Sunday, June 7, 2026
Iran again threatens to block Bab el-Mandeb strait
Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei's senior adviser Ali Velayati warned on Monday that Iran could block the Bab-el-Mandeb, a strait separating the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. It is a major shipping route, including for oil exports.
"The current security situation in Bab al-Mandab should not lead the enemy into miscalculation. The choice is yours: stop this foolishness or enter a balanced equation for disciplining the two straits," Velayati said, referring to Bab-el-Mandeb and the Strait of Hormuz, according to CNN.
https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Iran-threatens-to-block-Bab-el-Mandeb-strait/66455687
IDF detects missile from Yemen
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Telegram that it detected a missile launch from Yemen aimed at Israeli territory.
"Aerial defense systems are operating to intercept the threat," the IDF added in a statement.
It comes after the Israeli military said it attacked military targets in Iran.
https://breakingthenews.net/Article/IDF-detects-missile-from-Yemen/66455775
Goldman’s Moe Sees Korea Stock Rebound After ‘Scary’ Correction
South Korean stocks are expected to bounce back after a drop that triggered a circuit breaker, said Timothy Moe, Goldman Sachs chief Asia-Pacific regional equity strategist.
“In the longer run, this will prove to be a technical correction, albeit a scary one in a longer-term bull market,” Moe said in a Bloomberg TV interview, adding that “the underlying fundamentals are still very, very strong.”
Platner Has Fundraising Surge After NYT Exposé, Bad News For Nervous Democrats
Graham Platner raised $200,000 in a single day on Friday, pulling in donations from more than 5,000 supporters, averaging $40 each. For a party trying to win back the Senate, it should be cause for celebration, but for Democrats trying to quietly push him toward the exit, it is a disaster.
The money came pouring in just hours after the New York Times published a damaging account based on interviews with several of Platner's former girlfriends. The timing made everything worse. The Times story days after Platner reportedly assured Democratic allies that nothing further would surface. The report described "unsettling" behavior, including an allegation from Lyndsey Fifield, a GOP operative, who claimed Platner bragged about having a Nazi tattoo and grabbed her by the shoulders. Platner denied any physical abuse and said he was unaware of the Nazi connection to the now-covered tattoo. The only thing he would concede to is being a bad boyfriend during a period when he was using alcohol to cope after returning from combat.
In addition to the fundraising, Platner's campaign released an internal poll from Public Policy Polling this week showing him with a 4-point lead over Collins. While that may seem like a positive development, analyst Nate Silver was skeptical, noting the results are "not super reassuring given that internal polls typically exaggerate their candidate's standing by 4 points or so." A campaign releasing its own polling in the middle of a scandal is usually a sign of pressure, not confidence.
Despite Platner’s fundraising boon, he has lost some support.
“I pulled my endorsement of Graham Platner because the information that has come to light at this point is inexcusable," liberal activist Cheyenne Hunt said on CNN.
"From comments on Reddit that excuse rape to now multiple allegations from a number of women that detail behaviors that are just grotesque, from demonstrably poor judgment to physical altercations, emotional abuse, psychological abuse, it's disqualifying for someone seeking to hold higher office, and we have to do what is right, even when it is politically and electorally inconvenient."
Meanwhile, Democrats in Washington are struggling to figure out how to handle Platner’s candidacy.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) repeatedly dodged questions about whether he supports Platner, recycling the phrase "We're going to beat Susan Collins and take back the Senate" each time reporters pressed him. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) declined to endorse Platner during an awkward CNN interview.
The problem for Democrats is simple.
A candidate who can bank $200,000 in an afternoon, even amid allegations this serious, has little incentive to listen to nervous party leaders.
Platner told MSNBC's Chris Hayes on Thursday, hours after the Times story dropped, that he had not once considered stepping aside. "No, not once," he said, when Hayes asked whether he had thought about dropping out. Earlier in the same interview, Platner tried to contextualize the allegations by framing them as a byproduct of the trauma he brought home from war. "In this piece, there's a lot about my struggling, not being a good boyfriend, certainly self-medicating with alcohol, and I've been very upfront since the beginning of this campaign that that was a pretty dark period of my life after I came back from my combat service," he said.
Democrats had mapped out a straightforward path to flipping Maine, the most important state in their plan to win control of the U.S. Senate: The race was supposed to function as a referendum on Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a longtime incumbent whose brand of moderate Republicanism has always made her a target. That strategy is now in tatters. "There is dramatically higher concern about losing Maine now across the caucus than there was before the stories broke," a senior Democratic Senate aide told Politico. "Everyone realizes that without Maine, the path to taking back the Senate is impossible." The aide added, "Everyone is apoplectic."
Democratic strategist Joel Payne diagnosed the problem with uncomfortable precision. "There's no way he's going to win a referendum on himself," Payne told The Hill. "He's got to make sure that when Maine voters go to the ballot, they ask, 'Am I really comfortable with Susan Collins for another six years?'" He acknowledged the campaign had failed to keep that frame intact. "They've lost the thread on that," Payne added.
None of this appears to be moving Platner. He rallied supporters in Bar Harbor ahead of Tuesday's primary, signaling that his base remains energized even as the party apparatus quietly panics around him.
That enthusiasm is exactly what makes this such a clean trap for Democrats. They cannot force him out. They cannot openly abandon him without handing Republicans a gift. And every day he stays in the race, the question Maine voters will answer in November shifts further away from Susan Collins and closer to Graham Platner. His donors just made sure he understands he does not need the party's permission to stay. And if more damaging information comes out, and there’s every reason to believe it will, the party may be stuck with a candidate who cannot win an election critical to their strategy for flipping the Senate.
Questions Are Piling Up Fast As Pratt Suddenly Loses Second Place In LA Mayoral Vote
Update (2200ET): In a stunning shift, 9 days after the actual election day, LA City Councilmember Nithya Raman has suddenly overtaken former reality TV star Spencer Pratt for second place in the Los Angeles mayoral primary race on Sunday, the latest election results show.
With 83.2% of the expected vote in, Democratic incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, who NBC News projected on election night will advance to the November runoff, maintained her lead with 250,871 votes, or 34.68%, according to the updated vote tally released by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk on Sunday afternoon. Raman has 27.12% of the ballots counted so far, surpassing Pratt, who has 26.69%. She is now ahead of him by 3,113 votes.
Although no news outlet has projected which candidate will face Bass in November, Bass' campaign released a statement following Sunday's drop, referring to Raman as the mayor's "general election opponent."
Spencer Pratt took to social media:
This post on X summed up the general farce well...
Don't forget, "democracy" itself is at stake here...
What a fucking joke!!!* * *
Spencer Pratt entered election night with momentum, a measurable polling advantage, and what looked like a path to one of the two runoff spots in the Los Angeles mayoral race. Days later, the outcome is still unknown, and Pratt's path to the runoff is narrowing fast. Late-arriving mail-in ballots have methodically eroded his margin over Nithya Raman, and the trajectory has prompted pointed questions about how California counts its votes and who benefits when the process drags on for weeks.
California's jungle primary structure allows two candidates from the same party to advance to the general election, and it is widely believed that Democrats intentionally designed this system to ensure Republicans would be shut out of general elections. If Raman overtakes Pratt, the November ballot will feature two Democrats, freezing out the candidate who ran as the race's most prominent outsider voice on crime and homelessness in a city that has become a symbol of both.
As of the latest available count, Pratt's lead over Raman sits at just over 7,000 votes, a margin of under one percent, with roughly 22 percent of ballots still waiting to be counted. Pre-election polls had Pratt leading Raman by three to four points, and the expectation was that he would advance to the November runoff.
The gap between those projections and the current count grows harder to square with each new ballot drop. In the most recent batch, Raman pulled approximately 40 percent of the vote, compared with Pratt's 18 percent. Even Democratic incumbent Karen Bass, the race's front-runner, captured only 33 percent of that same drop. The remaining candidates split what was left.
The slow-rolling count and the bizarre trend of Raman getting the lead over all candidates in the mail-in vote have drawn national attention.
And former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), is blaming Gov. Gavin Newsom. "The question to the rest of the world is what happened to California elections? Well, I'll tell you, it's Gavin Newsom," McCarthy said on Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures. "When Gavin Newsom was elected governor of California, you knew who was elected in a day to two days. Now it takes more than weeks, almost a month."
He continued, "Gavin changed a number of election laws in which you want to see is what did he do and why did he cause it?" He went further on the structural shifts that preceded the current chaos. "We had cut off voter registration 30 days before the election. That helps the registrars to know who's going to vote and the candidates. Now we have same day voter, and you don't have to show ID. Gavin changed the rules where he mails ballots to everyone. So he took away the choice to Californians to vote in person or to vote absentee. Everybody gets mailed a ballot. But he didn't clean up the rolls. So that raises doubt in people's minds."
That doubt has found a louder audience online. Robby Starbuck posted a breakdown on X that laid out the ballot-drop pattern in stark visual terms.
Starbuck followed that with another post on Sunday morning that demonstrates just how unlikely it is that Raman would be performing so well in the mail-in ballots.
Elon Musk entered the conversation by pointing to what he sees as the underlying mechanism. "The reason ID is banned in California (and New York) elections is to enable large-scale fraud," Musk wrote on X, replying to Starbuck's post. "When you combine no ID and mail-in voting, fraud is de facto legalized."
Voters watched Pratt finish a solid second in the polls and on election night, then saw that lead steadily shrink as waves of late-arriving ballots were added to the count. When a state with California's resources still can't produce timely, transparent results in one of the nation's most closely watched elections, skepticism is inevitable.
If Pratt ultimately loses a runoff spot, it will become yet another flashpoint in the growing national debate over whether Americans can trust how elections are conducted and counted.
Sicko dresses up as Charlie Kirk, re-enacts his assassination at event hosted by his widow
A sicko dressed as Charlie Kirk to protest an event hosted by the assassinated activist’s widow, Erika Kirk — then re-enacted his murder as crowds chanted, “He deserved to die.”
The protester was seen at the Turning Point USA conference in San Antonio, Texas, wearing a papier-mache head made to resemble the slain podcaster, with the demonstrator suddenly collapsing on the floor as if to mock Charlie’s assassination last September.
The protester pulled the stunt in front of attendees at the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit on Friday — days after someone was charged with threatening to kill Erika Kirk at such an event.
During the sick stunt, a man on a megaphone could be heard shouting at conference attendees, “You are protecting pedophiles. You are protecting Nazis.”
Social media footage also captured fellow protesters celebrating Charlie Kirk’s assassination as they shouted, “Deserved to die!”
The demonstrators then joined the rest of the protesters booing Erika Kirk, 37, who was leading Friday’s summit.
The widow, who succeeded her slain husband as CEO of Turning Point USA, also faced a heckler inside the San Antonio Marriott Rivercenter.
“Erika Kirk protects pedophiles! Erika Kirk protects pedophiles!” the woman screamed before being removed from the event, video showed.
Kirk took a moment from her speech to address the heckler, urging the woman to change her ways and find real happiness.
“It’s important to remember that happiness comes and goes — and I pray that you find it,” she replied to the heckler.
“That’s an important moment because that just shows duty to faithfulness gives life meaning, and we must pray for our enemies and those that do not feel like their life has meaning,” Kirk continued.
“And that’s a perfect example of that. A perfect example. You pray for your enemies. You pray for those that persecute you,” she added.
The summit took place through the weekend despite online threats against Kirk’s life in the days leading up to it, including a bomb threat.
Police arrested Jacob Wenske, 26, who was charged with two felony counts of making a terroristic threat, causing public fear.