Good evening. Here’s the latest at the end of Friday.
An Iran-backed commander is accused of plotting U.S. attacksA commander of an Iranian-backed militia was arrested and charged with plotting to attack Jewish sites in the U.S., including a synagogue in New York. Federal prosecutors also accused the man of planning at least 20 attacks in Europe and Canada as part of a broader campaign of retaliation by Iran since the war began less than three months ago. The commander, Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, was recently detained in Turkey and handed over to American authorities, according to his lawyer. U.S. officials said he is a leader of Kataib Hezbollah, a powerful Iranian proxy militia. Read the criminal complaint here. Kataib Hezbollah was formed after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and has helped Tehran project power across the region, including through attacks on American forces and diplomatic targets. But its reach beyond the Middle East is less clear, and it does not have a well-documented record of global operations. For more:
Louisiana’s senior senator is fighting for his political futureAs Trump flew back from Beijing this morning, he posted a social-media message about tomorrow’s Senate primary in Louisiana: “Vote for Julia Letlow.” His intervention could unseat Bill Cassidy, a Republican who has represented the state in Washington since 2009. Polls suggest that Cassidy might not even qualify for the runoff. The election will serve as a high-profile test of Trump’s grip on his party. He has demanded that his followers vote out Cassidy, who voted to convict the president in his 2021 impeachment trial and who drew the ire of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement over his strong advocacy for vaccines. In other politics news:
The White House increases the pressure on CubaThe U.S. has cut off Cuba’s fuel supply, ramped up surveillance flights and demanded that the country stop allowing Russia and China to operate intelligence posts there. Now, my colleagues reported, American prosecutors are working on an indictment of Raúl Castro, the 94-year old former president. The warning could not be clearer. The Trump administration used a federal indictment as the pretext for arresting the leader of Venezuela. And people briefed on the administration’s thinking say senior officials at least want the option of employing the Venezuela playbook again. In other Trump administration news:
Archaeologists find a mummy buried with the ‘Iliad’A passage from Book 2 of Homer’s “Iliad” was discovered on a papyrus fragment inside an Egyptian tomb with a 2,000-year-old mummy. The finding suggested that Roman-era Egyptians viewed the Greek literary text as a potential guide to a more comfortable afterlife. One historian suggested that carrying the “Iliad” was a deliberate strategy to secure entry into the Greek underworld, effectively sidestepping the torturous trials of Egyptian mythology. More top newsChina Summit
Other Big Stories
A Eurovision winner will be crowned tomorrowEvery year, tens of millions of people tune in for the finale of the Eurovision Song Contest, making it the world’s most watched singing competition. This year’s contest, which has been overshadowed a bit by politics, will announce a winner tomorrow. (Here’s how to watch.) My colleague Alex Marshall said that Finland is the favorite, but that Italy’s throwback entry and Greece’s performance, which involves a man dressed as a cat, are also worth watching.
Microdramas are growing fast in HollywoodThey are inexpensive to film and easy to watch, with each vertically-shot episode lasting just a minute or so. Now, people on their phones are spending more time watching microdramas than they are streaming Netflix or Disney+. Microdrama productions have also become a lifeline for Hollywood workers as major studios scale back production. Our video team went behind the scenes of a recent production.
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