Iran said Sunday it struck an unmanned U.S. vessel trying to enter the Strait of Hormuz, a claim that the U.S. military dismissed as a “total lie.”
The purported attack came a day after the U.S. military said forces struck three Iranian oil tankers in response to Navy warships being targeted with ballistic missiles. Experts called it a dangerous escalation after Iran’s previous attacks at sea targeted commercial shipping.
The war began with U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28. But since a fragile ceasefire agreement was announced in June, on-and-off fighting has persisted, with both sides trying to inflict military and economic pain as negotiations have collapsed.
The United States and Iran resumed attacks last week, following a month of relative calm, with the Strait of Hormuz and areas along Iran’s southern coast again being targeted. At least five people were killed earlier in the week during a U.S. bombardment that returned attention to the area where a school was hit in the war’s opening strikes.
An armed man was arrested after charging toward the Democratic candidate for Ohio governor, Amy Acton, on Sunday during a campaign stop at the Canfield Fair, injuring several people, campaign officials said.
At around five o’clock on a winter evening in 2013, then college student Sam Forstag was driving through a snowstorm toward his third job of the day, making sandwiches at the Subway inside a Walmart.
Palestinians on Sunday held a mass funeral for 100 people, including 62 children, whose remains were recovered from the rubble of buildings destroyed in Israeli strikes in Gaza City.
Saif Abu Keshek, a Spanish-Swedish national of Palestinian origin, and Thiago Avila, a Brazilian national, were detained by Israeli authorities late on Wednesday and brought to Israel, while more than 100 other pro-Palestine activists aboard the Global Sumud flotilla were taken to the Greek island of Crete.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) has announced a new international effort to break Israel's blockade of Gaza, with ships sailing between European ports before a planned attempt to reach the besieged Palestinian territory in October. 
Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the Russian military to halt strikes on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv for a period of three days beginning at midnight on Saturday, Sept. 5, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced.
In a different Washington, under a different president, a return to the well-worn playbook of all-out sanctions to counter Iran might have been the signal for a publicity-hungry US secretary of defense to adopt a lower profile.
