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State party leaders are backing Assemblyman Robert Smullen. But a local businessman and provocateur, Anthony Constantino, has President Trump's endorsement.
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Acclaimed conservationist Mona Khalil was killed by an Israeli strike on her beachside home in the village of al-Mansouri in southern Lebanon. The 76-year-old spent more than 25 years working to protect endangered sea turtles, and her work helped turn a stretch of southern Lebanon's coastline into one of the most important nesting sites for endangered sea turtles in the eastern Mediterranean.
Khalil lived in "the Orange House" — her grandmother's home, which she helped transform into a refuge for endangered sea turtles, an ecotourism site and a training ground in ecological conservation for a generation of volunteers. "This is not a project that belongs to me," she once said. "It belongs to Lebanon. It belongs to the whole world."
A refugee of the Lebanese civil war, Khalil returned to Lebanon from the Netherlands in 1999 and began her conservation work after seeing a turtle laying eggs on the beach near her family's seaside home. Since then, Mona rarely left her home and the beach she had spent years protecting.
"Mona was like a symbol of hope, of life and of resistance in south Lebanon, and probably that's one of the reasons she was killed," says Rami Khashab, a Lebanese herpetologist who worked alongside Khalil. "They are trying to kill the hope of the Lebanese people."
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Israel is continuing to attack Gaza despite the so-called ceasefire. Israeli strikes killed Ahmed Wishah, a cameraman with Al Jazeera, and at least six people, including two children, on Saturday. Wishah's brother Mohammed, who also worked for Al Jazeera, was killed in an Israeli strike this April. Israel has now killed over 260 journalists in Gaza, including at least 12 working for Al Jazeera, since October 2023.
"We don't see the type of outrage that we would see if a Western journalist was killed by a country that is not a U.S. ally," says Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Middle East and North Africa editor at Drop Site News. "It's really a shameful state of affairs." Kouddous also comments on the expansion of Israel's "genocidal tactics" in Gaza that have now been "exported outside of Palestine in places like Lebanon."
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Right-wing Trump ally Abelardo de la Espriella has clinched a narrow victory in Sunday's runoff presidential election in Colombia, defeating leftist Senator Iván Cepeda, an ally of current President Gustavo Petro. De la Espriella ran a fearmongering, "tough-on-crime" campaign, promising to build mega-prisons inspired by El Salvador's authoritarian President Nayib Bukele, to bomb "narcoterrorist camps" and to abandon Petro's peace efforts. His reported victory is also a win for U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration is waging an intensifying "war on drugs" across Latin America, targeting left-wing leaders like Petro with false allegations and threats of military intervention.
"De la Espriella clearly represents a criminal approach to politics: lying, propaganda, coordination and collusion with criminal narcotrafficking, restriction of rights, and money laundering," says longtime Colombian activist Manuel Rozental. With his victory, says Rozental, "We expect to have military operations and a U.S. intervention within the country. We expect to have human rights abuses. We expect to have militarization. And it's all for the extraction of resources and the link of drug trafficking to the U.S. government, U.S. interests and global mafia."
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