President Donald Trump on Friday labeled the Iran war "small potatoes," the latest attempt to minimize a six-month conflict that caused a spike in gas prices and led to the deaths of 18 American service-members.
"A lot of people don't call it a war. I call it a military conflict because it's small potatoes for us. It's not a big thing," he said in the Oval Office.
A day earlier, Vice President JD Vance said the conflict shouldn't be termed a "war" since major combat operations ended months ago.
Trump similarly cast the conflict as periodic and low-grade, despite routine rounds of back-and-forth strikes.
"I would say that it's intermittent. You know, we do intermittent strikes," Trump said, adding: "There's a lot of truth that we're not fighting right now. There's no fighting."

#Trump #small

Ukraine has built a drone turret using two Kalashnikov rifles as its main attack option.
They're a cheap platform that the country's defense tech incubator, Brave1, says it can scale quickly.
It's already been used in combat, with more than 5 units testing it operationally, Brave1 said.
A Ukrainian manufacturer developed a roving turret with two Kalashnikov ****** ault rifles for its main armament, as Kyiv aims to build more cheap ground drones to fill dangerous infantry roles.
The uncrewed ground vehicle was recently used in combat by the Security Service of Ukraine's Alpha Group special forces to destroy a Russian ambush drone, said the country's defense tech incubator, Brave1, on Thursday.

#drone #rifles #main

HANOI, Aug 28 (Reuters) - Vietnam said on Friday it strongly opposed all foreign activities in the Paracels archipelago in ‌the disputed South China Sea, following a report earlier this ‌week of new Chinese construction on an islet there.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that new installations had been sighted on Yagong Island, called Ba Ba Island by Vietnam, citing satellite imagery, with security **** ysts saying it could be the start of an early-warning radar facility.
"Vietnam resolutely opposes this, ‌has made serious representations ⁠and affirmed its position on the matter, and demands an immediate end to such activities and that ⁠they not be repeated," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Pham Thu Hang told Reuters in an emailed statement.
China has occupied the Paracel Islands since 1974, when it seized them from the navy of the former South ‌Vietnam. Vietnam, which claims the entire grouping as its own, has moved in recent years to expand its own network of bases in the Spratlys, which lie further south.
The Spratlys and nearby waters are also claimed, fully or in part, by Vietnam, the Philippines, ‌Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei.

#activities

Aug 24 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday lifted a judicial decision blocking President Donald Trump's administration from implementing his executive order to restrict the use of mail-in ballots ahead of the November midterm elections that ‌will decide control of Congress - though another remains.
The justices granted a Justice Department emergency request to put on hold ‌an injunction that Boston-based U.S. Judge Indira Talwani's imposed in June preventing the Republican president from proceeding with his directive in a coalition of 23 mostly Democratic-governed states and Washington, D.C. that had sued to stop it.
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. The three liberal justices dissented from the decision.
The Supreme Court's action leaves open the door to the states suing again in the coming months as the midterm contest approaches.
Trump's executive order, issued in March, directed the Department of Homeland Security to compile and transmit to the states a list of U.S. citizens eligible ‌to vote in each state, and the ⁠Justice Department to prioritize investigating and prosecuting state and local election officials who issue ballots to people deemed "not eligible" to vote in federal elections.

#decision

By Yuliia Dysa and Daniel Flynn
KYIV, Aug 13 (Reuters) - Ukraine has sent Russia an offer suggesting they both halt attacks on civilian targets in the Black Sea, a source said, ‌after mounting strikes on vessels and ports there raised fears over global food supplies.
The offer ‌to suspend attacks was transmitted by Kyiv via a third party, and Ukraine was still waiting for a response, the source who is familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Both Russia and Ukraine, major players in the world agriculture market, have accused each other of intensified attacks on vessels used for exports.
EU WHEAT PARES GAINS AFTER REPORT

#Russia #source

Here is the paradox at the center of Broadway economics: the production that just broke the box-office record for a filmed stage musical was not built by anyone with the authority to greenlight it. It was built over 19 years by a Vermont folk singer who kept handing control to other people.
On the last weekend of July, the live capture of Hadestown opened on fewer than 2,000 screens. It took in $10.2 million, the largest opening ever recorded for a filmed Broadway musical, ahead of Hamilton. The distributor had booked it as a five-day event. Within 72 hours it announced an indefinite run. Its strongest per-screen results came from Huntsville, Salt Lake City, Eugene, and Boise: markets with no Broadway house at all.
I have spent a career focused on how the screen reshapes commerce—as President and CEO of The Museum of Television & Radio (now The Paley Center for Media), as Harvard Law School's inaugural Visiting Professor of Entertainment and Media Law, and as a management consultant on entertainment and media industry strategies. What Anaïs Mitchell built with Hadestown is the clearest working refutation I have seen of the instinct that destroys founder-led ventures in various market sectors.
The operational reality is unforgiving. A modern Broadway musical is a highly capitalized joint venture requiring upwards of $15 million against a weekly burn rate that can approach $700,000. The people who put up that money are not patrons of the arts. They are investors, and the directors, general managers, and marketing leads they hire are the operators who convert a creative vision into a going concern. Broadway posted the highest-grossing season in its history in 2025–2026, roughly $1.9 billion, and only six new musicals opened all year. More money is chasing fewer bets.
The industry's default bet is a famous name. Elton John's Tammy Faye and the Avett Brothers' Swept Away both took that bet recently, and both closed within weeks of opening. Neither was a failure of talent. Both were failures of organizational architecture. The creative founders believed that dominance in one market guaranteed fit in another, and they overruled the operators who knew better.

#hadestown #people

BEIRUT (AP) — Kozo Okamoto, the ***** anese militant who took part in a deadly attack on Tel Aviv's airport more than five decades ago, died Thursday in Beirut, the Palestinian group that had been protecting him said. He was 78.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a faction that is the second-largest group in the Palestine Liberation Organization, said that Okamoto had been ill for a long time.
Okamoto, who made rare public appearances since he settled in Lebanon after being released from Israel, was known within the PFLP as Ahmad al-Yabani, or Ahmad the ***** anese.
The PFLP said in its statement that Okamoto's journey was "marked by immense sacrifices spanning for decades on the battlefields of struggle in support of the Palestinian cause." The Palestinian group added that Okamoto "never compromised nor faltered but remained steadfast to his principles."
Okamoto had served 12 years in an Israeli lockup for a May 30, 1972 attack on the international airport outside Tel Aviv that was thought to be carried out by members of the ***** anese Red Army guerrilla group in a joint operation with the PFLP.

#okamoto #beirut

NEW YORK (AP) — A former Democratic commissioner of one of the country's top civil rights agencies dropped a lawsuit Monday challenging her dismissal by President Donald Trump, citing a recent Supreme Court ruling that dramatically enhanced the president's power over independent agencies.
Trump's unprecedented dismissal of Jocelyn Samuels and another Democrat from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cleared the way for his shake-up of civil rights enforcement, which has prioritized rooting out diversity and inclusion practices, weakening protections for transgender workers and championing discrimination claims against white workers and U.S.-born workers.
The EEOC moved forward with aspects of that plan Monday, releasing a regulatory agenda that includes proposals to end its annual collection of workplace demographic data and rescind longstanding guidance warning it may be discriminatory to require workers to exclusively use English on the job, among other changes.
One of Trump's first acts as president was demolishing the Democratic majority on the normally five-member EEOC, sweeping away what would have been a major obstacle to his civil rights agenda. His dismissal of Samuels and Charlotte Burrows before the end of their five-year terms was unprecedented in the history of the EEOC, which was created by Congress through the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The EEOC commission now consists of two Republicans and one Democrat. Trump has yet to nominate candidates to fill two open seats on the commission.

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (AP) — A referendum held in Slovakia on Saturday to decide whether to cancel lifelong payments for populist Prime Minister Robert Fico and other leaders after their terms in office expire failed to produce a valid result due to low turnout.
With the votes from 99.5% of all polling stations counted by the Slovak Statistics Office, turnout was 16.1%, far less than the required 50%.
The Slovaks were also voting on whether to reopen the office of the special prosecutor and the National Criminal Agency, which both dealt with major crime and corruption.
The referendum followed a petition organized by the Democrats, a non-parliamentary pro-Western opposition party, and was signed by more than 350,000 citizens in the nation of 5.4 million, the threshold required by law.
Only one of the 10 referendums in Slovakia's history — the 2003 vote on the country's European Union membership — was successful. Others failed due to low turnout.

SACRAMENTO, California — Social media giant Meta is pushing California state lawmakers to shield it from pending legislation that would increase legal penalties in child-harm cases, according to two people familiar with the effort.
The people, granted anonymity to discuss private negotiations, told POLITICO that lobbyists for Meta have approached Senate Judiciary Chair and Santa Ana Democrat Tom Umberg with draft amendments that would create a pathway for social media companies to gain an exemption from the legislation, AB 2.
The bill from ****** emblymember Josh Lowenthal, a Long Beach Democrat, threatens fines of up to $1 million per child for platforms found liable for harming kids through negligent product design. It's set for a Tuesday hearing in Umberg's committee.
Meta's plea comes as it faces hundreds of lawsuits accusing the company of failing to protect kids' safety on its platforms. The proposal is the latest example of how the company is maneuvering politically amid pending product safety lawsuits and surging global efforts to slap strict kids' safety guardrails on social media platforms.
The draft amendments would exempt social media platforms from increased penalties in child harm cases if the companies activate a suite of default child safety settings. Those settings include disabling autoplay, restricting geolocation data sharing, silencing nighttime notifications, preventing kids from receiving direct messages from unknown adults, shielding minors' profiles from public view and preventing explicit material from being shown to kids.