New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said city attorneys are reviewing whether local authorities could legally detain Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he attends the United Nations gathering in Manhattan.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said his administration is examining whether the city could attempt to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when world leaders gather for the United Nations General Assembly in September.

Mamdani acknowledged that he has not determined whether the mayor's office or the New York Police Department possesses the legal authority to detain a visiting foreign leader. He said the question is being discussed with city attorneys and that any action would depend on their interpretation of applicable law.

"Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that's what we will do," Mamdani said in an interview published Saturday by The New York Times.

The mayor argued that Netanyahu should face proceedings before the International Criminal Court, which issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli leader in 2024 over alleged conduct during the war in Gaza.

"I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in The Hague," Mamdani said. "He's a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court."

This week, Darializa Avila Chevalier was asked if there has ever been a "successful model of socialism anywhere in the world outside the United States in terms of both human rights and widespread economic justice." The member of the Democratic Socialists of America responded by citing Sweden and Norway. It is a common false claim made by socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and others. I address the claim head-on in Rage and the Republic.

DSA figures have been claiming that the socialist measures that they are pushing are proven successes in other countries. They often raise the Scandinavian myth.

The intense early summer heatwave in Europe is warming the biggest rivers and drying up their water levels, disrupting energy deliveries, power generation, and key supply chain routes.

• Europe's heatwave is disrupting energy and transport, with low river levels restricting barge traffic on the Rhine and driving up shipping costs for fuel, coal, and other goods.
• High river temperatures have forced France to cut nuclear power generation, reducing electricity output as reactors face cooling constraints.
• The extreme weather is adding to Europe's energy challenges, increasing inflationary pressures and threatening economic growth alongside ongoing disruptions from the Strait of Hormuz crisis.

The heatwaves in Europe started as early as June, with record-breaking temperatures for weeks on end in Europe's biggest economies, Germany and France.

As a result, rainfall was severely limited, and key inland transportation river routes were affected by navigation restrictions, with curbs on the freight volumes a barge can ship. This, in turn, has raised shipping costs and added additional strains to the economies at a time when the protracted Strait of Hormuz crisis is already hiking Europe's energy costs and inflation.

On top of economic and inflationary effects in Germany, the heatwave actually curbed electricity supply in France.

It is interesting that the country that goaded the United States - well, goaded Trump - into starting the war is no longer an active participant in the war. Let's you and him fight, as the saying goes.

While Israel watches.

Quietly.

One hears almost nothing about Israel all of a sudden. "Bibi" isn't to be seen. Previously, it was hard not to see him. It's almost as if this war doesn't involve Israel when, of course, it is all about Israel. There would be no war were it not for Israel. Trump has admitted this, telling the world he had to attack Iran because Israel was going to. This somehow makes sense to Trump. More finely, he hopes it makes sense to Americans.

The premise seems to be that had the United States not attacked Iran - had only Israel attacked Iran - somehow that would have resulted in harm to America. Well, that's exactly what happened. Americans have been killed and something on the order of $100 billion has been lost - so far. Americans are paying $4 for gas (again) when they had been paying about $2.80 for it just six months ago, before the war began.

Today is dot-connecting day again! Something profound is happening in American higher education, and you'd never know how profound. Over a two-month period, a series of seemingly disconnected events — the return of standardized testing, the sudden panic over grade inflation, plunging business trust, and a relentless crackdown by the Trump administration — are, in fact, tightly connected. They represent the Great Unwinding of a core ideological project that systematically dismantled academic standards to achieve woke demographic outcomes. Three days ago, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, "Janet Napolitano Helped Kill the SAT. She's Reconsidering."

If her name sounds familiar, it's probably because Janet Napolitano was Obama's DHS Secretary from 2009 to 2013, during which tenure she implemented DACA and the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA). After leaving DHS, she immediately became president of one of the nation's largest progressive public university systems — the University of California.

Back in May 2020, the UC Board of Regents — then strongly backed by Napolitano as UC's president — voted unanimously to stop using SAT and ACT scores in admissions, a move that killed the tests in one of the country's most influential university systems. Unsurprisingly, this terrible idea grew like cocaine-fueled kudzu all over the Ivory Tower.

How Oscar rules forced Nolan to cast for face, gender, & identity. To compete for Best Picture, Nolan first had to agree not to make it

Christopher Nolan may have made The Odyssey to adapt Homer, but Universal also had to make it for the Academy's confidential diversity, equity, and inclusion spreadsheet. Before the Academy will even consider a 2026 film for Best Picture, the studio must document compliance with it's identity-based standards covering race, sex, and gender identity of the actors, crew members, interns and even executives. Nolan's cast contains many excellent performers. But under the Academy's rules, excellence alone is no longer the measure, and that changes how we should read every casting announcement coming out of Hollywood, including this one.

Start with what the rules actually say, because most moviegoers have no idea they exist. Since 2024, a film cannot compete for Best Picture unless its distributor submits a confidential Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry form, known as the RAISE form, and demonstrates compliance with 2 of 4 standards. Standard A concerns what appears on screen. It can be satisfied if at least one lead or significant supporting actor submitted for Oscar consideration belongs to an Academy-approved list of racial and ethnic groups, or if at least 30% of secondary and minor actors come from at least two categories that include women, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities, or if the story itself centers on one of those groups. Standard B counts the crew, requiring qualifying department heads, or at least six technical workers from designated racial groups, or a 30% overall crew threshold. Standard C counts paid interns and apprentices from the designated groups. Standard D counts senior marketing and distribution executives by race, sex and sexual orientation. Of course, none of standards give a picture any credit for hiring white men - they are specifically excluded.

Brent crude futures jumped a little more than 4% to nearly $88 a barrel, putting the crude oil benchmark on track for its biggest weekly gain since April. That move followed an Axios report that said the Trump administration had notified Israel it was deploying additional aerial assets to the region, signaling the US military could expand strikes on Iran as soon as this weekend.

Financial Times spoke with energy traders at the end of the week who warned that slowing tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz could trigger a more severe supply crunch than the first round of the US-Iran war because emergency reserves and stockpiles around the world that cushioned the earlier disruption have been mostly depleted.

"We've burned through all of the buffers we had. Everything," said one trader. "All of that's now gone.

The reason is Poles' radically shifting views towards Ukraine since the start of their spiraling dispute sparked by Zelensky's state-level glorification of the Volhynia Genocide's OUN-UPA culprits.

Leading Polish conservative newspaper Rzeczpospolita published the results of a survey that it commissioned showing that 45.2% of Poles now want to stop arming Ukraine. The majority are from the opposition, which includes conservative and libertarian-nationalist (populist in American political parlance) groups who a separate survey recently showed could form a coalition government after fall 2027's next Sejm elections, and is almost three times larger than the 18.3% from December 2022.

Krzysztof Bosak, one of the populist Confederation's co-leaders, is quoted as reaffirming his party's consistent policy of supporting conditional aid to Ukraine that tangibly advances Polish interests. Its rapid growth in popularity per the second-mentioned survey above is likely due to the public realizing that Confederation was right all along about Ukraine amidst their country's spiraling dispute with it that was sparked by Zelensky's state-level glorification of the VolhyniaGenocide's OUN-UPA culprits.

Far-left podcaster and Democratic Socialists of America member Emma Vigeland appeared to inadvertently expose the far-left movement's ends-justify-the-means political calculus: Even a "secret Nazi" would be acceptable if the candidate advanced a national socialist agenda.

Vigeland, a former field reporter, producer, and commentator for The Young Turks and identified as a DSA member, also co-hosts The Majority Report with Sam Seder. She explained on a separate Vox podcast that she doesn't care if a progressive or socialist candidate has "Nazi" skeletons in their closet.

"I am wary of over-focusing on an individual's personal character over their platform. You know, I've said this before. I don't really care if say like Bernie Sanders or AOC go home and they're a secret Nazi, but they go out and they vote for the right things. Like we're talking about politician," the DSA member said earlier this month.

Europe's got talent, a very specific one - a politico-administrative dystopia. And France is once again leading the way.

First, a bit of recent history. In 2015, after the Maidan coup in Kiev and the beginning of the confrontation between Russia and the West, the EU created the East StratCom Task Force to fight foreign disinformation campaigns supposedly orchestrated by Russia.

This agency is a part of the European External Action Service and its goal is to fight Russian activities and promote EU ones in eastern countries such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Belarus, etc. It's not double standards, it's a basic war for influence. So far, nothing surprising.

Following suit, in 2021, the French authorities created VIGINUM, the Vigilance and Protection against Foreign Digital Interference Service, a national agency working as a watchdog for foreign interference in elections - incidentally, months before Macron's reelection after his first disastrous mandate. You know, just to be sure that 'dictatorships' and 'illiberal democracies' don't meddle in the democratic process.

That was already quite ridiculous, but France goes further.