Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and is scheduled to meet with President Trump on Tuesday.

Calls for an international boycott of Christopher Nolan’s recently released version of “The Odyssey” are based on his decision to shoot a segment of the film in the occupied nation of Western Sahara. 

Earthjustice and a coalition of environmental organizations are challenging the approval of a new PFAS fluid, Chemours’ Opteon 2P50, that would be used in data centers.

Trita Parsi writes: “Tehran believes Washington brokered the Lebanese-Israeli agreement — which contradicts the U.S.-Iran MOU by conditioning Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon on Hezbollah’s disarmament — to enable Israel to retain key positions that would weaken Hezbollah’s ability to support Iran in the next war. … What is clear is that the outlook of Iranian strategists has hardened markedly in recent weeks as they have become increasingly convinced that Trump intends to restart the war.”

In a piece for The American Prospect, David Dayen reports that a group of states sued to block the $110 billion merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. These states argue that the merger, approved last month by the federal government, will lead to lower revenues for theater owners and cable distributors and higher prices for moviegoers and cable subscribers. The combined company would consolidate Hollywood into four major studios controlling 85 percent of wide-release films. The company would have a 27 percent market share of box office revenue and a 27 percent market share of basic cable. “One out of…

“A truce that ended nearly a decade of war in Yemen has mostly held since 2022. It is being severely tested four years later, as tensions tied to the war in Iran risk spilling over.”

“During the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK ordered a ‘quarantine’ of only offensive weapons to Cuba and sought Organization of American States agreement; all other ships were allowed to continue through. When a member of the media was goading JFK into aggressive action, he responded: ‘A blockade is an act of ag[ression], war.’

“Mass demolition in the southernmost parts of Lebanon is an ongoing problem, with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz quoted as saying the country was ‘applying the Rafah Model’ on Lebanon, and that southern Lebanon would ultimately turn into Gaza, citing the mass level of destruction inflicted on the Gaza Strip in recent years.”

“What top Israeli officials — including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — are quietly backing is not a reduction in American support, but a reorganization of it: shifting billions in resources from State Department-administered foreign aid grants into general Pentagon procurement accounts, industrial partnerships, and sustainment pipelines. The shift will strip away the political and diplomatic oversight mechanisms that make the relationship publicly accountable, moving it from a visible annual aid vote into the opaque machinery of defense acquisition, where oversight is limited and political accountability is minimal. The result would be a defense relationship that is simultaneously deeper and less transparent.”

“Trump’s statement today that the Iran-U.S. memorandum of understanding is ‘over’ should not come as a surprise” since it was designed to create conditions for wider negotiations. However, “those conditions have largely collapsed. The Israeli war in Lebanon has not ended. Iranian frozen assets apparently remain largely inaccessible. The U.S. has revoked Iran’s oil waiver. Threats, explicitly prohibited by the MOU, never ceased. And the Strait of Hormuz has remained fiercely contested.”