Posts on Tuesday, July 7, 2026

BANGOR, Maine — Maine author Stephen King appears to be standing behind Graham Platner, even as the Senate candidate faces allegations of sexual assault and growing calls to end his campaign. Posting on 'X' shortly after POLITICO published testimony from a Maine woman who accused Platner of assaulting her in 2021, the prolific horror writer wrote "Graham Platner may drop out. I hope he doesn't, but." King then went on to reference President Donald Trump, and the numerous sexual misconduct allegations he has faced over the years, calling him the "Abuser in Chief." President Trump has consistently denied several public allegations

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards fired at least two missiles at commercial ships transiting through the Strait of Hormuz on Monday night, Axios reported, citing two US officials. Two commercial ships suffered significant damage but had no casualties, the report said, citing a US official. Separately, Britain’s maritime security agency said a tanker caught fire after being hit by an unknown projectile east of Oman’s Limah early on Tuesday.

Last night TCM played the dystopian thriller Soylent Green (1973), starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson. It was Robinson’s last film. He was dying of cancer during the filming and Heston credited him with the success of the film. Robinson played his character’s death scene in the face of his own “true and imminent death,” as Heston subsequently wrote. Rereading Gulliver’s Travels, I’ve been thinking about Heston’s role as surviving astronaut George Taylor in Planet of the Apes (1968). As Taylor crash lands on a strange planet, the film performs a variation on Part IV of Gulliver’s Travels. In Part IV Gulliver visits the land of the Houyhnhnms.

An Inspector General audit of the Minority Business Development Agency’s flagship program found that 96 percent of the reviewed transactions should not have been approved, revealing a stunning lack of oversight at the now-defunct agency and raising questions about what will happen if Democrats revive the program. The November 2025 audit, which has not been previously reported, reviewed $16 billion in transactions approved by the MBDA business center program, a network of federally funded consultancies, public and private, aimed at supporting minority-owned businesses, which had to be at least 51 percent minority-owned to qualify for services. The audit found that $15.4 billion of the $16 billion in transactions reviewed

The pastor of a prominent Chinese underground church has arrived in the United States less than two months after President Donald Trump pressed his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, for his release following pressure from lawmakers and rights groups. "Ezra" Jin Mingri, 56, founder of Zion Church—one of China's many so-called "house churches" that operate outside government control—was arrested in October along with 17 other church leaders in coordinated overnight raids across the country, in one of the Chinese Communist Party's largest crackdowns on a single church in decades.