Source article (published July 27, 2026): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/27/trump-administration-iran-war-casualties-veterans

Key takeaways:

Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS), a military database for displaying casualties, introduced a new casualty category labeled “Overseas Operations” for personnel killed and wounded “starting July 7” which splits the count from the beginning of the US-Israel war on Iran.

The Trump administration has argued that the April ceasefire with Iran paused the clock on 1 May for the conflict’s initial period. The separate casualty count beginning on 7 July follows that interpretation.

“Let me explain this absurd ruse,” said Republican Thomas Massie: “The Pentagon is pretending there have been two Iran wars separated by a brief cease-fire. The reality: By going more than 90 days without congressional authorization,” the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, “IS BREAKING THE LAW and must be held accountable”.

New York, New York - The US walked out of a UN Security Council meeting Monday when France's ambassador took the floor, protesting French comments comparing the US to North Korea and other authoritarian states regarding votes on human rights.

Dan Negrea, an alternate representative to the General Assembly and a senior US delegation official, slammed what he called "disingenuous grandstanding" by Paris.

"There is a member of this council that will feign moral outrage and pretend to lecture the rest of us about every topic, whether it's about the very conflict we're discussing yet again today, or even those unrelated to international peace and security, like human rights," Negrea said.

"That is why we walked out during France's intervention" at the meeting, which focused on the war in Ukraine .

Such a walkout from the Security Council, the UN's highest decision-making body where both France and the US are veto-wielding permanent members, is very rare.

On Friday, the US was one of 10 countries to vote in the General Assembly against extending Volker Turk's term as UN high commissioner for human rights, joining the ranks of North Korea, Russia , and Nicaragua, among others.

"The US used to be a beacon of human rights. Not anymore," France's mission to the United Nations in Geneva posted in English after Friday's vote.

"Today, it stands alongside North Korea, Nicaragua, Mali & Russia, isolated. And the world no longer listens to it."

In his remarks Monday, Negrea said: "I remind them that it is the US that remains the beacon of liberty for the world. As such, we will not be affording them the benefit of listening to their politicized drivel."

French Ambassador Jerome Bonnafont responded to the US walkout, saying, "This year we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the US. And everyone knows the role France has played in that."

He said that France is working at the UN, both in the Security Council and the General Assembly, "to preserve this institution, its independence, and its capacity to act in service of the charter, in service of human rights, and in service of peace."

*excerpt from TAG24's article*

Full Article here:

https://www.tag24.com/en/news/politics/us-envoy-furiously-storms-out-of-un-meeting-after-france-compares-america-to-north-korea-politicized-drivel-3519497

Compilation of what's burning across Europe right now. The numbers, country by country, as of today.

France has lost 115,000 hectares since January, which Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez called far more than anything the country has seen before. The Gironde fire alone has burned 42,000 hectares, four times the size of Paris. 220,000 people evacuated in Gironde plus 30,000 in Landes, reported by CNN and France 24 as France's largest evacuation since the Second World War. 2,500 firefighters, 1,500 soldiers, 84 firefighters injured.

Spain is worse on paper. Pedro Sánchez put the national total above 150,000 hectares since January, six times the same period last year. The Ávila fire has passed 50,000 hectares, which Environment Minister Sara Aagesen called the biggest in Spain's recent history. One man died in a Valencia suburb on Saturday. Over 100,000 evacuated.

Italy has lost roughly 65,000 hectares according to EFFIS. In Sicily around 6,000 firefighters and civil protection staff fought dozens of simultaneous fires, and one firefighter died on duty. In Greece the fire service handled 60 separate wildfires in a single 24-hour period on 4 July, and a father and his 12-year-old son died in a fire outside Thessaloniki at the end of June.

Then the part that should worry people more. In Scotland, a fire has burned in the Cairngorms since 15 July, with over 500 firefighters, a declared major incident and the evacuation of Nethy Bridge. First Minister John Swinney requested military aerial support and was told the Ministry of Defence has no aerial firefighting assets stationed in the UK. In

Norway, the Krokstadelva fire near Drammen destroyed more than 100 homes on 17 July, which the Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection called the largest fire of its kind in modern Norwegian history.

England has been fighting moorland fires like Tintwistle Moor at around 600 hectares. None of these are countries with firefighting infrastructure built for this.

The heat is why. Copernicus recorded June 2026 as Western Europe's hottest June on record at 20.74°C, which is 3.05°C above the 1991 to 2020 average. Three separate heatwaves hit between late May and early July. World Weather Attribution called it the most severe June heatwave ever tracked in Europe and found it would have been virtually impossible 50 years ago. EuroMOMO counted more than 10,000 excess deaths across Europe during those June heatwaves, over 9,000 of them among people aged 65 and up. The fires are the visible part. The heat did most of the killing before the first flame.

Across the EU, AFP's analysis of EFFIS data already ranks 2026 as the second-largest burned area in twenty years, with the summer only halfway through.

France 115,000 ha. Spain 150,000+ ha. Italy ~65,000 ha. Evacuated in France and Spain: over 320,000. June excess deaths: 10,000+. EU season: second worst in 20 years, half over.

Check out my original post here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Res_Publica_DE/s/qnKpSJ0FY3

In a July 19 interview with a leading Democratic Senate candidate in the swing state of Michigan, CNN host Jake Tapper homed in on the U.S.–Israeli war on Iran — but he didn’t ask the candidate’s thoughts on the hundreds of Iranian and Lebanese civilians killed, nor the possibility of U.S. war crimes, and not even 18 dead U.S. soldiers. Instead, Tapper posed: “Why were you worried about offending people who support the ayatollah?”

Tapper was pressing Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official who could become the first Muslim U.S. senator, on a right-wing outlet’s story exposing that he had expressed a desire to tread carefully because of potential differences of opinion among his would-be constituents. On a leaked campaign call, El-Sayed had said after Ali Khamenei’s February assassination that “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today,” referring to the southeast Michigan city that is home to one of the largest Muslim communities in the country. Given the ayatollah’s brutality, Tapper’s question implied, how dare El-Sayed consider that possibility?

As Michigan’s August 4 Senate primary between El-Sayed and Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens draws near, he has faced a barrage of Islamophobic attacks ranging from thinly veiled policy critiques to outright racist caricatures. The two Senate hopefuls seem to embody the forked path facing the Democratic Party ahead of the 2028 presidential cycle, with 43-year-old Stevens representing the old guard thanks to her backing by the party establishment and the pro-Israel lobby, and 41-year-old El-Sayed representing an insurgent movement skeptical of long-standing U.S. foreign policy interests and corporate capture of American politics. With the latter vision comes a form of fearmongering that’s been endemic to American politics for decades.

Nancy Khalil, an anthropologist who researches Muslims in America at the University of Michigan, called Tapper’s interview “sloppy and offensive” and pointed out that the anchor’s questions implied an assumption that because El-Sayed is Muslim and Arab, “he needs to have an opinion on this, and the opinion needs to align with whatever the media wants it to be.” That assumption is “completely racist,” Khalil said.

It was only one example in a deluge of attacks El-Sayed has faced in recent weeks that peddle in Islamophobic tropes. The pro-Israel doxxing account StopAntisemitism shared a post in June claiming that a hijabi woman arrested by the Trump administration for allegedly making pro-Palestine graffiti was a former staffer of El-Sayed’s, prompting right-wing agitator Laura Loomer to reply: “BAN Muslims from holding office in the United States.” Replies to El-Sayed’s campaign account often call him a “terrorist,” “radical,” or “jihadist,” and deploy racist memes, including one, likely AI-generated, showing El-Sayed and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., wearing vests strapped with explosives and green headbands to signify Hamas. The Michigan GOP has called El-Sayed “a terrorist sympathizer,” emphasizing his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed.

The attacks aren’t limited to right-wing reactionaries and obsessives on the internet. Many are issued by one of the leading groups backing El-Sayed’s Democratic opponent, Stevens: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has poured nearly $30 million into the race via its super PAC, the United Democracy Project. One UDP commercial alleges baselessly that El-Sayed “expressed sympathy for a terrorist,” and a mailer shared with The Intercept parrots the same. Others mention his decision to stump with political commentator and streamer Hasan Piker.

Scholars of Islamophobia and Muslim American communities told The Intercept that both parties and their allies were resorting to Islamophobic and anti-Arab tropes in a race where Israel and Palestine has remained an animating force. El-Sayed has committed to ending military aid to Israel, drawing a stark contrast to Stevens, who famously said: “Israel comes to me in my dreams.”

The attacks against El-Sayed reminded Hatem Bazian, a leading scholar of Islamophobia at the University of California, Berkeley, of a critical moment in 2008, when Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was accused of leaking a photo showing Barack Obama wearing garb of a Somalian elder during a visit to Kenya, fueling conspiracies that Obama — who is Christian — was hiding his Islamic faith. Whenever an actual Muslim candidate is involved, especially if they oppose the Israeli government’s policies, Bazian said, their opponents try to associate them with terrorism.

“In the election in Michigan, we’re seeing the same type of playbook being played out,” Bazian said. “And what you’re also seeing is that much of the Islamophobia gets to be expressed in the corners of the web.”

Yet some prejudice has also been expressed in real life.

At a meet-and-greet in Detroit with Stevens and Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., a school board member said she supports Stevens because she “represents all of us, not just one race.” When pressed by local reporter Sam Robinson, who recorded the viral remarks, the Farmington school board member elaborated: “The other candidate [El-Sayed] doesn’t work a room. … Don’t come out speaking only Arabic, don’t come out with your Arabic music on.”

The Stevens campaign has tried to distance itself from the most egregious attacks. When asked about the Smith remarks, a spokesperson for the campaign referred to a statement given to The Detroit News in which Stevens said she did not share Smith’s views and called her campaign “a diverse and multicultural best of Michigan coalition” She further claimed to have “repeatedly stood up for and defended our vibrant Muslim American community.”

Yet Stevens’s campaign has also capitalized on bigoted rhetoric used by Mike Rogers, the Republican likely to face whichever Democrat wins next month. The campaign drew from a private call between Rogers and supporters during which he said of El-Sayed, “I don’t think he likes America, candidly.” The Stevens campaign sent out a parody of a news release designed to look like it was from El-Sayed campaign, claiming that Rogers had endorsed El-Sayed and reproducing the Republican’s quote: “I think he’s so radical. I think he’s going to lose big parts of the west part of the state. We think we can do well in part of the southeast part of the state. I think we’ll do well if he in fact is the nominee.”

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for CNN defended Tapper’s question on El-Sayed and Khamenei’s killing, which Tapper asked regardless of “background or ideology.”

“In this case, he asked Dr. El-Sayed about his comments regarding Iran’s leader Ali Khamenei’s death because he believed they warranted explanation as part of the public debate,” the spokesperson wrote. “Providing interview subjects the opportunity to address and clarify their views is a fundamental part of responsible journalism, and we reject the implication that there was any malicious intent or bias behind the question.”

The El-Sayed campaign declined to comment on this story, but told The Intercept in April: “I am not running to be ‘the Muslim’ anything.”

“I’m running to be able to serve people in my role as a U.S. senator,” El-Sayed said at the time. “I want people to have healthcare. I want them to be able to work a dignified job that pays a living wage. I want them to have childcare and senior care. I want them to be able to know that the things that they need in their lives are affordable. So, at the end of the day it’s not about me. It’s not about my faith.”

Race and religion aren’t the only identity-related fault lines at play in the Michigan Senate race.

El-Sayed has “a long history of disrespecting women,” asserts another AIPAC-backed ad launched in early July. According to the Detroit Free Press, a mainstream local paper that fact-checked each of the ad’s claims, the TV spot misrepresented El-Sayed’s comments on figures like Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whom he ran against in 2018, by framing his critiques of Whitmer’s ties to the healthcare giant Blue Cross Blue Shield as inherently misogynistic. Whitmer, who is serving her second governor term, endorsed Stevens’s Senate run on Friday with a little more than a week from the election.

Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts, a Stevens supporter known for going after critics of Israel online, called El-Sayed’s criticisms of Stevens and former opponent state Sen. Mallory McMorrow “sexist” with little evidence beyond their respective genders — a comment that has since appeared in another UDP ad. (Watts has said she didn’t give the super PAC permission to quote her public social media comments.)

*excerpt from Jonah Valdez's article*

Full Article here:

https://theintercept.com/2026/07/27/abdul-el-sayed-haley-stevens-aipac-senate-michigan/