Netanyahu touts ‘growing signs’ Iran strikes killed the Ayatollah
Source: Washington Examiner · Bias: Center Right
Summary
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday suggested there are “growing signs” the overnight U.S.-Israel strikes against Iran killed the country’s supreme ruler. There are growing signs that Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “is gone,” Netanyahu said during a press conference addressing the strikes. There has not yet been official confirmation that Khamenei was killed. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, […]
Netanyahu touts ‘growing signs’ Iran strikes killed the Ayatollah
Center Right
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday suggested there are “growing signs” the overnight U.S.-Israel strikes against Iran killed the country’s supreme ruler. There are growing signs that Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “is gone,” Netanyahu said during a press conference addressing the strikes. There has not yet been official confirmation that Khamenei was killed. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, […]
Federal officials described President Donald Trump's July 4 celebration as "safe" and "well-prepared" just hours after a record heat wave forced organizers to shut down the Great American State Fair and paramedics rushed to aid attendees, several of whom were reportedly hospitalized.In a joint statement Friday, Freedom 250, the U.S. Park Police, the National Park Service, the Secret Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency said they had coordinated to expand cooling resources, water stations and medical support for the "Salute to America" event."We are proud to welcome the public to a safe, well-prepared, and truly memorable celebration of America's 250th birthday," the statement read.The reassurance arrived alongside a quiet concession. Organizers pushed back public entry to the Washington Monument grounds from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. "to reduce prolonged exposure to heat," cutting four hours off the window guests can spend on-site.Trump's slot was left untouched, however. The president is still scheduled to deliver remarks at 9:45 p.m., followed by a 10:30 p.m. fireworks display his task force has billed as the largest in history.The statement capped a troubled stretch for the 16-day event. The fair was forced to close for hours Friday as the capital baked under an extreme heat warning, with the heat index projected as high as 113 degrees. One attendee earlier dunked herself in a baptismal pool to escape the heat, and reporters described a largely deserted fairground throughout the week.Washington was forecast to be hotter than 99 percent of the planet on Friday, according to a Washington Post meteorologist.
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Resistance is mounting across the United States against the increasing use of surveillance tech company Flock Safety’s cameras, with a growing number of cities canceling contracts as the artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers are quietly being installed in thousands of locations nationwide.State and local police departments first used the Atlanta-based company’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems for standard law enforcement purposes, but they are now being employed for a much broader range of uses, including immigration-related searches and other actions supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Trump administration’s deadly anti-immigrant crackdown.“We have cameras that are used for everything from illegal dumping to drug houses to hotels that are just big problems,” Flock Safety engineer Kevin Cox told prospective customers during a demonstration of the company’s Condor Camera, according to a Thursday report in The Washington Times.“There are endless, endless uses for what we can do with these things,” Cox added.Those uses include spying on constitutionally protected protest activity and enforcing abortion bans by tracking pregnant people’s travel across states—even ones in which the medical procedure is legal.The ACLU—which recently launched a “Get the Flock Out” campaign to “fight creepy ALPR cameras”—says there are currently between 80,000 and 100,000 Flock devices installed nationwide that conduct more than 20 billion scans per month. More than 5,000 law enforcement agencies use the cameras, and some of them keep their locations a secret.“Flock’s ALPR cameras aren’t like your normal traffic cameras,” the ACLU explained. “This surveillance technology records and tracks every car that comes into view, and then an AI algorithm catalogs the make, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and even scratches. This personal information is then uploaded into a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search—with few regulations or oversight on how they use what they find.”The backlash against creeping state surveillance has even transcended the partisan divide.“I think our country is in a kind of uniquely anti-surveillance environment right now, which is to say that, in a time where it seems there is nothing that is not partisan, opposition to government surveillance is nonpartisan,” ACLU privacy and surveillance attorney Chad Marlow told The Washington Times on Thursday.There is growing action—both legal and otherwise—to end the use of ALPRs across the country.According to the public information project Ban Flock Cameras, 82 Flock contracts were terminated across 28 states between August 2021 and May 2026, with 39 of those cancellations occurring in the first five months of 2026 alone.Even Amazon-owned Ring announced earlier this year that it would stop doing business with Flock Safety.Susie O’Hara, a member of Santa Cruz, California’s nominally nonpartisan City Council, told WBUR earlier this year that she grew increasingly concerned about local use of eight Flock cameras last year after learning that police were sharing data gleaned from the cameras with the company’s national network without city officials’ knowledge, a violation of state laws banning the practice.O’Hara became increasingly convinced that Santa Cruz should cancel its Flock contract after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good, a US citizen, in Minneapolis in January.“I have goose bumps on my arms thinking about the absolute chaos that was happening in Minneapolis,” she said. “And just the absolute insanity of what we were seeing... It was totally clear to me that we should in no way consciously be in this system at all—just no way.”Less than a week after Good’s killing, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to terminate the city’s Flock contract, becoming the first municipality in California to do so.“For us, the threat to our civil liberties was greater than any benefit we could get from the flawed product,” Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley told KQED at the time.Chad Kemp, who represents District 32 on the nonpartisan Dane County Board of Supervisors in Wisconsin—which in April voted to stop funding two dozen cameras leased from Flock—told The Washington Times that “there’s a public safety issue here, but there is also a privacy issue.”“There are serious concerns about individuals who can be monitored without their knowledge, or if it is even constitutional or ethical to track people without a warrant,” he added.At the national level, US Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) last year launched an investigation into the use of Flock cameras to track pregnant people across state lines for abortion care and to conduct unauthorized immigration enforcement operations.Krishnamoorthi and Sen.
Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf has warned of an Iranian response if the U.S. and Israel breach the interim peace deal, as Tehran prepares to bury its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “We strongly demand full implementation of the agreements, and if the U.S. and the Zionist regime fail to fulfill their commitments, Iran…
Iran's entire regime made a red carpet entrance to the first of three funeral ceremonies for late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — except the dead ayatollah's own son and successor.
