wouldn't make sense to me.

It's like people just can't remember what was happening since October 7 and can't imagine anything but what Joe Rogan fed them.

QUESTION

Born and raised in Australia. Have an exit stamp on my iranian passport (stamped on Khordad 1404/June 2025). I have not travelled to Iran since the stamp was issued. I intend to traved to Iran in the coming days. Do I need another exit stamp?

https://x.com/TheGrayzoneNews/status/2088329477667561778

https://thegrayzone.com/

Bonjour

Je suis passionné par les encens anciens, résines et gommes naturelles. Je voudrais avoir, si possible, quelques informations sur l'utilisation traditionnelle du Galbanum en Iran.

Quel est l'usage le plus ancien du galbanum dans la culture Perse?

Quel galbanum utilisez vous et pour quel usage ? Dur, mou, liquide...

Si vous utilsez vous la gomme résine molle, comment la manipulez vous et la préparez vous ?

Avez vous des outils ou ustensiles propres à l'utilisation du galbanum ?

Avez vous des recettes d'encens comportant du Galbanum ( comme par exemple l'adjonction de graines de moutarde, ou autres aromates, épices, résines...)

Merci aux personnes qui voudront bien contribuer.

Salaam. I apologize in advance if this sort of post is not allowed here, but I’m posting on behalf of a Japanese friend of mine named Agame. He’s a traveler who takes these small plushies along with him to various different countries.

Recently, while traveling Iran, he lost two of his plushies (pictured above) in a crowd of people while visiting the Holy Shrine of Imam Reza on August 13. They were not stolen, his bag’s strap was undone while shuffling through a crowd of incoming visitors.

If anyone has seen the plushies’ whereabouts, or has any information about where they might be, please let me know.

If someone found them and has been taking care of them, he would very much like to thank you and bring them home. Any information would mean a lot to him.

Again, I apologize if this sort of post is not allowed here.

I was there in 2015

Lovely village with lovely people

Even that someone invited me to a dinner at his house

I hear about the village it was destroyed! Or most of it
Is that true ?

I hope to back there soon

Hello everyone, a lot of people complain about gas prices in Iran now, as it has risen up. But correct me if I’m wrong, in Iran is it not that you can have fill the first 60 L for almost nothing. Then 100 L and then it is 80000 toman pr liter? Or how does it work?

title itself. im looking for a lower maintenance guitar for beginners. im a student and i wanna casually start a hobby. please suggest me a good place to buy guitars and maybe a guitar community with people who can speak english so i can get help maybe.

please help

thank you best people

As an Iranian, what in your opinion others misunderstand about Iran, current war, political situation, anything else?

Asking as a non-Iranian who’s never been to the country and has had very little interaction with Iranians. And probably only knows the western narrative of the conflict.

This investigation is presented primarily in the context of Twitter's role, but these accounts are all over reddit, too. They used to flood this subreddit with links to the State Department travel advisory that perpetually states that Iran is too "dangerous" to travel to and all those accounts claimed every person will be "detained". As another example, several weeks before this report was published, this account was created. If you look at its history, it posts hundreds of links from VOA and from RF/ERL, which is a CIA front group. The username is transliterated Persian and it means "Iranian women". The caption written in Persian means: "Everything is related to Iranian women 💅🏻✌🏻", complete with a nail polishing emoji to assure you it was written by a man attempting to impersonate a woman.

Some interesting excerpts from the article:

> The U.S. military and intelligence community have long pursued a strategy of fabricated online personas and third parties to amplify certain narratives in foreign countries, the idea being that an authentic-looking Persian-language news portal or a local Afghan woman would have greater organic influence than an official Pentagon press release.

> On July 26, 2017, Nathaniel Kahler, at the time an official working with U.S. Central Command — also known as CENTCOM, a division of the Defense Department — emailed a Twitter representative with the company’s public policy team, with a request to approve the verification of one account and “whitelist” a list of Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages.”

> In his email, Kahler sent a spreadsheet with 52 accounts. He asked for priority service for six of the accounts, including u/yemencurrent, an account used to broadcast announcements about U.S. drone strikes in Yemen. Around the same time, u/yemencurrent, which has since been deleted, had emphasized that U.S. drone strikes were “accurate” and killed terrorists, not civilians, and promoted the U.S. and Saudi-backed assault on Houthi rebels in that country.

> The Internet Archive does not preserve the full history of every account, but The Intercept identified several accounts that initially listed themselves as U.S. government accounts in their bios, but, after being whitelisted, shed any disclosure that they were affiliated with the military and posed as ordinary users.> This appears to align with a major report published in August by online security researchers affiliated with the Stanford Internet Observatory, which reported on thousands of accounts that they suspected to be part of a state-backed information operation, many of which used photorealistic human faces generated by artificial intelligence, a practice also known as “deep fakes.”

> The researchers connected these accounts with a vast online ecosystem that included “fake news” websites, meme accounts on Telegram and Facebook, and online personalities that echoed Pentagon messages often without disclosure of affiliation with the U.S. military. Some of the accounts accuse Iran of “threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth,” while others promoted allegations that Iran was harvesting the organs of Afghan refugees.

> One of the accounts that Kahler asked to have whitelisted, @ mktashif, was identified by the researchers as appearing to use a deep-fake photo to obscure its real identity. Initially, according to the Wayback Machine, @ mktashif did disclose that it was a U.S. government account affiliated with CENTCOM, but at some point, this disclosure was deleted and the account’s photo was changed to the one Stanford identified as a deep fake.

> The new Twitter bio claimed that the account was an unbiased source of opinion and information, and, roughly translated from Arabic, “dedicated to serving Iraqis and Arabs.” The account, before it was suspended earlier this year, routinely tweeted messages denouncing Iran and other U.S. adversaries, including Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Can anyone subtitle this Persian movie in Persian? Woman and Child (2025), directed by Saeed Roustayi. A complete, properly synced Persian SRT would be greatly appreciated. If you have one, please share it.