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Tragedy has struck in Los Angeles, California as a 17-year-old boy has died after a fatal fall from the iconic 6th Street Bridge. Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore reported that the teen had been attempting to record a social media video when he lost his footing and fell.
Police responded to the scene at 2 a.m. on Saturday, May 20th, and pronounced the boy dead at the hospital. His name is being withheld as the investigation continues.
The 6th Street Bridge, the largest and most expensive span ever built in the city, opened in July 2022 at $588 million. Spanning 3,500 feet over the Los Angeles River, the bridge was designed to be an iconic landmark in the city, rivaling the Hollywood Sign and Griffith Park in its presence.
Unfortunately, the bridge has become a hotspot for various nefarious activities, including street racing, graffiti, and illegal takeovers. Social media stunts have also been increasingly common, with a man fatally shot in January while filming an unauthorized music video.
Police have had to step up efforts to manage the large crowds and those attempting risky behavior. Chief Moore himself admitted that “we see that location, while it has spawned a great deal of pride in Los Angeles, it has also, unfortunately, served as a backdrop now for tragedies such as this.”
The death of the 17-year-old boy at the bridge is a horrifying reminder of the risks of engaging in dangerous and unprecedented social media stunts.
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Still from Succession. (HBO)
This review contains spoilers.
As she eulogizes her “dear, dear world of a father” in the penultimate episode of HBO’s Succession, Siobhan Roy repeats the pattern that’s made her such a brilliantly frustrating creation across the show’s four tectonic seasons: she tiptoes up to the edge of the truth, only to retreat from the harshness of its glare. As children, Shiv recalls, she and her brothers would sometimes play outside their father’s office, and he’d burst into the hallway to yell at them, insisting on peace and quiet while he ran one of the world’s most powerful media conglomerates. “What he was doing in there was so important, we couldn’t conceive of what it was,” Shiv says. “Presidents and kings and queens and diplomats and prime ministers and world bankers. And. . .” Then she pauses, swallows, and withdraws. “I don’t know. Yeah.”
A wiser person might have pushed on and said, “And we still can’t conceive of it. And neither could he.” They might have acknowledged that this collective inability to conceive of the scope of Logan Roy’s power has set fire to the world outside the church’s walls. But Shiv, like the rest of her kin, is not wise. She’s just rich. And as Succession barrels toward a supersized series finale, it’s underlining the fact that she and her silver spoon–sucking siblings may never learn how to be anything else.
Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy, Sarah Snook as Shiv Roy, and Kieran Culkin as Roman Roy. (HBO)
For the duration of its decorated, zeitgeist-dominating run, Succession has been a lot of things: Shakespearean ensemble comedy, venomous satire, diamond-sink family drama. At its core though, it’s always been a show about scale. “Think you know what rich means?” it’s asked, piling a Kanye West–sized birthday party on top of a $10 billion acquisition deal and three eye-bleedingly decadent weddings. “Think again.”
Crucially, the billionaires at the center of the show’s crash-zoom-heavy circus don’t know what rich means either: their influence long ago surpassed the powers of human consciousness, locking them in a kind of terrible tunnel vision that makes their boardroom maneuvers and individual reversals of fortune seem big enough to fill the canvases of their entire lives. Often, this tunnel vision has made the show thrilling, or funny, or both — it’s exhilarating to watch pieces of the Waystar pie change hands, and bitterly hilarious to remember that America’s “movers and shakers” are, by and large, buffoons. As things wind down, though, the Roys’ shortsightedness is begetting mostly tragic shades.
After Shiv shares her childhood anecdote and nearly stares Waystar’s awful reach in the face, she does what all Roys do and brings the focus back to herself. It was difficult to be Logan’s daughter, she admits, because he “couldn’t fit a whole woman in his head.” What she fails to grasp is that this is a symptom of her father’s disorder rather than the disorder itself. For all his alleged complications, Logan’s goal was simple: he wanted more. He lived to grow, period, and had an uncommon lack of scruples about the mechanisms that enabled that growth, even for an oligarch.
It’s bitterly hilarious to remember that America’s ‘movers and shakers’ are, by and large, buffoons.
In one of his most revealing late-series conversations, he barks, “What are people? They’re economic units.” To keep his engine running, Logan couldn’t fit other people in his head. He couldn’t even fit himself in there, refusing to engage when demons from his past — an abusive uncle, a dead sister, former employees wielding misconduct allegations — threatened to breach the walls he’d built to contain them.
For a while, the structure of the show itself seemed to bend to Logan’s will. A total absence of flashbacks (save the title sequence) trapped the action in an eternal present tense; moments of pathos were washed away by or absorbed into more pressing matters of business. Ever since Logan’s death, though, the center of gravity has shifted, and the show has illustrated how woefully insufficient the meeting-to-meeting mentality Logan inflicted on his children and contemporaries is in the face of forces as tidal as grief and fascism. Absent its Rupert Murdoch–shaped steam engine, Succession is deliberately spinning out, leaving mostly interpersonal misery in its wake, and achieving a warning sign about resource-hoarding far more potent than any more prescriptive piece of class critique in recent memory.
Brian Cox as Logan Roy. (HBO)
King Lear, one of Logan Roy’s clearest literary analogues, famously turned to a room full of underlings and loved ones to ask, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” As Succession has hinted for years, no one — including Logan Roy — could say who Logan Roy was. His fanatical desire for growth crowded out every inch of his humanity. Before Shiv gives her noncommittal eulogy, Logan’s brother, Ewan, gives it a shot too. He shares his and Logan’s traumatic exploits as refugees during World War II, eloquently lays out Logan’s faults, and concludes that he must, in the end, have loved his brother — but any firm, summative portrait eludes him.
It’s only Kendall, Logan’s one-time heir apparent, who comes close to capturing the essence of his father, in a stirring speech that sacrifices personal detail for trumped-up populist rhetoric. “He had a vitality and a force to him that could hurt — and it did,” Kendall begins:
But by god, the sheer lives, and the livings, and the things that he made. And the money. The lifeblood, the oxygen of this wonderful civilization that we have built from the mud. The corpuscles of life gushing around this great nation, this world, filling men and women all around with desire. Quickening the ambition to own, and make, and trade, and profit, and build, and improve. The great geysers of life he willed, of buildings he made stand, of ships, steel hulls, amusements, newspapers, shows, and films, and life.
But what, in the end, did all that bluster amount to? Logan’s name may, indeed, be plastered on amusement parks, cruise ships, and lucrative intellectual property the world over, but he spends his final days estranged from his children, rambling incoherently to his closest advisers, and carrying on an affair with a decades-younger assistant that embarrasses anyone who so much as thinks about it. He dies alone, in an airplane bathroom, fishing his iPhone out of the toilet.
Kendall, of course, avoids disclosing anything quite so concrete. He continues, “Now people might want to prune the memory of him to denigrate the magnificent, awful force of him. But my God, I hope it’s in me.” The joke of the show, of course, is that it’s not in him, nor in his petulant, self-absorbed siblings; the tragedy is that each of them wishes it was, because they have no idea how else to be.
Perhaps the only Lear line more famous than “Who can tell me who I am” is the king’s assertion, to his daughter Cordelia, that “nothing will come of nothing.” Logan Roy lived his long life as if he was haunted by that idea and determined to invert it. If nothing would come of nothing, then he would give everything to his work, and thus everything would come of it, and it would all be his. As the finale approaches, though, Succession seems to be asking whether Shakespeare got it wrong. What if, in the end, nothing comes of everything?
May 25 marks the anniversary of the liberation of Lebanon’s territory. (Sameh Rahmi / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
May 25 marks the anniversary of the liberation of Lebanon’s territory, ending an almost two-decade Israeli occupation of the south of the country.
To this day there remains considerable pride that groups of well-organized Lebanese — tired of the injury and loss under yet another illegal Israeli occupation — successfully ejected one of the most modern, lavishly funded and reputedly best-organized militaries on Earth. Populations in southern Lebanon suffered immeasurable damage under a constant threat of detention, torture, extrajudicial killings, and the many other patterns of Israeli behavior still carried out in its military occupation in Palestine.
Today, a comprehensive museum to the Lebanese liberation, set up at the picturesque, central mountain village of Mlita, displays a collection of the nail bombs, land mines, and illegal cluster munitions that the Israelis used nearby in efforts to maintain their occupation. Yet this was all without success — and Lebanese resistance instead offered a further example in the global body of evidence that there is no force more potent than a people defending its homeland.
A unifying moment for this country, its struggle is also inseparable from the cause of Palestine. The Israeli occupation was primarily an effort to crush a society that had offered solidarity, and also shelter, to those Palestinian refugees and resistance that fled Israeli perpetration of the Nakba in 1948. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was based in Lebanon until the Israeli invasion, whereupon it moved to Tunisia, a relocation that in turn unleashed fresh Israeli attacks against Tunis.
Nor was that liberation twenty-three years ago the end of Israeli interference in Lebanon. Firstly, because a war in 2006 saw Israel attempt another brutal invasion, complete with the bombing of Beirut, rather than enter into negotiations for Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails, after Israeli soldiers were also captured near the border.
Lebanese are still today left to suffer the constant trauma of flyovers, “buzzed” by Israeli warplanes on their way to attack targets, particularly in Syria, where the Israelis also still maintain their illegal occupation of the Golan Heights. Moreover, after the awful 2020 explosion at Beirut Port, Lebanon is still awash with rumors that the official story does not stack up — with possible Israeli involvement one theory being considered by investigators.
Memories, too, persist. None have forgotten the Israeli support of far-right Christian militias within Lebanon, the Phalanges most notorious among them, who carried out repeat atrocities during Lebanon’s civil war, including — behind the protection of an Israeli military cordon — the 1982 massacres of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. This cynical Israeli effort in divide and rule is prominent among the causes of the sectarianism under which Lebanon has struggled, a division that is only now beginning to give way to a singular Lebanese national identity.
But for all the history, economic crisis, and enduring problems of having Israel as a neighbor, there is a cautious optimism about the state of affairs. Though Lebanon does not recognize Israel, and the countries are officially still at war, a deal last year to delineate a maritime boundary in the Mediterranean should give the near-bankrupt Lebanese economy a lifeline in the form of Lebanese gas reserves that have until now been — true to form — appropriated by the Israelis.
The deal was struck after Hezbollah flew an unarmed reconnaissance drone toward the Israeli gas field, Karish — a measured act of threat-signaling that cuts against regular Western depictions of the group as recklessly violent. Crucially for Lebanon — particularly those in southern regions who bore the brunt of Israeli occupation — the episode shows a new state of deterrence existing between the two countries, preventing the threat of further Israeli occupation, but also showing Tel Aviv that Lebanon has the ability to impose costs upon it in the event of further Israeli violations. US sanctions continue to exacerbate corruption and internal divisions within Lebanese society and economy, helped gladly by a corrupt local elite, but just two decades since liberation, internal security from the Israeli threat is not taken for granted.
While that liberation was a hard-earned victory for Lebanon, its lessons travel well. Western interest in the Palestinian struggle, particularly perhaps in younger generations who were not alive when Lebanon successfully ousted the Israelis, can tend to fixate narrowly on the Palestinian territory still under Israeli occupation, or the injustices meted out against Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Greater awareness of Lebanon’s liberation is helpful here in multiple respects.
Firstly, in driving home the fact that the Israeli project sought to occupy all the way to Beirut (as well as across Sinai in Egypt), its cross-border, expansionist and in all ways illegal modus operandi is more apparent than by looking at only Palestine and Israeli methods deployed in the West Bank and Gaza. In a time of heightened global attention to international law and Ukrainian territorial integrity, the Israeli gusto for cross-border annexations cannot be overstated.
Secondly, it is helpful to understand that many Zionists do sincerely — if not legitimately — feel that the territory Israelis now claim, including the obvious Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, is a small amount next to the greater swathes that the Israeli military has previously occupied. The grievance is not valid, but it exists, and grievance can be a potent motivating force.
Moreover, Western interest in Palestine needs to pay attention to Lebanese liberation because Lebanon remains a firm friend to the Palestinians. Its population retains a wide and deep social empathy with what Palestinians suffer under the Israelis, because they very recently were made to suffer the same.
The Lebanese conviction to take matters of liberation into their own hands is also indicative of the fact that people cannot wait for anybody to come and save them. Western influence has, to say the least, done little to limit Israeli aggression and crimes, and no one should be chided for refusing to submit to a supposed peace process that sees their homeland daily destroyed.
Lastly, and most crucially, the anniversary of Lebanese liberation from Israeli occupation should be recognized quite simply because it was a victory. In this, the very fact forms an important reminder of an arc of history that, while it always needs pushing, will be bent toward justice.
“So far we don’t have nuclear weapons, but by God, if we had – we would use them,” Jibril Rajoub has said.
By World Israel News Staff
Labor MK Gilad Kariv will be travelling to Ramallah this Sunday to meet with Fatah senior Jibril Rajoub, who is seeking to replace the widely unpopular and ailing octegenarian Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Channel 14’s Motti Kastel reported Thursday.
A close ally of late arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat within Fatah, Rajoub was tapped to lead the PA’s internal security force after the Oslo Accords, before Arafat appointed him national security advisor in 2003.
The meeting will include Gadi Baltiansky, CEO of the Geneva Initiative – in what appears to be an attempt to revive the movement calling for a return to the pre-1967 borders, the establishment of a Palestinian state and the annexation of the Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem to “Palestine.”
In a Channel 10 interview in 2007, the report notes, Rajoub, who is currently working to reach a reconciliation agreement with Hamas, said that “Israel is a cancer in the region. I am sure that every grain of historic Palestine, from the sea to the river – will return to us.”
In May 2013, Kastel notes, Rajoub said in an interview that “so far we don’t have nuclear weapons, but by God, if we had – we would use them” against Israel.
In the same interview, he also added: “We the Palestinians are the enemies of Israel and no one else. Our resistance as members of the Fatah movement is still on our agenda in all its forms.
“At the moment we are satisfied with the popular resistance. We the Palestinians are the source of Israel’s concern and no one else. We are on this land, and this land is ours. They are our enemy, and our campaign is against them.”
Rajoub, who served time in Israeli prison for terrorism-supporting activity, heads the Palestinian Football Association and the Palestine Olympic Committee. Rather than separating sports from politics, he has used his position to act against the Jewish state. In 2019, for example, FIFA launched an investigation against him over his support for terror.
Kariv also serves as executive director of the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism.
The post MK to meet with senior terror-supporting Fatah official in Ramallah – report appeared first on World Israel News.
Zelensky’s attempts to self-promote as some kind of a military leader despite the sore absence of a clearly defined plan of action have pushed most of the military elite into opposition, as he essentially turned the military into some sort of a theater of his with the sole purpose of waging an infowar, resulting in needless massive casualties for the Kiev regime forces.