War

President Trump is deploying nuclear bombers to the North Korean border amid fears that an all-out war will break out between the U.S. and North Korea soon. Trump has ordered military chiefs to send B-1 and B-52 bombers, equipped with nuclear weapons, to the Korean peninsula, following Kim Jong-un’s series of missile launches recently. It is thought that Pyongyang’s most recent launch of four ballistic missiles into the seas near Japan this week prompted the decision to take military action against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

As tensions between the U.S. and Iran continue to mount, the semi-official news agency Tasnim is reporting that Iran's Revolutionary Guard has successfully conducted yet another ballistic missile test, this time from a navy vessel.  Called the Hormuz 2, these latest missiles are designed to destroy moving targets at sea at ranges up to 300 km (180 miles).

Reports on the latest test quotes Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the IRGC's Aerospace Force, who confirmed that "the naval ballistic missile called Hormuz 2 successfully destroyed a target which was 250 km away."

While the Trump administration waits to decide if it will send 1,000 troops to Kuwait to fight ISIS, overnight the Washington Post reported that the US has sent several hundred Marines to Syria to support an allied local force aiming to capture the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa. Defence officials said they would establish an outpost from which they could fire artillery at IS positions some 32km (20 miles) away. US special forces are already on the ground, "advising" the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance according to the BBC.

President Trump had made defeating ISIS one of the key goals of his presidency, and if Reuters' sources are to be believed, the administration is weighing a deployment of up to 1,000 American soldiers to Kuwait to serve as a reserve force in the fight against Islamic State as U.S.-backed fighters accelerate the offensive in Syria and Iraq. The Pentagon has so far declined to comment on the leak.