☢️ Iran’s New Supreme Leader Vows to “Guard” Nuclear and Missile Arsenal — Ceasefire at Risk

Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei — who has not been seen publicly since his inauguration in March following the assassination of his father — issued a written statement Thursday declaring that Iran will “guard” its nuclear and missile technologies as a national asset and that “foreign actors have no place” in the Persian Gulf except “the depths of its waters,” drawing a hard line against US demands that Iran dismantle both programs as part of any peace deal, according to The Washington Post and CNN.

The statement comes as gas prices hit $4.30 a gallon nationally — up 44% since the war began — and oil futures briefly topped $125 a barrel overnight, as Trump said Iran simply has to “cry uncle” and the US mulls an extended naval blockade while the open-ended ceasefire holds but frays. An Iranian military commander separately threatened “swift” action against US forces, while Iran marked Persian Gulf Day celebrating its historical expulsion of Portuguese troops from the Strait of Hormuz — the very waterway at the center of the current standoff, ABC7 reported.

Washington’s Proclamation of Neutrality in 1793 — which we noted just a week ago on this day in 1793 — taught that the hardest act of statesmanship is knowing when not to fight. The Founders also understood that when adversaries publicly declare what they will never surrender, it is wise to believe them — and to plan accordingly, rather than assume the next round of talks will produce what the last twelve did not.

📺 Trump Demands ABC Fire Kimmel — FCC Threatens Licenses, Disney Won’t Budge

President Trump posted Thursday morning that ABC had “better” fire Jimmy Kimmel “soon” over a joke Kimmel made calling Melania Trump an “expectant widow” — a comment that landed days after the Correspondents’ Dinner shooting attempt — as Disney, which owns ABC, has quietly held firm despite the Trump-aligned FCC ordering the company into an early license renewal process for its eight ABC station affiliates in what outside observers widely read as government retaliation, according to CNN.

Kimmel is under contract through next year, Disney has declined to comment, and legal experts say the company will almost certainly prevail in any license challenge. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression drew a clear constitutional line: “Melania Trump has every right to say Jimmy Kimmel’s joke was vile. The First Amendment problem starts when the White House pressures ABC to punish a comedian for protected speech. That’s jawboning,” said FIRE president Greg Lukianoff, Fox News reported.

The Founders who wrote the First Amendment did so because they had lived under a government that punished unflattering speech about its leaders. The amendment protects speech that is offensive, unfair, and mean-spirited — because the alternative is a government deciding what is acceptable to say about itself. Jimmy Kimmel’s joke was tasteless. Using the FCC as a weapon to silence it would be something far worse.

❤️ Breakthrough: Nonsurgical Heart Valve Replacement Now Works in 98% of Cases

A landmark study published Thursday in JAMA by Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine — based on more than 1,000 patients at 82 medical centers across the United States — found that transcatheter tricuspid valve replacement, a nonsurgical procedure approved by the FDA in February 2024, successfully implanted the valve in 98.4% of patients and reduced severe tricuspid regurgitation to mild or negligible levels in 97.7% of patients at 30 days, with a stroke rate of just 0.2%, according to Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine.

Tricuspid regurgitation — in which the heart’s right-side valve leaks blood backwards — is the most common valvular heart disease in adults 65 and older and was previously undertreated because open-heart surgery carried too high a risk for elderly patients. Senior author Dr. Charles Davidson called the findings “a validation that this technology is as effective as what was reported in the clinical trial” and said the results demonstrated “scalability to a broad population,” JAMA reported.

American medical innovation — driven by private investment, competitive research universities, and a regulatory framework that allows new technologies to reach patients — has consistently produced breakthroughs that no government-run system ever could. This is what American free enterprise looks like when it is pointed at human suffering rather than bureaucratic process. At 98.4% success in a population too fragile for open-heart surgery, that is a number worth celebrating.

⚖️ SCOTUS Guts Voting Rights Act — Florida Immediately Redraws Maps to Flip 4 House Seats

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued a landmark ruling Wednesday in Louisiana v. Callais — tossing out Louisiana’s congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander and fundamentally reinterpreting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to require proof of intentional racial discrimination rather than merely discriminatory effect — a decision that Trump called “a big win” and that Senate Republican leader Tom Cotton said “will certainly apply to Missouri,” while the Republican-controlled Florida House passed an aggressively redrawn congressional map just one hour after the ruling dropped, targeting four Democratic incumbents including Kathy Castor, Darren Soto, Jared Moskowitz, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, according to The Hill and SCOTUSblog.

Democrats warn the ruling could eliminate up to 19 Democratic-leaning House seats nationally and spark the largest-ever drop in Black congressional representation — potentially below the post-Reconstruction record low set in 1877 — with Chuck Schumer declaring it “defies the spirit of the American Civil Rights Movement,” while Republicans note that the court’s ruling simply requires that racial classifications in redistricting meet the same constitutional standard as any other use of race by government: strict scrutiny, according to NPR and Democracy Docket.

The Founders who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause did so to ensure that the law treats every citizen the same, regardless of race. Whether using race to draw district lines to help Black voters or to hurt them, the constitutional principle is the same: government classifications by race demand the highest justification. The Court has now said that principle applies consistently — and the political fallout will reshape the 2026 midterm map in ways that are still being calculated.

🇬🇧 UK Local Election Day — Reform UK Poised for Historic Gains as Labour Faces Reckoning

Voters across England head to the polls Thursday for local elections covering county councils, district councils, and mayoral contests — with Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s populist insurgency now polling consistently above 27% nationally, widely expected to seize control of county councils in Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk for the first time ever, while Labour faces projections of losing 500-600 council seats as its dramatic post-landslide collapse continues, according to The Guardian and BBC.

The elections, described by analysts as the most consequential local vote in a generation, will test whether Farage can convert record polling into actual governing power at the council level — and whether the Conservative Party, decimated in 2024, can mount any recovery — as Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces simultaneous challenges from Reform in working-class areas, the Liberal Democrats in wealthy commuter suburbs, Greens in cities, and pro-Gaza independents in heavily Muslim constituencies, Fox News reported.

The pattern playing out in Britain today is one American conservatives should recognize: a governing party that won an overwhelming mandate less than two years ago, promising transformation, now hemorrhaging support as voters conclude that the promises were bigger than the results. What is happening in Britain’s town halls tomorrow may be a preview of what happens in America’s in November.

🌍 South Africa Sets November 4 as Election Day — ANC Faces Its Toughest Local Test Since Apartheid

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced Thursday that South Africa’s 2026 Local Government Elections will be held on November 4 — the same day as America’s midterms — setting the stage for the African National Congress to face voters for the first time at the local level since losing its parliamentary majority in 2024 and entering a coalition Government of National Unity, with recent Ipsos polling showing only 38% of South Africans think their local government is doing a good job, according to South African Government News and Reuters.

508 political parties have registered to contest the elections — a record — as Ramaphosa warned mayors and premiers that the ANC’s greatest threat is the water and sanitation crisis affecting nearly every municipality, with residents of Johannesburg, Durban, and smaller towns facing routine outages and what one analyst called “water is the new load-shedding,” Daily Maverick reported.

The world’s great experiment in post-apartheid democracy has produced a generation of ANC governance that gave South Africans freedom but not always functioning water. The Founders of this republic understood that the test of any government is not its founding documents but its daily performance — and that a citizenry which lacks clean water will eventually find politicians who promise to deliver it, from wherever on the political spectrum they come.