UNSETTLING DEVELOPMENT: Britain, Canada, and France announced the placement of sanctions on Israeli “settlements” in the occupied West Bank, with Britain saying Israel had “turned a blind eye” to violence against Palestinians.

  So-called “settlers” have been kicking Palestinians off their land for decades … often violently … and the Israeli government doesn’t stop it. The settlements are actually in many cases well-built small towns.

  British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said in Parliament that as a “proud British Jew” unwavering in his support for Israel, that “there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank — perpetrated by settler terrorists.” He announced that the sanctions would apply to those who provide services to settlements, including “construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate for settlement expansion.”

  The sanctions are likely to put Britain, Canada, and France on a collision course with President Trump, who has given unquestioning support to Israel and its Prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

THE WAR ROOM: The US says it destroyed five Iranian oil tankers in retaliation for attempted Iranian strikes on a US warship, augmenting the fighting of recent days. Oil has hit $100 a barrel.

  US Central Command said the tankers were “part of a multibillion-dollar shadow network that funds the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guards) and its regional proxies.” 

  Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s lead negotiator, told lawmakers that the era of “proportionate responses” to American attacks was over. The Revolutionary Guards also warned tankers near Kuwait and Bahrain to evacuate their crews. Jordan’s military said in a statement that it had intercepted 18 Iranian ballistic missiles.

  In a sideline to the conflict, Iram says it captured a 19-foot US Navy submarine drone. “We trapped one of the most modern, intelligent and unmanned submarines of the terrorist American army at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz,”  the Revolutionary Guards Navy said in a statement carried by Iranian state media.

TRADE WAR: Escalating his fight with the neighbors to the north, President Trump banned the import of some Canadian dairy products, all alcohol, and motorcycles.

  Trump also moved to eliminate Canadian products from large, long-term government contracts and directed the General Services Administration to declare Canadian products ineligible for those contracts until Canada allows “full and fair reciprocity″ for American products.

HISTORY LESSON: After seven years on the job and nearly two years fighting the Trump administration about how American history is presented in its museums, Lonnie Bunch IIIannounced that he will resign as secretary of the Smithsonian.

  “I have to be honest, it has been stressful,” Bunch told The NY Times. “And at a certain point, I’d like to wake up in the morning and not look at my cellphone.”

  President Trump has been pushing for presentation of what he calls “patriotic history,” a glowing picture of American accomplishments and greatness while diminishing such things as slavery. Trump has said he believes that the Smithsonian  portrays “American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive” and has an anti-white bias.

  The National Museum of American History removed a reference to Trump’s two impeachments. 

INFINITE SCROLL: 

— President Trump talked about himself, his accomplishments in office, and a little bit about the death of responders to the  9/11 attacks yesterday at the Ellipse in front of the White House during an event marking the 25^th anniversary of the terrorist attacks. 

  The President awarded the Presidential medal of Freedom posthumously to Welles Crowther, a 24-year-old stock trader and volunteer firefighter who shepherded people to safety until he died in the collapse of the World Trade Center’s South Tower.

— Trump gave $45,000 in cash gifts to his executive assistant Natalie Harp, “the human printer,”  and two of his other young White House aides, according to financial disclosures released by the administration. The gift to Harp amounts to nearly a third of her $150,000 salary.

  The gifts would appear to violate a federal law prohibiting subsidizing employee salaries with private money. 

— President Trump speaks tonight at an unusual Republican mid-term convention to whip up support for holding on to both houses of Congress. The event has been nicknamed “Trumpalooza.” 

THE OBIT PAGE: The self-described “anarcho-confectioner,” Noël Godin, a Belgian entertainer who smeared  executives, politicians, and celebrities with cream pies, died last month at age 80. Among his targets  were Bill Gates, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Jean-Luc Godard, among many others. He was 80.

  “We use only the finest patisserie, ordered at the last minute from small local bakers,” Godin told The Observer, a British newspaper, in 1995. His memoir was titled “Cream and Punishment.” 

 THE SPIN RACK: Facing conflicting court rulings in which they have both won and lost, Missouri Republicans say they are going to go ahead and use a gerrymandered congressional map that favors their party in the midterm elections. — Three jurors in the Lindsay Clancy child murder trial have given interviews about their frustration with a single juror who refused to vote not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury’s forewoman, Roni Carlson, said that despite the evidence that had convinced the other 11, that one juror said, “I’m still not going to say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.”

BELOW THE FOLD: OpenAI announced that its newest artificial intelligence technology has solved “Navier-Stokes,” one of the seven “Millennium Problems,” that have stumped human mathematicians.

  Navier-Stokes asks the question whether under certain extreme conditions the laws of physics could be made to break down and, for example, water could be made to spontaneously explode. The artificial brains at OpenAI say yes, it could happen although human brains say they know of no such conditions in which that could.

  This is why big companies are building acres of data centers sucking up water and power.

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