Israeli officials said an airstrike on Sept. 20 killed the operations commander of the Hezbollah terrorist group and a dozen of its top leaders as they met in a bunker beneath a residential building outside Beirut, Lebanon.

Hezbollah had responded overnight, as it promised it would, to this week’s deadly exploding pager and radio attacks, launching nearly 150 rockets at Israel. Israeli officials have not directly commented on the pager and radio attacks and have not said whether Israel’s military was involved.

Aqil was Hezbollah’s operations commander, head of its elite Radwan Forces, in line to become second-in-command to leader Hassan Nasrallah, and long wanted by the United States for his directing the 1983 U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks bombings in Beirut. The IDF said Aqil was planning Hezbollah’s version of Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, in which northern Israeli communities would be infiltrated and their residents murdered. Read the full story here›

The Georgia Election Board has approved a rule requiring election workers to hand count ballots in the November election and confirm that the numbers match machine counts before the vote can be certified. The rule, which was first proposed in August, passed in a 3–2 vote on the morning of Sept. 20, making Georgia the only state in the union to adopt such a requirement as part of its standard vote-counting.

The new hand-count regulation was, at the time of reporting, the first of 11 that the board was set to vote on Friday. The others include a proposal that absentee ballots be visually distinct from other types of ballots, and another that requires poll workers to record the number of ballots cast from in-person scanners and reconcile those numbers to ensure accurate reporting of votes.

Advocates have framed the proposed rules as common-sense measures to bolster election security. Supporters of the hand-count rule, specifically, have argued it would help increase public trust in the voting process. Critics, such as the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials (GAVREO), say the proposed rules are, on the whole, impractical, poorly written, and inefficient in achieving their intended goals. Read the full story here›

Secret Service agents who were involved in securing the July 13 rally site where former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt face disciplinary action, Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe said Friday. Rowe did not go into details about the staff or possible punishments that could be meted out. He said, however, that he hasn’t “asked for anybody to retire,” adding that reports saying otherwise “are false.”

“While some members of the advance team were very diligent, there was complacency on the part of others that led to a breach of security protocols,” he said.

Rowe’s statements followed the Secret Service’s release of a report on Friday that details a series of “communications deficiencies” before the shooting by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by a Secret Service counter-sniper after firing eight rounds in Trump’s direction from the roof of a building less than 150 yards. One of the bullets pierced Trump’s ear. Read the full story here›

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