- U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz said Monday that President Donald Trump is “always open to a deal” when asked whether the president would consider meeting with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.
- IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi said Tehran would change both its weaponry and targets in response to renewed U.S. military action, according to Iran’s Fars news agency.
- Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst on Sunday reported that Trump said he is in “deciding mode” and warned Iran that “big things” could happen if Tehran does not “behave.”
Iran warned Monday that it could deploy new weapons and expand the geography of the conflict if the United States launches another offensive, as President Donald Trump weighs his next move in the war.
IRGC spokesman Hossein Mohebbi said Tehran would change both its weaponry and targets in response to renewed U.S. military action, according to Iran’s Fars news agency.
“We will introduce new weapons with new capabilities into the battle, and the world will be astonished,” Mohebbi said, according to Iran International. He also claimed Iran has targets that have not previously come under attack and is prepared for a prolonged conflict.
Trump, meanwhile, told Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst on Sunday that he is in “deciding mode” and warned Iran that “big things” could happen if Tehran does not “behave.”
"It's basically three things,” Trump said. “Wipe it out, let it rot with the economy, or make a deal."
Monday, September 21, 2026
Iran claims world will be 'astonished' by new weapons, Trump in 'deciding mode'
Magnitude 6.4 earthquake rattles Papua New Guinea in latest Pacific Ring of Fire activity
Angela Fortuna
A magnitude 6.4 earthquake has once again rattled the Pacific Ring of Fire — this time in Papua New Guinea.
The earthquake struck at 9:17 a.m. UTC, and was felt across the island country. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said the quake struck at a depth of about 64 miles, approximately 30 miles from Kainantu.
The USGS said the population in this area resides in structures that are a mix of vulnerable and earthquake-resistant construction. Recent earthquakes in this area have caused secondary hazards such as landslides and liquefaction.
The agency reports that the quake happened on the Australia-Pacific plate boundary, which is about 2,500 miles long, spanning from the Sunda (Java) trench in the west to the Solomon Islands.
The UN Wants The Keys To AI - What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
PNW STAFF
Artificial intelligence may become the most powerful information technology humanity has ever created. It will increasingly determine what people read, what children learn, how governments operate and, perhaps most importantly, what billions of people believe to be true.
So there is a question just as important as what AI will eventually be capable of doing:
Who gets to make the rules?
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres wants the UN to play a major role in answering that question.
The organization has launched a Global Dialogue on AI Governance, created an international scientific panel on AI and is pushing countries toward greater cooperation over how this technology should be controlled.
AI certainly presents enormous risks. But before giving an international institution greater influence over the rules governing the world's most powerful technology, perhaps we should examine the institution asking for the keys.
This Is About More Than AI Safety
The UN's Global Digital Compact explicitly calls for enhanced “international governance of artificial intelligence” and says the United Nations has “an important role to play in shaping, enabling and supporting” that governance.
The architecture is already taking shape: scientific panels, global dialogues, international cooperation and interoperable standards.
Each sounds harmless enough by itself.
Together, however, they create something much more significant — an international framework capable of influencing how governments regulate a technology that could eventually mediate much of humanity's access to information.
And information is where this becomes especially dangerous.
Who Decides What AI Is Allowed To Tell You?
The Global Digital Compact doesn't stop with dangerous AI systems. It also addresses “information integrity,” misinformation, disinformation and hate speech while promoting international cooperation over how these issues should be handled.
That raises an enormous question:
Who determines what constitutes misinformation?
Increasingly, people won't search ten websites and compare competing arguments. They'll ask an AI assistant a question and receive one synthesized answer.
What caused this war? Was this election fair? What does the Bible teach about sexuality? Is this medical treatment safe? Is this religious belief hateful? Who has the historical claim to Jerusalem?
AI won't simply locate information. It will select, summarize, interpret and prioritize it.
Control the standards governing AI and you potentially influence the gatekeeper through which billions of people understand the world.
Israel Should Be A Warning
For Christians and supporters of Israel, the UN's record should immediately raise concerns.
Israel has faced extraordinary scrutiny throughout the UN system. The advocacy organization UN Watch counted 15 General Assembly resolutions concerning Israel in 2025 compared with 11 concerning all other countries combined.
Then came the UNRWA scandal. A UN investigation examined allegations involving 19 employees following October 7 and ultimately concluded that evidence concerning nine indicated they “may have been involved” in the attacks. Those employees were fired.
Now imagine similar institutional judgments filtering into artificial intelligence.
Who determines how AI describes Jerusalem?
Who defines “occupation,” “terrorism,” “resistance,” “settlements” or “genocide”?
Who determines whether Israel's biblical and historical connection to the land is legitimate history or religious mythology?
Today's diplomatic battles could become tomorrow's algorithmic assumptions.
And unlike a UN resolution that most Americans will never read, an AI-generated answer could reach hundreds of millions of people.
International institutions are run by people. They can be slow. They can succumb to political pressures. They can get things wrong.
Yet during a crisis, their conclusions can quickly acquire enormous authority.
Now imagine those judgments incorporated into AI systems answering billions of questions every day.
A mistaken press conference eventually disappears.
An assumption embedded throughout an AI information ecosystem can reproduce itself endlessly.
Previous generations worried about governments controlling newspapers, radio stations and television networks.
AI changes the scale entirely.
Imagine a generation that rarely reads primary documents or visits individual news organizations. People simply ask their AI what happened.
AI explains history. Summarizes news. Teaches children. Answers religious questions. Recommends financial decisions. Determines which sources appear credible.
Soon AI agents may conduct transactions, interact with governments and manage parts of people's digital lives.
Whoever substantially influences the rules governing those systems possesses something far more consequential than traditional media influence.
They influence the gatekeeper itself.
The Prophetic Dimension Is Difficult To Ignore
Revelation 13 describes a future system of extraordinary centralized power under the Antichrist, eventually reaching into something as basic as whether individuals can “buy or sell.”
For nearly 2,000 years, such worldwide control would have been practically impossible.
Not anymore.
Digital identity, biometric authentication, programmable digital currencies, mass surveillance, interconnected databases and artificial intelligence are creating capabilities ancient empires could never have imagined.
AI could become the connective tissue holding much of it together — identifying individuals, analyzing behavior, detecting prohibited activity, processing transactions, monitoring communications and determining access to digital systems at extraordinary scale.
Now place those technologies alongside the growing push for international governance.
The Bible describes a final period in which political authority, economic control and spiritual rebellion converge under one ruler. Our generation is constructing technologies capable of enabling levels of centralized control that previous generations could scarcely comprehend.
That should make Christians pay very close attention when the world's most powerful technology begins converging with increasingly ambitious systems of global governance.
The UN wants a greater role in governing AI.
But the deeper question is where this road eventually leads.
Because humanity is rapidly building an AI infrastructure powerful enough that whoever ultimately controls it could exercise a degree of influence over information, identity and economic participation unlike anything the world has ever seen.
And Scripture has already warned us that one day, someone will.
Majority Of Israelis Fear October 7-Style Attack From Judea And Samaria
TAMAR STEIN/ISRAEL 365
Seventy-seven percent of Israelis, including 86% of Jewish Israelis, believe a large-scale terrorist attack modeled on the October 7 Hamas massacre could originate from Judea and Samaria, according to new polling data released by the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA). The number has climbed steadily for over two years, and it now sits alongside a defense establishment warning that the threat is not theoretical.
The JCFA survey, conducted September 2-4 among 703 Jewish and Arab Israelis by Dr. Menachem Lazar’s Lazar Research Institute, found that 75% of Jewish Israelis and 67% of all Israelis oppose establishing a Palestinian state along the pre-1967 lines. That opposition has held remarkably steady since October 7, 2023, according to the JCFA, which has now tracked the question across seven consecutive surveys spanning 30 months.
What has not held steady is fear of the West Bank itself becoming what the JCFA calls Israel’s “next front.” In February 2025, 62% of Israelis and 68% of Israeli Jews told JCFA pollsters they were concerned about an October 7-style attack from that direction. Nineteen months later, in the September 2026 survey, that number reached 77% overall and 86% among Jewish Israelis. Even on the political left, where respondents were evenly split at the start of the tracking period, 58% now say they are concerned, compared to 32% who are not.
The fear is not confined to abstract polling. Defense Minister Israel Katz announced this month that he and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have instructed the IDF to prepare for what he called “an all-out war” against Palestinian Authority officials and infrastructure if Israel identifies signs that PA-linked security forces are preparing an October 7-style assault.
“If the security apparatuses of the Palestinian Authority and the bodies associated with them launch, or we know for certain that they are about to launch, an October 7-style terrorist attack against forces and Jewish settlements,” Katz said the IDF has been ordered to move against “all terrorist infrastructure in Judea and Samaria.”
The warning follows research published by the JCFA in July, authored by Lt.-Col. (res.) Adv. Maurice Hirsch, documenting what he termed a “turning the guns” scenario: the possibility that Palestinian Authority security personnel, trained and armed under the framework of the Oslo Accords, could turn those weapons on Israeli civilians and soldiers.
Hirsch’s study found that PA security forces have grown to roughly 70,000 personnel, some 133% beyond what the Oslo Accords permit, with the overage in Judea and Samaria alone reaching approximately 400% above the authorized limit. Those forces are now armed with rocket-propelled grenades and shoulder-launched missiles, according to the study, and Hirsch identified four separate 22-kilometer routes by which PA forces could reach Israeli population centers in a short span of time.
When JCFA pollsters asked the Israeli public to rank the threats the next government should prioritize, the “turning of the guns” scenario in Judea and Samaria scored 3.6 on a six-point scale, placing it above concerns about Hezbollah’s rebuilding in Lebanon and behind only the reconstitution of Iran’s nuclear program and Hamas’s rearmament in Gaza.
Two years after October 7 reshaped Israeli public opinion almost overnight, driving opposition to Palestinian statehood from 69% to 79% in a matter of weeks, the numbers coming out of Judea and Samaria suggest that trauma has not faded. It has migrated.
What began as a hardened consensus against a Palestinian state has become, three surveys and thirty months later, a specific and rising fear about where the next attack will come from. Israel’s defense establishment, judging by Katz’s warning this month, appears to be operating on the assumption that the public’s instinct is correct.
Iran's Military Believes US Is Preparing To Resume Attacks
TYLER DURDEN
Iran's central military command has announced it believes the United States has made the decision to resume military attacsk on the Islamic Republic.
Citing the country's General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, state media IRIB states that "According to intelligence received, the US has once again decided - with the green light from certain regional countries - to resume actions against Iran during a joint meeting in a European nation."
At the same time Iranian leadership again warned US allies in the region that they'll be considered "complicit" if the US resumes it military assault on the Islamic Republic. The Iranian military HQ stated that "any mistakes will result in painful attacks."
Tehran further indicated Sunday that it is still awaiting Trump's response to its conditions for ending the war. Its chief negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf confirmed to AFP that Iran's demands were sent to Washington via the Qataris.
Starting Saturday night there was an avalanche of online chatter over potential new escalation, given President Trump abruptly cut short a visit to Camp David.
Some pundits saw in this a sign of some kind of imminent military action in the Middle East, also amid reports that extra military hardware is being sent to the region.
But others have suggested this is just setting up for another TACO moment, and reports of escalation is just the White House trying to instill fear and uncertainty in Tehran.
There's also speculation that Washington could be moving towards direct intervention in the Saudi-Yemen conflict, after the Houthis have been attacking key Saudi Aramco oil sites. Also, Riyadh has just come under attack for the first time of the war.
In the background is a new State Department warning to Americans to avoid all travel to the Middle East. A statement indicated that the Iran war could quickly worsen.
“This military conflict has the potential to escalate rapidly. Americans outside the Middle East should seriously reconsider travel to and through the region,” the State Department said late Saturday on X. It said that Americans currently in the region should "exercise heightened vigilance and be aware of potential flight cancellations, airspace closures, and travel disruptions."
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