Bahrain's Ministry of Interior said that sirens have sounded in the country amid attacks from Iran for thesecond dayin a row.
The ministry urged people to "remain calm and head to the nearest safe place."
Kuwait also reported drone attacks as the situation between Iran and the United States and its allies seemed to escalate again, with Washington accusing Iran of violating the ceasefire agreement by striking ships in the Strait of Hormuz and threatening to end its existence. Meanwhile, Iran accused the US of ceasefire breaches and insisted it would continue to respond "firmly" to any vessels taking routes through the strait "other than those specified by Iran."
Yay:The Supreme Courtjust embraced science and sense over hysteria and trial-lawyer greed, slapping down an entire class of lawsuits that aimed to suck hundreds of billions of dollars out of US businesses just because (as bank robber Willie Sutton once put it) “that’s where the money is.”
In the case at hand, the junk-science claim was that Roundup, the widely used weedkiller, caused a Missouri man’s cancer — so the company that makes it owed him (and his lawyers!) $1.25 million because it never put a warning to that effect on the label.
The case involved the claim that Roundup, the widely used weedkiller, caused a Missouri man’s cancer — so the company that makes it owed him (and his lawyers!) $1.25 million because it never put a warning to that effect on the label.Getty Images
The problem is, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has repeatedly tested that claim about glyphosate (the herbicide’s key ingredient) and found no such effect, and so refuses to require a warning.
By 7-2, the justices ruled that state courts can’t create their own standards for such warnings when the feds have already acted.
FIFRA (the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act) established asingle national labeling system specifically to avoid a proliferation of state requirements.
This ruling nixes thousands of similar suits against Bayer (which bought Roundup’s maker, Monsanto, in 2019), and countless more efforts to sue other companies with similar theories.
Since judgments in Roundup cases have hit the billions, the lawsuits were never going to stop until the Supremes shut the racket down.And not just Roundup cases: The ambulance-chasing bar spends big to fund studies that declare all manner of substances topossiblybe cancer-causing, claims that paid “experts” can cite to give juries an excuse to help out a sympathetic plaintiff.
The high court just dealt a huge blow to that scam, a win for companies that make things and a loss for racketeering lawyers.
The political threats aimed at Gov. Hochul by mad-dog leftists are almost enough to make you feel sorry for her. Almost.
The hitch is that Hochul has only herself to blame. She ignored the warning not to feed the alligators.
Instead, she foolishly assumed Mayor Mamdani and his ravenous crew of radicals would be satisfied when she gave them billions of taxpayer dollars for their Socialist agenda.
Chomp, chomp, but that only whetted the alligators’ appetite for more, and now the governor is on the menu.
“She knows we’re coming for her,” declared a boastful Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the city wing of the Democratic Socialists of America.
A comrade who runs the DSA political team, Osman Chaudhary, even claimed that “we have a Democratic Socialist mandate in New York City.”
Dems vs. Dems
After Tuesday’s results, he might have a point. Although turnout was abysmally low in most areas, DSA candidates were superbly organized and emerged undefeated in a select group of congressional and legislative primaries against incumbent Democrats.
With zero chance that a Republican will win a general election race in those districts, November will usher in a new wave of radicals for Congress and the state Legislature.
In effect, the political battleground is being reshaped. Instead of left vs. right, it is now increasingly a battle of left vs. far left.
In addition to Hochul, state Attorney General Letitia James was caught off guard by the success of the Mamdani acolytes.
James was cheering him on when he won the mayoralty, but was seething over Tuesday’s results. She told CNN that “Some of the candidates that he supported are individuals who do not understand the politics of New York City, the cultural differences from district to district, who have not been part of the history and the struggle of some of these districts, and are relatively new to the body politic.”
She seemingly doesn’t realize that blowing up the Democratic Party is the whole point. The Mamdani movement is not interested simply in defeating Republicans.
It aims to destroy the priorities and leaders of the Democratic Party because it views them as not sufficiently different from Republicans. The young insurgents, whom I regard as the worst generation, want government at all levels to have more power and more money so they can impose their benighted views on every nook and cranny of American life.
To hell with the private sector and individual rights, they declare themselves the sole arbiters of right and wrong.
Indoctrinated instead of educated at largely elite colleges, they are ignorant of human nature and basic economic principles. That many are also antisemites illustrates how little they understand about events that took place before they were born.
The only hope is that millions of New York voters will realize that the radicals cannot be trusted with more power. Already, working middle and professional classes have watched helplessly as Albany and City Hall raised taxes and spending beyond reasonable limits.
Yet it is never enough to satisfy the left’s rapacious appetite for more.
In recent years, violent crime and a soaring cost of living sparked an exodus of middle-income families and wealthy voters from New York.
The shrinking GOP has been marginalized, and those trends accelerated when Mamdani captured City Hall last year and raised his red flag over America’s largest city.
Shape shifter
Hochul, in her fifth year in office, has spent too much time shape-shifting her political identity. She poses as a moderate when she thinks it will help her, but it’s a ruse to fool those not paying close attention.
Her record reveals she is a tax-and-spend leftist who spews platitudes about the sky-high cost of living, but lacks the courage to do anything that would require her to take on her own party.
Indeed, the targeting of her by the Mamdani crew now is possible only because they know she is a weather vane and not guided by strong convictions. They won’t vote against her, they just want to scare her so she does their bidding.
Like most of New York’s Democratic leadership, she initially opposed Mamdani’s push for higher income and corporate taxes.
But she broke with the establishment to endorse him in the mayor’s race, and after his victory began yielding on his reckless agenda.
Although she continued to reject his demand for higher income and corporate taxes by saying it would drive even more taxpayers to Florida, she soon forked over billions of state dollars to fund his handouts.
She also pushed through the Legislature a pied-à-terre tax on second homes valued at more than $5 million, promising it will yield $500 million annually to Mamdani before she even figured out the details.
Of course, her moves were designed to help her re-election bid as much as help Mamdani deliver his red agenda.
That’s because the math of statewide elections is clear. Republicans get the majority of votes in lightly populated counties, but Democrats win by running up huge margins in the city, parts of Long Island and Westchester, along with urban areas like Buffalo.
Gov’s leverage
Hence Hochul’s help to Mamdani, and it’s working for her so far. Polls show her running far ahead of GOP nominee Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive.
A Siena poll last week found Hochul padding her lead over him to 20 points, a gain of four points since April.
In that context, the threats against her by the Mamdani crew shrink in importance. They can make her life difficult, but she knows they’re never going to vote for Blakeman.
That gives her space to move toward the middle, but don’t count on that happening. It would take more courage and conviction than she has shown.
No filmmaker better captures the spirit of America at its best than Mel Brooks. His life and work embody its can-do confidence and joyful exuberance, its promise as a melting-pot that welcomes all-comers with open arms.
Born 100 years ago this weekend, on a kitchen table in a Brooklyn tenement, just in time for the Depression and the golden age of American comedy, Melvin Kaminsky, the son of Polish and Ukrainian Jews, inherited a powerful love for life. He was raised by a single mother who worked a 10-hour shift in New York’s garment district. (His father died when he was two.) Short, scrawny, and with a nose that someone once compared to “a small mudslide”, Brooks toldPlayboy that he could hang around with older boys because “they were afraid of my tongue. I had it sharpened and I’d stick it in their eye. I read a little more than they did, so I could say, ‘Touch me not, leper!’ ‘Hey! Mel called me a leopard!’ ‘Schmuck! Leper!’ Words were my equalizer.”
That’s true of comedians in general. But it was Jewish ones who perfected the fine art of using wit — which Aristotle defined as “cultivated insolence” — as a weapon of defence. Don Rickles, Joan Rivers (born Molinsky), and Jackie Mason (Yacov Moshe Maza), also children of immigrants and contemporaries of Brooks, made their careers out of humor honed to a razor’s edge over centuries in the Diaspora. (A typical Mason joke: “Are there any Poles in the audience? No? There must be. They just don’t understand the question.”) A few years older than Rickles and Mason, Rodney Dangerfield (Jacob Cohen), “Mr I Can’t Get No Respect”, revealed the socially anxious underbelly of their aggressive routines. But Brooks, who at the age of nine told his uncle that he was headed not for the garment district but for show business, is cut from different cloth.
Brooks can be as outrageous as anyone: The Producers’ vaudeville production “Springtime for Hitler” made the film untouchable by major studios. Yet if his humour is distinctly Jewish — in Blazing Saddles, he appears as an Indian chief who speaks Yiddish — it is also as big-hearted and self-assured as the country that gave him his break. Whether it was a natural inclination to gratitude, or serving his country at the Battle of the Bulge, or rising from poverty to the silver screen by way of the Borscht Belt, Brooks came to love America, and to reflect that love in his art.
‘Springtime for Hitler.’ (Screen Archives/Getty)
Consider Blazing Saddles. Nothing captures the American belief in gritty individualism, justice, and a fair deal for the little guy more than the Western, where the white hats give the black hats what’s coming before they ride off into the sunset. Brooks, whose writing team included the legendary comedian Richard Pryor, turns that idea into a piece of biting social commentary — one that condemns present-day racism while offering a hopeful vision of Americans’ capacity to live up to the nation’s ideals. The story’s protagonist is Bart, a black convict played by Cleavon Little. As the opening credits roll, the title song informs us that Bart “conquered fear and he conquered hate, / He turned dark night into day, / He made his blazing saddle / A torch to light the way.”
Blazing Saddles doesn’t exactly break the fourth wall, because there is none from the get-go. In one early scene, a boss taunts his chain gang of railway track-layers: “When you was slaves, you sang like birds. Come on! How ’bout a good ole n****r work song?” Backed by a chorus of black convicts, Bart sings a fine a capella version of the 1934 Cole Porter tune “I Get a Kick Out of You”, and then watches with amusement as the befuddled cowboy bosses — “Hold, it, hold it! What the hell is that shit?” — dance like imbeciles while singing “Camptown Races,” a minstrel song that parodies slave music, to show what they had in mind. Taggart, who oversees the whole operation, comes riding up fit to be tied: “What in the Wide Wide World of Sports is goin’ on here? I hired you people to get a little track laid, not to jump around like a bunch a’ Kansas City faggots!” It’s a brilliant (if unintended) reversal that foreshadows the plot as a whole — Taggart is as racist as anyone — in which bigots learn to respect, and even cherish, the objects of their former hatred.
Like Huckleberry Finn, an anti-racist book full of racial slurs, Blazing Saddles doesn’t have a mean bone in its body. In fact, it’s a retelling of Twain’s great American novel of friendship between outcasts, with Gene Wilder’s Jim (a washed-up alcoholic gunslinger) in the role of Huck, and Bart in the role of Jim. These two characters — nothing but a lousy pair of deuces, socially speaking — become fast friends when Bart, who’s been appointed sheriff of Rock Ridge by the state’s attorney general in a scheme to seize their land, is greeted with open hostility by the town’s all-white residents.
Mel Brooks: the Yiddish Chief. (Blazing Saddles/Warner Bros)
But the pair ultimately win over the townspeople, setting up a genuinely democratic drama. They lead a popular coalition of Rock Ridge settlers, and black, Irish, and Chinese track-layers, to outwit a motley band of common criminals, Klansmen, Nazis, Hell’s Angels, and (this being the year after the Yom Kippur War) Arabs on camels, paid for by the wealthy and powerful. In Blazing Saddles, a classic tale — the triumph of the wily underdog against organized injustice — turns out to be equally Jewish and American. In the end, the townspeople beg Bart to stay on as sheriff, but he and Jim head for greener pastures. They get into a chauffeured limousine and drive west, toward the setting sun. It’s a story of civic amity worthy of America’s 250th, a reminder of national aspirations that are sorely in need of renewal.
“I’m a serious human being who is a humorist,” Brooks told Playboy. “The greatest comedy plays against the greatest tragedy. Comedy is a red rubber ball… if you throw it against the hard wall of ultimate reality, it will bounce back and be very lively.” Brooks’ signature combination of edgy humor, deep generosity, and a tragicomic sensibility shaped by wide reading — Gogol, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy — was already apparent in his first film, The Producers, released in 1967. The protagonists are Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel), a Broadway producer, and Leo Bloom (again Gene Wilder), an accountant, whose name is a nod to the eponymous wandering Jew of Joyce’s Ulysses.
Many people think that it was in very bad taste for Brooks to make a film full of goose-stepping, Sieg-Heiling characters in Nazi uniforms little more than 20 years after the Holocaust. Maybe so: but Brooks subtly indicates that he is by no means insensitive to Jewish suffering. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom is targeted by Irish antisemites, while the Polish city of Bialystock was home to 50,000 Jews at the start of the Second World War; 800 were burned alive inside the Great Synagogue when the Germans torched it in 1941, while the rest died on the streets, in the ghetto, or at Treblinka.
These hints had to suffice, and not just because the film is a comedy: American survivors just wanted to forget the past, and began speaking publicly about their experiences in the Holocaust only in the Seventies. But in 1967, Americans were fully prepared to ridicule the Nazis; the popular television series Hogan’s Heroeshad been doing just that for two years. Little wonder “Springtime for Hitler” brilliantly mocks the Third Reich by having a spaced-out acid-head perform the role of Hitler (did Brooks know that der Führer was sustained by a steady diet of opiates, cocaine, and amphetamines?) and a black hipster that of “Little Joe” Goebbels.
Brooks’ big heart is there again on full display in The Producers. Bialystock talks Bloom into participating in his con of massively overselling shares in “Springtime for Hitler” — a play so bad that he is convinced it will fail on its first night — to little old ladies he pretends to love. The scheme backfires, and both men are sent to prison. But neither the little old ladies, who attend their trial, nor Bloom, who seems to bear in himself all the anxieties of Jewish trauma have regrets. He explains that “No one ever called me Leo before… even in kindergarten they used to call me Bloom. I never sang a song before, I mean with someone else… This man, this man — this is a wonderful man.”
Brooks in ‘Dracula: Dead And Loving It’. (Archive Photos/Getty)
It’s a plea for kindness and compassion that is all-too-rare in comedy today. That’s because the world in which Brooks came of age no longer exists. His generation was educated in the school of hard knocks: first the Depression, then the war, with its triumphs and horrors. And if the slump taught self-reliance, that existential fight against the Germans and Japanese taught patriotism and civic responsibility. To many veterans, it revealed what really matters in life: family, friendship, community; gratitude and kindness. Brooks’s distinctly American comedy — democratically capacious, high-spirited, goofy, magnanimous, tinged with Jewish pathos — perfectly expressed this sensibility.
Shortly after the bicentennial, however, Americans began losing faith in their great experiment in ordered liberty. The schools stopped teaching civics; the idea of the melting-pot ceased to form young souls, and national pride declined. No longer united by common ideals and aspirations, our sense of humor has become smaller and more brittle. And with the reassertion of a wary tribalism, Brooks’s marriage of Jewish and American comedy seems but a distant memory. In Blazing Saddles, Sioux warriors attack a wagon train in which Jim (then a boy) and his family are travelling far in the rear, a wry comment on how black Americans were sent to the back of the bus in the Jim Crow south. Brooks, the Yiddish-speaking Indian chief, lets them go, marvelling “They darker than us! Woo!” The scene, which wittily presents Jews as aboriginal Americans while emphasising their solidarity with black Americans during the civil rights movement, wouldn’t work today. Some black Americans view Jews as oppressors, and few Jewish Americans still understand Yiddish. Like other Americans, Jews have increasingly embraced progressivism, which turns people into humorless scolds — especially when jokes contain offensive language. These developments have pushed Brooksian comedy to the brink of extinction.
What remains in a world without humor is absurdity, the incongruity at the heart of any joke. But absurdity in itself, shorn of the meaning our common human endeavors and shared concerns bring to it, isn’t funny. It can’t lift us up, because it isn’t going anywhere. Brooks is always going somewhere; his comedy is beloved because its honesty about who we are, and its hopeful vision of who we might be, satisfies our craving for authentic human meaning.
Jacob Howland writes on contemporary issues from a classical perspective.
Former US envoy Dennis Ross said on Saturday the Lebanese army is not yet able to replace Hezbollah in the south or disarm it, adding that it requires US, European and Arab support.
"The framework agreement between Israel and Lebanon is about restoring Lebanese sovereignty and producing Israeli withdrawal. Can the Lebanese army replace Hezbollah in the south and disarm it. Not yet, it needs US, European, Arab support. Mobilize that support and isolate Hezbollah," he posted on X.
The framework agreement between Israel and Lebanon is about restoring Lebanese sovereignty and producing Israeli withdrawal. Can the Lebanese army replace Hezbollah in the south and disarm it. Not yet, it needs US, European, Arab support. Mobilize that support and isolate…
Iran responded to US forces with attacks on Bahrain overnight, and US and Bahraini forces jointly shot down nine Iranian one-way attack drones, according to a senior US official cited by Fox News.
MORE from Senior US official: Iran responded last night with attacks on U.S. forces in Bahrain. The US and Bahrain forces combined to shoot down 9 Iranian one way attack drones. No damage or personnel injuries, according to a senior US official. https://t.co/gb0ZO4I14C
Omani officials said they oppose any mandatory fees or tolls in the Strait of Hormuz, citing international freedom of navigation, according to CNN.
The officials said their position stands regardless of statements from Tehran or conflicting media reports. The news was supported by the US ambassador to the UN on X.
