Israel moving to control Al-Aqsa Mosque

• Fars News Agency: Trump is misrepresenting the Iran deal terms. He claimed Iran agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz for free and dismantle its nuclear materials — neither is in the actual text. The US must immediately unblock $12 billion in Iranian assets before talks can proceed, and a full ceasefire in Lebanon (on Hezbollah's terms) is also required. The deal is still awaiting final approval in Iran. Informed sources describe Trump's statements as a mix of truth and fabrication — an attempt to claim a premature victory. Trump cannot tell us what we ‘must’ do, we decide it by ourselves. Trump is on his own planet and talking to himself again.

• Washington Post: Trump’s approval plunges among his white working-class base. In a striking shift, white voters without college degrees who voted to reelect Trump by a huge margin are now net-negative on his job approval.
• Bloomberg: Five US military personnel were injured in Iran's retaliatory attack on a US base in Kuwait. The IRGC launched a retaliatory strike on the base from which Iran was shelled on the night of May 28. US military personnel were injured, and two MQ-9 Reaper attack drones were seriously damaged, each costing around $30 million.  Ali Al Salem, located in the Jahra Governorate of Kuwait, mainly hosts the 386th Air Expeditionary Wing of the United States Air Force.

• Portside reports: The origins of this current malaise in the US date back to the mid-1970s, and followed the actions taken by business class elites responding to the exhortations contained in the now-famous Powell Memorandum. This was a secret 1971 memo from then-corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to the Secretary of the US Chamber of Commerce. The memo wasn’t revealed to the public until well after Powell had been appointed to the Supreme Court, where he continued to wage his ideological battle in defense of capitalism and corporate power. In the memo Powell argued that: 'The US Chamber of Commerce should lead an assault upon the major institutions, universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts, in order to change how individuals think about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual.'
• The Pentagon has spent months positioning warships and weapons in place for an attack on Cuba and is ready to go if President Trump gives the order, POLITICO reported on Wednesday. The report noted that the US doesn’t have quite the number of warships it had deployed in the Caribbean before the attack on Venezuela, but the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and its strike group just recently arrived in the region, and the US can also make use of fighter jets and other weapons based in Florida for a war with Cuba. The US has also ramped up military surveillance flights around Cuba, something it did in the months leading up to the attack on Venezuela.
• Bolivia stands up: 'We will not dialogue or negotiate with those who have the blood of our indigenous communities on their hands; we will resist in the barricades until President Rodrigo Paz resigns.' Indigenous leaders from Bolivia vow to fight until they topple the regime of Rodrigo Paz, a US puppet who seeks to privatize the country and hand over precious resources like lithium to the Yankee empire. This is what the dignity of native peoples looks like as they fight against those who destroy and sell their land. 

• Blue Origin rocket exploded on a Florida launch pad, in major setback for space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Blue Origin rocket exploded on the pad during an engine 'hotfire test' on May 28 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Blue Origin officials posted a statement: "We experienced an anomaly during today's hotfire test. Debris from the anomaly could wash ashore...over the coming days or weeks." The rocket had been slated to potentially launch as early as June 4. Rockets sometimes blow up on the launch pad or soon after take off. Imagine the danger when these rockets will be outfitted with nuclear devices in the near future as missions to the Moon and Mars are planned to carry nuclear reactors to those planetary bodies. 

• Hungary will not send weapons and military equipment to Ukraine. Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Magyar stated this at a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
• Professor Jeffrey Sachs: 'I published in the Berliner Zeitung an open letter to Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Germany has the key responsibility right now for preventing a European-wide war. Germany incidentally promised the Soviet Union and Russia in 1990 that NATO would not enlarge. Germany cheated on its promise.' 

• The US Space Force must plan to deploy troops on orbiting space stations and at bases on the moon [at the Earth-Moon Gravity Well] to prevent China from winning the new space race and controlling outer space, according to a policy paper circulated recently by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz writes in his weekly Inside the Ring column that the paper by retired Space Force Col. Kyle Pumroy warns that a sustained human military presence in space is needed to counter China’s growing space efforts that are run by the People’s Liberation Army, including plans for a moon base by 2030. 

• Confirmed: Yemen shot down another MQ-9 drone, this morning. 

• Muslims have been praying at Al-Aqsa Mosque for around 1,400 years. Israel has had its eyes on the holy site since the state’s creation in 1948, and its leaders have made increasingly aggressive attempts to seize control. In theory and by law, the custodian of Al-Aqsa Mosque is King Abdullah II of Jordan.  The US and Israel are conspiring to strip the Jordanian royal family of its historic custodianship. A US official has denied the report, but under the plan described to Middle East Eye by American, Jordanian and Palestinian officials, Israel would gain control over the appointment of imams and senior mosque officials. The plan, reportedly being pushed by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and zionist US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, would also give Israel a role in approving the content of Friday sermons.

• Footage circulating online shows Dutch police smashing a pregnant Palestinian woman into the ground, while posing no threat at all, in the Netherlands. What did she do to deserve this brutality?

• The President of Romania stated that a drone crashed in the country following an intervention by Ukrainian air defence. Romanian President Nicușor Dan visited Galați, the site where the drone crashed, and stated that the drone ended up on Romanian territory after being hit by Ukrainian air defenses near Reni. According to him, the group consisted of 43 drones, some of which were shot down over Ukrainian territory. One of the drones was likely hit over Reni, after which it changed course and crashed on Romanian territory. Of course NATO blamed Russia. 
• Pro-Palestine candidates were more likely to win their seat than candidates from any major party besides Reform at the recent local elections in England. New data shared with Middle East Eye indicates that opposition to British cooperation with Israel remains a key political issue and is a predictor for electoral success in many areas in England. At the May 7 local elections, candidates who signed the 'Pledge for Palestine', created by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, won 27 percent of the seats they contested, while Reform candidates won 30 percent. Labour candidates trailed behind on 22 percent, with the Lib Dems just one point behind on 21.

• The US is deliberately causing hunger in Cuba as part of its economic strangulation of the island, City University of New York professor Danny Shaw has said in an interview with RT. Shaw, an ethnography scholar, discussed his recent visit to Cuba and argued that the US is the main cause of the instability. “US foreign policy for 67 years now has done everything to disrupt the Cuban economy, any sense of social and economic harmony,” Shaw said. “The State Department, all these different agencies, the CIA, they know exactly how many calories Cubans have access to, and every day it’s less,” he added. Sanchez, who was born in Cuba and raised in Miami, said the issue was personal to him. He also rejected claims by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Cuba’s worsening economic crisis is primarily the fault of its own government, arguing instead that “the US has destroyed Cuba [by its economic blockade], not incompetent communists.”
• The Kremlin has published a joint statement by the leaders of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) regarding Armenia’s plans to join the EU. The leaders of Russia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan believe that a nationwide referendum should be held in Armenia on whether to join the EU or remain in the EAEU.  This is all part of NATO-EU encirclement of Russia.