Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org, I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with the assassination by an Israeli drone of a top Hamas official in Beirut,

which is bound to inflame an already tenderbox situation that could lead to a war between Israel and Hezbollah,

since the target, Saleh El-Ruri, was in effect the Hamas ambassador to Hezbollah, since the target, Saleh El-Ruri was in effect the Hamas ambassador to

Hezbollah with close ties to Iran.

Joining us is Thanasi Kambanis, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and director of

the Center for International Research and Policy.

Until recently, he worked as a journalist based in Lebanon, and his books include A Privilege

to Die, Inside Hezbollah's Legions and their endless war against Israel, Once Upon a Revolution,

an Egyptian story, and most recently, Shia power comes of age, the transformation of Islamist

politics in Iraq 2003 to 2003. Then we'll investigate the well-funded movement underway

led by the man who has already stacked the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary to create

a test case to tear down Thomas Jefferson's wall between church and state by reversing the

Supreme Court's interpretation of the First

Amendment. Joining us is Paul Collins, professor of legal studies and political science at the

University of Massachusetts Amherst, whose research focuses on understanding bias and inequality

in the American legal system, particularly in the behavior of actors like judges, legislators,

presidents, the media, and interest groups. His books include friends of the Supreme Court,

interest groups, and judicial decision-making, Supreme Court confirmation hearings and constitutional

change, and the President and the Supreme Court going public on judicial decisions from Washington to Trump.

Then finally we'll explore the frightening similarities between Germany in the early 1930s and the U.S. in 2024,

with Trump and his followers who were about a third of the vote,

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