Renewed conflict continues to be potentially breaking out over Yemen, as on Monday Saudi Arabia struck the runway of the Houthi-controlled Sanaa International Airport, amid growing allegations that Iranian flights have increasingly made use of Yemen’s airspace.
The Saud-backed Yemeni government which has long been locked in a civil war for the country’s future has singled out the Houthi rebels for hosting Iranian flights, warning that its “patience has run out” and that it will respond to any airspace violations.
“The Yemeni legitimate government, in cooperation with the regional and international community, and by all diplomatic and legal means, has tried to convince the Iranian regime and the Houthi coup militias in Sana’a to return to the armed forces and not to penetrate the Yemeni airspace with the Iranian planes,” an official statement said.
Residents of the Houthi-controlled capital of Sanaa have reported seeing warplanes flying overhead, after Houthi-affiliated Al-Masirah channel indicated the strikes targeted the airport’s landing and takeoff runways.
“In an unjust aggression, the Saudi enemy carried out several airstrikes against Sanaa International Airport,” Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree responded. “The Saudi aggression against Sanaa airport has ended the phase of de-escalation, and it must bear the consequences of its aggression,” he added.
Another senior Houthi official, Hazem al-Assad, also threatened in follow-up remarks: “The Saudi regime will discover that it has dug its own grave.”
The Iranian plane in question reportedly hasn’t been hit or damaged, and was safely diverted to Yemen’s Hodeidah International Airport.
The “internationally recognized” Yemeni government has long been propped up by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the US, after a lengthy half-decade long UAE/Saudi/US coalition air war failed to dislodge Houthi power. The pro-Saudi government operates out of Aden in southern Yemen, after the country’s president fled there a decade ago.
Earlier this month there was another attempted Saudi warplane intercept of an Iranian civilian airliner, which was reportedly carrying Yemenis who had been stranded in Iran back to their home country.
The Houthis at the time of the prior incident said it was “breaking the Saudi-American siege on our people and expelling the occupiers.”
As we featured previously, since 2015 Saudi Arabia has imposed a blockade on Yemen’s land, sea, and air ports, severely restricting vital commercial and humanitarian imports, including fuel and food.
The blockade triggered what the UN called one of the most severe humanitarian crises globally, leading millions towards famine and drastically damaging healthcare and water systems.
The Houthis continue to be an important side-player related to the US-Iran war, given they’ve continually threatened to block the key Bab el Mandab Strait and return the war to the Red Sea region.
In a poetic and heartwarming gesture, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster has officially nominated Darline Graham Nordone as interim U.S. Senator.
Darline is the younger sister of late Sen. Lindsey Graham.
She will now serve the remainder of her brother’s term in the Senate, until South Carolina voters decide in this year’s midterm elections who will fill the seat for the next six years.
Watch the moment Darline accepted the role here:
Whatever your opinion is of Lindsey Graham’s political career, you have to admit that this is an incredibly touching moment.
He and his sister shared a special bond throughout their whole lives.
If you don’t know, Lindsey Graham actually adopted Darline when she was just 12 years old, after their parents sadly passed away.
Earlier today, President Trump threw his support behind the idea of appointing Darline to fill her late brother’s shoes.
Graham died on Saturday night at age 71. He never married or had a family of his own, but Nordone was often by her brother’s side for the political touch points of his career, speaking at events and appearing in some of his campaign ads.
After their parents died at a young age, Graham was left to raise his sister, for whom he later became legal guardian. They were very close, and she was there as he filed reelection paperwork earlier this year, along with her children and grandchildren.
“To Lindsey, I miss you more than I can even put into words,” Nordone said, emotion rising in her voice. “But I’m going to do this. I got it.”
Introducing Nordone, McMaster said the two had spoken in “in the wee hours of Sunday morning” after Graham’s death, and he asked her to serve.
“I had wondered what you would say, and I was humbled by your quickness to see the duty that you had to serve,” McMaster said. He added that President Donald Trump “thought it was a great idea” when he later told him of his pick. Trump announced his support for Nardone to fill the seat earlier Monday.
Next month, a special election will be held to decide on a Republican nominee to run for the open Senate seat.
At this time, it remains unclear whether or not Darline Graham Nordone plans on running for a full term.
Others were in the mix initially, including Lt. Gov. Pam Evette, who Trump endorsed in her failed bid to clinch the GOP nomination for governor, former Rep. Trey Gowdy and former Sen. Jim DeMint, sources told Fox News Digital.
Her appointment fills the seat through Jan. 3, while voters decide in November who will hold the seat for the next six-year term.
At this point, it’s unclear if Nordone would consider running for a full six-year term, and there’s already private jockeying to run in the special election, set for Aug. 11, to secure the GOP nomination in the Palmetto State, with Reps. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., and Ralph Norman, R-S.C., both eyeing a bid
Graham’s death narrowed Republicans’ Senate majority and added pressure to keep every GOP vote available, especially with Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., still being treated after a fall and pneumonia.
The stories coming out of Iran nowadays are tricky, not always believable, and often peppered with more than the usual amount of propaganda.
That’s why when one report is interesting, we try to approach it with the proper care.
For some characters of this war, the stories come in a series of bombastic and mutually excluding revelations: new Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei is gay; he was killed in an airstrike; or rather, he was disfigured and maimed in an airstrike; or rather, he is alive and well and leading the country.
For former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the same is valid. Back in March, it was reported that he would have been killed in the first wave of Israeli airstrikes against Tehran.
And today, alternatively, a NYT report has arisen that the former president has been placed under house arrest by the country’s infamous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The reason for his arrest is reportedly that Ahmadinejad was part of a ‘failed Israeli plot’ to install him in place of the current theocratic regime.
“The New York Times, citing four Iranian officials, reported Monday that the 69-year-old is being held by the IRGC’s intelligence wing after he left a safe house run by Israel’s Mossad.
Before last week, Ahmadinejad had not been seen in public since an Israeli airstrike hit his compound in the early hours of Operation Epic Fury Feb. 28, after which he was spirited away to the safe house, the Times reported, citing US and Iranian officials.
The former president, who ran Iran with an iron fist from 2005 to 2013, re-emerged last week — apparently flanked by security guards — during funeral ceremonies for the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the same day as the strike on Ahmadinejad’s compound.”
“The Israeli campaign, which culminated in a strike on Ahmadinejad’s bodyguards to free him from house arrest on the first day of the US-Israel attack on Iran in February, included a meeting with Mossad chief David Barnea on the sidelines of an academic conference in Hungary.
A car secreted the former president away to a safe house after that attack, but he later left the safe house after growing disillusioned with Israel’s plan to install him, The Times reports.
Ahmadinejad’s current status is unclear, according to the report. He was seen briefly surrounded by guards — masked and wearing a heavy coat — at the funeral for slain supreme leader Ali Khamenei and is believed to be in IRGC custody over his ties with Israeli intelligence.”
The San Gennaro Festival is one of the largest religious festivals in the United States and, along with the Columbus Day Parade, one of the largest ethnic parades in the country. It has become an integral part of New York City’s multicultural heritage and immigrant history.
Has anyone ever heard of Little Palestine or eaten at a Tibetan restaurant in New York? When visiting New York, what is your favorite Guyanese festival?
In a recent map of New York City’s immigrant neighborhoods produced in association with the World Cup, New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, excluded Italian neighborhoods despite the fact that Italians were one of the city’s largest immigrant groups and among its greatest contributors to its culture. Mamdani lives in New York, yet somehow does not know what the city is famous for or which ethnicity has become an institution known around the world: the New York Italian.
Instead, the map included much newer and smaller communities that, in some cases, number only a few hundred people, have had little or no impact on the city’s culture, and that most New Yorkers have never heard of. These include Little Tibet, Little Palestine, Little Africa, Little Guyana, Little Bangladesh, and Little Egypt.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion means not only excluding whites and Europeans but also rewriting history to eliminate or vilify the contributions of whites and Europeans while exaggerating the contributions of minorities. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal recently claimed that immigrants from Somalia built the United States of America. As Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) said, “This country was built by Somalis, Indians, Latinos, Africans.”
Italians have shaped New York since the era of mass immigration to the United States. Between the 1880s and 1920, more than 4 million Italians arrived in the United States, making them the single largest immigrant group and accounting for more than 10 percent of the nation’s foreign-born population at the time. Most entered through New York, first via Castle Garden and, after 1892, through Ellis Island, although other major U.S. ports, including Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, and New Orleans, also received large numbers of Italian immigrants directly.
Roughly a third of Italian immigrants settled in New York City, building neighborhoods from Little Italy and Arthur Avenue to Astoria, Bensonhurst, and Staten Island’s South Shore, now the most Italian-American county in the country. Their labor built the subway system, the Brooklyn Bridge, and much of the city’s early infrastructure.
Today, New York State holds the largest Italian-American population of any state, about 2.2 million residents, or 11.1 percent of the state’s population. That heritage is marked every October with the Columbus Day Parade, organized by the Columbus Citizens Foundation since 1929, drawing 35,000 marchers and roughly a million spectators to Fifth Avenue and broadcast to more than 7.4 million television households, also carried live on RAI International.
Columbus Day has been a federal holiday since 1971, the first tied to a specific ethnic heritage, and remains one of only two such federal holidays — the other being Juneteenth, added in 2021. America itself was named after Amerigo Vespucci, whose accounts convinced European mapmakers that the land Columbus reached was a separate continent, not part of Asia.
Beyond the parade, Little Italy has filled with crowds every September since 1926 for the Feast of San Gennaro, which has grown from a one-day religious observance into an 11-day festival drawing more than a million visitors to Mulberry, Hester, and Grand Streets, with more than 300 vendors lining the route and a Solemn High Mass and religious procession alongside the cannoli, carnival rides, and live music.
The Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is known for its “giglio” lift, while smaller parish feasts, including San Rocco and Santa Rosalia, and the annual “Ferragosto” street festivals on Arthur Avenue and in Belmont, continue the tradition of public religious and cultural celebration tied to Italian immigrant parishes.
These parades and feasts, alongside Italian-American food, fashion, and decades of film and television, have become fixtures of the city’s identity and its image abroad, feeding into both the stereotypes and the pride long associated with Italian New York.
Italian food consistently ranks among the top two or three cuisines globally across surveys and social media analyses, trading the top spot with Chinese food depending on the methodology used. New York is famous for its Italian restaurants. Estimates of the number of Italian restaurants in New York City vary by source and by how “Italian” is defined, ranging from roughly 560 to more than 1,500. That figure can roughly triple if pizzerias, which are typically counted separately, are included.
New York’s pizzeria culture traces to Lombardi’s, which opened in 1905 as the first licensed pizzeria in the United States, and Italian-American cooking has since become inseparable from the city’s food identity, from chicken and veal parm to baked ziti, meatballs, and Sunday gravy. Italian ices and cannoli, the latter popularized by Ferrara Bakery since 1892, along with delis, and the espresso and cappuccino culture rooted in Little Italy’s coffeehouses are part of the city’s daily life.
Italian-American New York has supplied some of the most recognizable material in American film and television, from The Godfather, Goodfellas, Mean Streets, A Bronx Tale, Donnie Brasco, and Casino to The Sopranos, Jersey Shore, and Growing Up Gotti. Saturday Night Fever and Moonstruck are both set in Italian-American Brooklyn, and the 2024 film Cabrini dramatizes Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini’s work among Italian immigrants in Lower Manhattan’s Five Points.
The comedy in My Cousin Vinny brought the Italian-American attitude and culture to a small town in Alabama, showing how the outside world perceives the New York Italian and how unique that culture is compared to other parts of the country.
Fonzie, Arthur “The Fonz” Fonzarelli from the TV show Happy Days, is one of the most memorable characters in American sitcom history. Although the show is set in Milwaukee, the character’s backstory is that he is an Italian-American from New York. He is just one of many Italian-American New Yorkers who have become iconic television characters.
Three of the most influential television series of the 1990s, Friends, Seinfeld, and The Sopranos, all featured prominent Italian-American characters, from Joey Tribbiani on Friends and George Costanza on Seinfeld to the cast of The Sopranos. Other memorable examples include Vinnie Barbarino on Welcome Back, Kotter and the ensemble of Everybody Loves Raymond.
Stoop sitting in Italian-American neighborhoods has produced some of New York City’s most iconic images. Photo courtesy of We Are Italians.
The “wise guy” archetype, drawn from Mulberry Street and Little Italy, has become visual shorthand for organized crime in the American imagination, alongside softer images of the pizzeria owner, the deli counter, and the stoop culture of brownstone Brooklyn. Italian-American slang, including “fuhgeddaboudit,” “goomba,” and “paisan,” has worked its way into general New York vernacular, and Frank Sinatra remains one of the most enduring Italian-American symbols of the city itself.
Italian-Americans impacted the fashion associated with New York. John Gotti’s tailored “Dapper Don” style and Frank Sinatra’s fedora-and-suit look became templates for a broader New York aesthetic, echoed later in Tony Manero’s white suit in Saturday Night Fever. Gold jewelry, including cornicello pendants (Italian horns), crucifixes, pinky rings, and layered chains, remains a recognizable marker of Italian-American style, as does the “guido/guidette” subculture popularized nationally through Jersey Shore. At the higher end, Gianni Versace’s presence at New York Fashion Week and Domenico Vacca’s Fifth Avenue flagship tie Italian design directly to the city’s luxury retail corridor.
By rejecting Italian-Americans, Mamdani is also rejecting figures who were significant to New York’s history and had a national impact. New York City has had four Italian-American mayors: Fiorello La Guardia, the city’s first, who served three terms from 1934 to 1945; Vincent Impellitteri, from 1950 to 1953; Rudy Giuliani, from 1994 to 2001; and Bill de Blasio, from 2014 to 2021.
New York State has had five governors of Italian descent. Charles Poletti became the nation’s first Italian-American governor in 1942, completing the final month of Herbert H. Lehman’s term. Mario Cuomo was the state’s first elected Italian-American governor, serving from 1983 to 1994, and his son Andrew Cuomo served from 2011 to 2021. George Pataki, of Italian descent through his mother, served from 1995 to 2006. Al Smith, governor from 1919 to 1920 and 1923 to 1928 and the first Italian-American major-party presidential nominee in 1928, had partial Italian ancestry through his paternal grandfather, Emanuele Ferraro of Genoa.
Antonin Scalia rose from Queens to the U.S. Supreme Court. Italian-Americans have also served as New York City Borough Presidents across multiple administrations, most consistently on Staten Island, including Ralph J. Lamberti, Guy Molinari, Anthony R. Gaeta, James Molinaro, James Oddo, and Vito Fossella, alongside Andrew J. DiPaola in Queens.
Mamdani’s selections for the immigrant-neighborhood map, including Little Tibet, Little Palestine, Little Africa, Little Guyana, Little Bangladesh, and Little Egypt, combined have not had as much impact on New York as Italian-Americans.
