Democracy Now! 2026-06-08 Monday

Earlier Iran had launched a wave of missiles at northern Israel, claiming it was in response to Israeli attacks near Beirut on Sunday. Israel responded with attacks on Iran with explosions reported in Tehran, Tabriz, and Isfahah. The Israeli army also confirmed it struck a petrochemical plant in Mashar.

Israel attacked Iran. Despite President Trump telling Axios News on Sunday, he planned to call Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to urge him not to respond to the first wave of Iranian missiles. President Trump also told the Financial Times. Netanyahu had no choice but to accept a deal with Iran, saying quote, I call all the shots, he doesn't call the shots, Trump said.

This morning, President Trump posted on Truth Social, quote, Israel and Iran must immediately stop shooting, unquote. This after the Pentagon's DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, recently raised the counterintelligence threat assessment for Israel to critical. Amidst growing concerns, Israeli spy agencies are eavesdropping on American negotiators working on a ceasefire deal with Iran.

Israeli airstrikes hit Beirut's suburbs on Sunday despite a US brokered ceasefire that was renewed just days earlier. On Saturday, Israeli attacks across southern Lebanon killed at least ten people, including a brigadier general, a captain, and a Lebanese soldier. Since March, Israeli attacks have killed more than thirty-five hundred people and displaced over a fifth of Lebanon's population.

In Gaza. At least seven Palestinians were killed and fifteen others injured on Saturday when Israel's military bombed a large tent encampment in the heart of Gaza City. Children were among the dead and wounded. On Sunday, an Israeli strike on a police station on a vehicle killed at least nine people and wounded twenty others. The attacks come despite last October's US brokered ceasefire. Since then, Israeli attacks have killed about nine hundred and fifty Palestinians.

This is Abdul Salam Judah, the uncle of a Palestinian killed in an Israeli strike over the weekend.

Meanwhile, in the Zaporita region, Russian guided bombs hit a public transit stop in Balabin, killing three civilians and wounding three others. This is the principal of a local school.

A federal lawsuit filed Saturday is seeking to block an ultimate fighting championship UFC event scheduled for june fourteenth. On the White House South Lawn, which happens to be President Trump's eightieth birthday, the White House's brand new UFC event is part of the United States two hundred fiftieth anniversary celebration.

The suit, brought by the Public Integrity Project on behalf of a Vietnam War veteran and a civic activist, argues the UFC fights would financially benefit President Trump and UFC President Dana White. through promotional opportunities and stockholdings. The lawsuit cites a report that Trump bought fifty thousand dollars in stock.

In UFC's parent company. It also argues the Trump administration's approval violated National Park Service regulations prohibiting commercial sporting events on specific federal parklands. that Congress did not authorize the construction of a towering six hundred ton steel arch on the South Lawn, and that no environmental review was conducted.

President Trump stormed out of an interview with NBC News' Kristin Welker Friday after she questioned him about compensating the January sixth insurrectionists who attack police. As well as whether he had any evidence for rigged elections, Trump had agreed to record the sit-down interview for Meet the Press ahead of an event in Wisconsin.

Hold a hunger and labor strike to protest inhumane conditions while demanding their freedom. One letter from a prisoner dated May 31st describes Medical neglect, undrinkable water, expired and rancid food, unusable toilets and poor ventilation. The prisoner writes, quote, they constantly threaten to deport us, transfer us to punishment units, and move us from one detention center to another.

They take photos of us in the dormitories without our consent and tell us that we have no rights here, unquote. Meanwhile, New Jersey prosecutors have charged an Essex County police sergeant with stealing about ten thousand dollars worth of equipment from reporter Angelina Kassana. The photojournalist dropped her camera bag and had to be hospitalized after she was attacked by police while covering a protest at Delaney Hall in May.

In California, three prisoners at a for-profit ice jail in Adelanto were transferred to solitary confinement after they met last week with members of Congress to discuss their hunger stress. Prisoners launched the FAST in May to protest medical neglect, rancid food in inhumane conditions. Democratic congressmember Judy Chu of Pasadena told the Southern California newsgroup she was horrified.

To hear about retaliation faced by the three men who she and Congress members Pete Aguilar and Jimmy Gomez visited last Monday. She said, quote, the fact that they're being punished for speaking out about these conditions only underscores the cruelty and corrupt management of facility that's profiting off of their suffering, unquote.

In Ohio, gunfire erupted Saturday afternoon at a street festival in Toledo, wounding twelve people. The victims range in age from fourteen to sixty one. Authorities say a search for the shooters is ongoing.

And the European Commission has warned Albania's government against violating the EU's environmental rules. after members of President Trump's family proposed building a massive luxury resort on an ecologically sensitive stress David Senra, about how she had discovered a private island along a stretch of Albanian coastline while traveling aboard a yacht with her husband, Jared Kushner.

In the most serious escalation since the US Iranian so-called truce was reached in April, Iran and Israel exchanged fire overnight. Iran launched a wave of missiles at northern Israel, saying it was in response to Israeli attacks near Beirut on Sunday. Israel responded with attacks on several areas of Iran, including the capital Tehran. Earlier today, Iran announced its halting strikes on Israel, but warned it'll carry out a more severe response if Israel continues to attack Lebanon.

Israel attacked Iran despite President Trump telling Axios on Sunday that he planned to call Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to urge him not to respond to the first wave of Iranian missiles. Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Ismail Baray spoke in Tehran earlier today.

Why don't you elaborate on that? Were you surprised by this major violation of the so called ceasefire between the US and Iran and what this says about how much power President Trump has over Netanyahu. He said he warned him not to do this, not to respond to Iran attacking Israel for Israel attacking Lebanon.

Uh that's when Trump intervened and the situation was diffused. So the fact that the Iranians were going to uh uh enforce their red line in Lebanon, I don't think was a surprise, and I think the US government took it seriously as well. What is perhaps a bit surprising is the immediate reaction that Trump had and of course then that the Israelis defied Trump's expressed wishes.

And and where that goes from now we will have to see, but it's important to understand that what the Iranians were trying to do and what really worries these is that they were trying to extend their deterrence. They had already established their own deterrence in the sense that any attack on Iran clearly would be retaliated against.

But now they were trying to say that even if the Israelis were to attack Lebanon, southern Lebanon, they would also face a re Iranian retaliation, which would be the first time in a very long time that a major power p would put real hard power behind uh a a warning or a deterrent against an attack by Israel on a third country.

Uh and this is part of what uh the Israelis are worried about because if it suddenly means that they can no longer have that complete maneuverability in in Lebanon and Gaza and elsewhere that they enjoy, that they are enjoying because the West is more and uh less uh enabling that to happen, they're politically defending it, etcetera. And for the last couple of decades it has not been challenged by any regional state in a sincere or or serious way.

This appears to have been an attempt by the Iranians to uh challenge that, to establish this extended deterrence, and this is part of the reason why the Israelis have acted so uh uh aggressively against this attempt, as they call it, to establish a new equation in the region.

uh making sure that the Israelis cannot have the freedom of starting the war again or bombing Lebanon or other places has to be included. That is the Iranian perspective. The question is if now when they are signaling that they're willing to back off

Are they doing so in order to put pressure on the US to now deal with Israel? Or are they doing so because they're regretting their attack and realizing that the Israelis would strike at them much harder? It it remains to be seen exactly what the calculation is, but I don't think that the Iranian side is going to back off from its demand that any end to the war has to be region wide and has to include Lebanon and Israel as well.

and and fundamentally unacceptable and what their worry is, is that the US would p put some pressure on the Israelis to ceasefire and this ceasefire will only last a couple of days or so and then slowly but surely the Israelis would once again restart attacks against whether it is uh Lebanon or whether it is Gaza, and they don't want to see a scenario of that kind be repeated. And as a result, uh they're now using some of their hard power to essentially signal

that any ceasefire, any end of the deal has to be complete. Otherwise it will be a complete war instead of this. uh kind of shameful s situation you have right now in which we called it a ceasefire, but more than three thousand five hundred Lebanese have been killed in that so called ceasefire.

about a a real restraint on them unless they have a deal with Iran. It is not worth it for them to take a gamble and have that big fight with Israel in the hope of getting a deal with Iran. Because then they may end up spending all of that political capital fighting the Israelis and still not get a deal with Ibar.

So I think the administration's position is that they will only do so if there is a deal with Iran, and the Iranian position is that there won't be a deal with Iran unless you prove your ability to restrain the Israelis.

On the Republican side, Susan Collins is running unopposed as she seeks her sixth term in the Senate. On the Democratic side, forty one year old Oysterman and Marine Vett Graham Platner has led the polls for months running as a progressive populist backed by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Congressman Rokana, and others. On the campaign trail, Plattiners repeatedly targeted the bil billionaire class and called for a wealth tax, Medicare for all, and other progressive policies.

In late April, Maine's Democratic governor Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign after polls showed Plattner easily beating her in the primary. But Governor Mills never officially withdrew, and her name remains on the ballot. Since launching his campaign, Plattner has faced numerous controversies, many stemming from his actions in the years after returning from fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, a time when he says he was suffering from PTSD.

post traumatic stress disorder and was self-medicating with alcohol. The initial controversies focused on old posts Platner made on Reddit and on tattoo on his chest that resembled a Nazi symbol. Platner says he got the tattoo while on military leave in Croatia twenty years ago and is denied knowing about the design's association with Nazis. He's apologized for the social media post, saying they were written at, quote, a time in my life where I was struggling deeply, unquote.

In recent weeks, two more scandals emerged. First, it was revealed he'd sent sexually explicit text messages to at least six women after getting married in twenty twenty three. Then the New York Times published an article headlined Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner recall unsettling behavior, unquote. On Thursday, Plattner interviewed by Chris Hayes on MS Now said this.

certainly self medicating with alcohol and I've been very upfront since the beginning of this campaign. That that was a pretty dark period of my life after I come came back from my combat service and that's what that combat serv that's what that kind of life looks like. And uh and so there are things in this that I absolutely uh will take responsibility for and and have been speaking about openly for months now. Um but those serious allegations are just not true.

Do we have ten times the free time? No. In fact, we have less. Fewer schools. Fewer hospitals. Our paychecks run out earlier in the month. And we have less time'cause everybody's working harder.

I led the fight against the Epstein class, which has been a cover-up for sexual abuse with Thomas Massey. I've been at the uh forefront of championing uh women's rights and rights of survivors. But here you have a case of someone who had a dark chapter in his life, who was in toxic relationships, was ashamed about it, who served this country, uh, and the main voters are saying, look, let's give him some grace.

Uh and his focus is stopping these wars and it's getting national health insurance and it's taking on economic uh inequality.

Talk about the race, what you're concerned about, and why you're telling people to vote for Governor Mills who actually while she didn't pull out of the Senate race, she did suspend her campaign and even with these controversies didn't re enter with rallies like Platiner is having right now.

Who before he was busy dismantling the Voting Rights Act and taking voting rights away from black Southerners, he was busy getting down to the work he went there for, which was dismantling a woman's right to choose. And she told us, she told us that that was settled law. She looked him in the eyes and he told her that he would never do such a thing. Well, either she lied to us or she's a fool. Either way, you shouldn't be a United States Senator from the state of Maine.

She's already shown that she has taken on Trump. When he threatened to pull federal funding from Maine, she looked him in the eye and said, I'll see you in court. So that's leadership under pressure. We think that she's the best one to take on the uh the systems that are hurting American families and American women.

Shay, thanks so much for being with us. Um a lot has come out on Graham Platner from the tattoo uh that he has emblazoned on his chest. to um the most recent New York Times expose on some of the women uh he was romantically involved with uh questioning his behavior. Can you talk about your thoughts as Graham Pratner just had a major rally in Portland?

uh of the Reddit Post and the uh the tattoo became quite skeptical. Um it was after then that I actually met up with Graham and we had a conversation and over the course of the probably last several months we've had a series of uh conversations and observations and I think what's interesting about this race and about Graham is that um In Maine, f I would say a lot of people have a very different perspective of him than what the national media is showing. Um I think that

despite his controversies, he is really speaking to the people of Maine at this moment. Um as I've uh been writing and I wrote recently, uh it is estimated that one and two Mainers are struggling to make ends meet.

And so I think that, you know, one of the reasons people have continued to support Plattener despite these controversies is because for the first time in a long time, he makes people feel heard. Um I only recently heard him speak to an audience. Um my because my interactions with him had been primarily one-on-one, um I had heard about how he when he speaks to a crowd, uh, but I have to say it was really interesting to experience.

uh hearing him and seeing more importantly the audience, how enthusiastic they were. At the same time, um I live on Peaks Island, Maine. It's a predominantly very white little uh enclave island here. Um we have a few folks of color and it's a you know community that people would probably think of of as fairly prosperous and yet he was really connecting with them. Um I think as a person he is absolutely complicated.

And messy. There is no no getting around that. He's a very uh complicated, messy individual who uh I think if these were more normal times, I think the campaign would have tanked probably several scandals ago. Uh but I think that given the current reality of the country we're running in with the folks running in it, uh people are feeling a little bit more generous in forgiving uh his personal situations.

Certainly Rokana talked about the damages of war and K Platner himself talks about what it means that war is violence and how veterans have suffered. But that you have to take responsibility for how you act afterwards.

Do we believe do I believe that people even deserve a second chance? Um, first and foremost, these are serious allegations. Uh I don't think there's no excuse for the harm that he caused these women. I think that if I were to say one thing, I would love to hear him speak more about ways in which um he can make amends to the women he's harmed.

Uh he needs to be held accountable to those women. At the same time we find ourselves in this very, very awkward situation in the state of Maine and really in the state of the country. Uh eighteen months into the second term of Trump, we ha have watched our country turn upside down in ways that we have never imagined. And so we find ourselves with in the case of the main Senate race,

Uh we have a candidate who most certainly inspires people. Uh I know when I went to his uh public event here on Peaks I was I I saw young folks of color who had taken the ferry over just to hear him speak. Um we also uh and I'm sorry, I just completely lost my thought there. Um I think that we have to reckon with the reality of war and violence. Um I was thinking about this morning, knowing that, you know, this would probably be a part of the conversation.

In some ways I see platiner as sort of the result of this country. Um that we send people to war, they come back and then we don't do a lot for those people. But more than that, when we talk about violence, in this case there is personal violence, but then we also have state violence. We have someone who went to war

suffering from the effects of state violence, who has now inflicted violence upon folks personally. And so it really becomes a very messy situation in terms of how do we reckon with that? Uh how do we figure out how to go forward? I think I think in this moment what's hard is for people t to gather and to to understand and it must certainly is something that I've struggled with given everything that we've seen going on in this country.

Um is the fact that historically we've expected our politicians, we've held them to a certain standard. We've expected certain behavior. Um and I would say, you know, in the years since Trump, all of that has been turned upside down. I think over on the left, I think. we've held ourselves to a standard that we don't want to be anything like those folks

And so here we have this person who is a messy walking contradiction. On the one hand, he has values in terms of what he's putting out there that speaks to us, but his personal life is messy. Um so it's one of those what do we do? And in this moment I ask myself, do we discard him? Um I know your previous guest spoke a lot of to um his opponent, Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign and is now, you know, last week m reminded us all that she is still on the ballot.

And I know as a maner, as a manner of color, uh I don't see her track record as being quite as rosy as somebody on a national level might. Um just a couple of things I wanted to mention. Just recently she vetoed LD uh 1911 this year, which was the Clean Slate Law, which really would have given folks with a criminal background in certain cases a second chance.

Uh there was also the other veto that she did the uh uh L D three oh seven, which would have placed a moratorium on state and local governments issuing permits for data centers. As we know data the conversation of data centers is really big across the country. Um those two vetoes alone for many, many main voters, uh really were a turnoff.

So again, the national perspective on Janet Mills versus the reality on the ground are two different things and I think for many people, main voters, that's left people really conflicted. I mean we do have two other candidates.

a right in candidate who of course isn't on the ballot but has been campaigning really hard and then we have one other uh gentleman on the ballot, David Costello, uh who many people just don't know who he is. Um so many find themselves in a really tough situation in terms of

this is a person who is saying the things that we want to hear and at the same time we're hearing these allegations in their personal life that are pretty disturbing. Um I can say that when it came down to my deciding whether or not I wanted to support him um

I knew is if there was any criminal ac you know, allegations that was not something I was gonna do. I'm still not comfortable with what I've heard. Uh at the same time, um, it feels like While we can say is it an excuse the PTSD from the war, it is also a reality that many people returning from war do face.

Coming up, we go to Peru, where Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of Peru's former imprisoned dictator, has a slight lead over her progressive challenger Roberta Sanchez in Peru's presidential runoff. Stay with us.

The latest ballot count this morning showed Fujimori leading by just about a percentage point ahead of Sanchez, according to Reuters. Sanchez spoke from Lima Sunday.

as President Trump aggressively intervenes, expanding attacks against leftist governments while backing a series of right wing candidates in recent presidential elections, including in Colombia and Honduras. Mexican President Claudia Schoenbaum has also accused far right sectors in the US of coordinating with domestic groups to destabilize the Mexican government.

For more we go to two guests in Lima, Peru, we're joined by Gustavo Guerra Garcia Picasso, a Peruvian economist and public policy expert who's held various high level government and academic positions over the past twenty years. Here in New York, we're joined by Greg Grandin, Yale University History Professor, Pulitzer Prize winning author, his latest book, America America, a new history of the new world now available in paperback.

His new piece for the New York Review of Books is headlined The Education of Pope Leo the Fourteenth. We welcome you both to Democracy Now. Let's begin with Gustavo Gueda Garcia Picasso. Uh talk about what has happened and if you've been surprised by how close this runoff is. And who Sanchez and Fujimori are.

And it's urgent that reforms must be implemented quickly to restore a presidential system with check-in balances and to reduce political instability. And the responsibility of these new problems is Keiko's constitution of 2024.

and to and to promote political change, even radical political change, with many nuns and priests and lay people joining insurgencies or joining jo joining social movements and And and and Leo, at the time father Bob Prevost, um from Chicago, from from a kind of peace Catholic background, was very much influenced by by this tradition and he al allied with Pope Francis, who at the time was married er m was was the was the archbishop of of of Buenos Aires.

Uh of Buenos Aires. Yeah. And um and they in many ways they work together to push back against the kind of Vatican

attempt to undermine liberation theology and they pushed back very effectively. They really kind of contained opus day within within Peru. I mean Leo's tenure in Peru over the course of twenty years corresponded to John Pope John Paul and and Joseph Ratzinger who became Pope Benedict's campaign to isolate and undermine liberation theology and then Lee and then Leo uh was appointed bishop by Francis and then he presided over a kind of rollback of the rollback.

So i i i and so in many ways that's shaping his moral vision, his humanism. It comes in many ways out of Latin America.

Latin America is exactly the opposite. You see a kind of full spectrum press on the whole continent. Like this not a not a country maybe apart from Uruguay where the United States

isn't actively involved in the internal politics and you see what's being put into place is is the full spectrum of hard power. We have regime change in Venezuela, law fare we're seeing w the United States allying with uh militaries trying to expand as as um the military footprint of the United States in Peru, in Ecuador.

relaunching the war on drugs, what's at stake with the election in Peru, the election coming up in Colombia, is is really if if Trump wins those countries and back for the United States then I want to see a full on uh reescalation of the war on drugs plan Colombia, which was devastating for the countries involved. Devastating for Colombia. And and and that's and that is That is explicitly the plan. Um in Mexico, the United States is using a combination of CIA covert ops in the north.

and lawfare in order to box in Claudia Scheinbaum. In many ways Claudia Scheinbaum stands as a polar opposite of Bukele in El Salvador. Scheinbaum and Bukele are the two most popular presidents in Latin America and they re and they represent polar opposite political projects. Right. Bukele is basically it's this dystopian pro uh project of of of eliminating due process and filling mega prisons and basically serving as a receptacle for the United States' cast off.

And and Scheinbaum is trying to resurrect a kind of Mexican humanism, a Latin American humanism, a universalism, uh uh uh through economic redistribution. But you know, she's she's uh her room for maneuver is is tight. Cuba is really just the tip of the iceberg. It really is a kind of unprecedented

We have twenty seven okay. It's really is an unprecedented uh uh program of regression that we're wa that we're watching in in in Latin America and and and quite in many ways we must admit effective and successful.

For our Landox. That does it for our show. Go to our website at democracynow.org. I'm Amy Goodman.