The new Palace Pub may look a lot like Wrestaurant at the Palace, the restaurant that preceded it: Very long wood bar, classy teal walls, festive entryway mural, outdoor patio space and walk-up pizza window.

But don’t be fooled: They’re different! The pizza is thin-crust now!

Jokes aside, the Palace Pub is pitching itself as a bar — a distinct vibe, if subtly so, from its predecessor.

“Before, we’d said ‘restaurant,’ and now it’s a bar,” said Marc Dickhut, the director of general operations for First Avenue, which owns the restaurant and co-manages the adjacent Palace Theatre. “You can still have great food and great service and be a bar. There are plenty of amazing restaurants in this area. We just want to be a good bar, with good food.”

Wrestaurant, which opened in fall 2023, was a partnership between First Avenue and local Detroit-style shop Wrecktangle Pizza, but the Palace Pub is fully an in-house project, Dickhut said. Wrestaurant quietly closed last fall amid extensive water damage to its building, bought in early 2023 by now-troubled Madison Equities. The spot had previously been home to Wild Tymes.

Now as the Palace Pub, the menu is completely redone: More casual and tavern-y, with similarities to the menu at The Depot, First Avenue’s restaurant next to its downtown Minneapolis flagship. The staff is new. And because of the water damage, some of the furniture, fixtures and plumbing are new, too.

It’s certainly a place to eat before Palace shows or other concerts or events downtown, but Dickhut and his team also hope you’ll visit even when your next stop isn’t next door, he said. Arcade games and pinball have been added, and the place is open regularly 3 p.m. to 1 a.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, regardless of various nearby venues’ event schedules.

The Palace Pub opened a little early on its first day for a sneak peek, and I stopped by to check it out. As for drinks, they’ve got 12 beer taps, plus cans, wine, non-alcoholic options and cocktails that, at least in the case of my TC Side Car, were appropriately strong.

And speaking of that thin-crust pizza, it’s good.

I sprung for a classic cheese. Whole pizzas are cut into squares, but slices are also available. The point is not to be a push-the-envelope pizza, though I did appreciate that the sauce was especially zesty; it’s to be one you’d happily split with friends over some drinks, which it was.

Same goes for the Buffalo wings, served as separate drumettes and flats instead of whole as previously: They’re Buffalo wings that taste like Buffalo wings. And you know what? That hits the spot.

Palace Pub: Open 3 p.m. to 1 a.m. Tuesdays–Saturdays at 33 W. Seventh Place; 952-600-5611; palacepubstpaul.com

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If the Pentagon had used bunker buster bombs and cruise missiles to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapon facilities last year, a necessary act as the fanatical mullah regime in Tehran will never voluntarily give up on nukes, the congressional Republicans would be calling President Joe Biden’s action unconstitutional and saying that he was starting a war, while Democrats would be praising the president for ending a threat to the whole world.

What’s changed is that a Republican president ordered the strikes, so the Democrats are crying foul, while GOP leaders on the Hill are lining up behind President Donald Trump.

Democrats and Republicans agree that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons. If the ayatollah would not abandon his nukes program through diplomacy, and after years and years of talks and deceptions and delays, he wouldn’t, then it would have to be ended by other means, including being bombed to bits. It shouldn’t matter which political party the president is.

Such partisanship is not about the consensus foreign policy, stopping Iran from having the bomb, but about who is in the White House. And that’s a bad prescription, especially since for decades, every president, of both parties, has been trying to deal with the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, home to chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” seeking to acquire atomic weapons.

It was former President Barack Obama who showed the world that Iran was building a secret underground uranium enrichment factory at Fordo in 2009. It was also Obama who authorized the creation of a bomb big enough to destroy Fordo, buried inside of a mountain, the GBU-57A/B MOP. That stands for Guided Bomb Unit and Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000 pound, 20-foot long giant.

A squad of seven B-2 bombers flew the 37 hours roundtrip from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to Iran to drop their payloads of two bombs each. That equals 14 of these things, which is 420,000 pounds of bomb, landing on Fordo and Natanz, another nuke site.

Meanwhile, a U.S. sub offshore of Iran launched 30 Tomahawk missiles at Isfahan, the third nuke target hit in Operation Midnight Hammer in the dead of night in Iran over the weekend.

A week ago, as Israel was attacking Iran’s nukes and ballistic missile infrastructure (along with its military leaderships and atomic scientists and air defenses) the G-7, which consists of the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Canada, Italy and Japan, issued a joint statement that said “Iran is the principal source of regional instability and terror,” and “We have been consistently clear that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.” Let’s highlight that: “Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.”

Trump gave Iran chance after chance, even as Israel struck. But Iran would not cease its pursuit of nukes.

Iran has threatened retaliation, but they are very weak, their proxies of Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, either destroyed or degraded to impotency. Iran’s puppet state of Syria is no more and the militias in Iraq are far less a danger. Half their missile launchers are gone and Israel controls the skies over the country.

Give up the nukes for good and all the fighting ends, which is something everyone in Washington can agree on.

— The New York Daily News

By MATTHEW LEE and ELLEN KNICKMEYER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has authorized providing $30 million to a U.S.- and Israeli-backed group that is distributing food in Gaza, a U.S. official said Tuesday, an operation that has drawn criticism from other humanitarian organizations.

The request is the first known U.S. government funding for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s aid distribution efforts amid the Israel-Hamas war. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive diplomatic issue involving a controversial aid program.

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The announcement comes as violence and chaos have plagued the new food distribution sites since opening last month. GHF says no one has been killed at the aid sites themselves and that it has delivered 44 million meals to Palestinians in need.

Palestinian witnesses and health officials say Israeli forces have repeatedly opened fire on crowds heading to the sites for desperately needed food, killing hundreds in recent weeks. The Israeli military says it has fired warning shots at people it said approached its forces in a suspicious manner while going to the sites.

Israel wants the GHF to replace a system coordinated by the United Nations and international aid groups. Along with the United States, it accuses Hamas of stealing aid, without offering evidence. The U.N. denies there is a systematic diversion of aid.

Hamas has been designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, Canada and the European Union.

The Associated Press reported Saturday that the American-led group had asked the Trump administration for the initial funding so it can continue its aid operation, which has been criticized by the U.N., humanitarian groups and others. They accuse the foundation of cooperating with Israel’s objectives in the 21-month-old war against Hamas in a way that violates humanitarian principles.

State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters earlier Tuesday that she had no information to provide on funding for the foundation.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A man charged with aiding the bomber of a fertility clinic in California has died in federal custody just weeks after his arrest, prison officials said Tuesday.

Daniel Park, 32, was accused of supplying chemicals to Guy Edward Bartkus of California, the bomber, who died in the May 17 explosion.

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The two men connected in fringe online forums over their shared beliefs against human procreation, authorities told reporters Wednesday. The blast gutted the fertility clinic in Palm Springs and shattered the windows of nearby buildings, with officials calling the attack terrorism and possibly the largest bomb scene ever in Southern California. The clinic was closed, and no embryos were damaged.

Park, of suburban Seattle, was found unresponsive in Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles Tuesday morning and was pronounced dead at the hospital, prison officials said. No cause of death was provided.

Park shipped 180 pounds of ammonium nitrate to Bartkus in January and bought another 90 pounds and had it shipped to him days before the explosion, authorities said. Park purchased ammonium nitrate online in several transactions between October 2022 and May 2025, according to a federal complaint.

Three days before Park visited him in January, Bartkus asked an AI chat application about explosives, detonation velocity, diesel and gasoline mixtures, the complaint said. The discussion centered on how to create the most powerful blast.

Authorities said Park traveled to California to experiment with them in the bomber’s garage months before the attack.

Park was taken into custody at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, after he was extradited from Poland, where he fled to four days after the attack. Park had been charged with providing and attempting to provide material support to terrorists.