Tracy Mumford

In London on Monday, residents in a neighborhood with a large Jewish population were woken up by the sound of exploding oxygen canisters as ambulances parked next to a synagogue were torched.

And in Belgium and the Netherlands, two Jewish schools, a bank and a car in a Jewish neighborhood, have also been attacked.

It stoked a new wave of fear and anxiety amid an already sharp uptick in anti-Semitic incidents.

So far, investigators haven't publicly said who's behind the attacks, though a previously unknown Islamist group has taken credit online.

It warned that the attacks would continue if European countries didn't distance themselves from, quote, American and Zionist interests.

There are questions about whether the group is a bogus front masking the involvement of Iran.

Police have made arrests in some of the cases, which could potentially clarify if they were coordinated, and if so, by whom.

One expert at the International Center for Counterterrorism told The Times that the goal of the recent attacks, which did not lead to any injuries, appears to be to create confusion and get attention, and that, quote, there's no reason to believe this was the last attack.

In the U.S., a special election last night in Florida handed Democrats a surprising win right in President Trump's backyard.

In a Palm Beach district that includes Mar-a-Lago, a first-time Democratic candidate beat out a Republican to flip a state House seat.

The win is part of a broader trend.

Since the 2024 election, Democrats have flipped more than two dozen seats in battleground or Republican-led states, including Arkansas and New Hampshire earlier this month.

Republicans have flipped zero.

Democrats say the results show mounting anger at President Trump and his party, feelings that could carry through to November in the midterms.

Republican strategists, meanwhile, have framed the losses as a kind of natural regression.

It's become common for the party in power to lose seats after they take the White House.

Notably, President Trump himself voted in yesterday's special election using a method he's repeatedly railed against, mail-in voting.

Just this week, he called the practice, quote, mail-in cheating.

He's been pushing Republicans to make it significantly harder to vote by mail, claiming, without evidence, that it's led to widespread voter fraud.

This year, social media companies have come under intense scrutiny in a series of lawsuits that claim their products have harmed children.