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Officials in Tehran said the Strait of Hormuz would reopen to commercial shipping, but they dismissed the president's claims of a wider agreement with the U.S.
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A 10-day ceasefire has begun in Lebanon. The news is being celebrated across the country, but major questions remain over what happens next. President Trump announced the deal between Israel and Lebanon on Thursday. Hezbollah, which is not a party to the agreement, says it will observe the ceasefire. The Israeli military is occupying a large swath of southern Lebanon, about 10% of the country. Early on in the current war, the Israeli military announced the intention to create a "security zone" from the Lebanese-Israeli border all the way to the Litani River, 20 miles north of the border.
Many in the country are questioning whether Israel will abide by the ceasefire, says Beirut-based journalist Kareem Chehayeb. Israel continued airstrikes on Thursday right up until the ceasefire took effect, including blowing up the last bridge over the Litani River. "With this kind of military mobilization and this ground invasion of Lebanon, many in Lebanon do fear this could lead to some sort of long-term or even permanent occupation, similar to that from 1982 until the year 2000," says Chehayeb.
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President Trump on Thursday repeated his claim that a deal to end the war on Iran is "very close" and that direct talks with Iran could resume in Pakistan as soon as this weekend. Despite the claims, the Pentagon is surging thousands of additional troops to the Middle East, including an additional 6,000 sailors and aviators joining the USS George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier battle group. Around 4,200 others with the Navy and Marines are expected to arrive near the end of the month. Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, says "we might be, at some point, returning to a hot war" because the Iranians, too, have "preserved a degree of retaliatory capacity." The main question on the negotiating table is whether the Iranians, who "have been saying for years that they don't want nuclear weapons," will curb their nuclear activity, and if so, whether the U.S. would "be willing to provide them with economic incentives and sanctions relief."
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Sean Hannity criticized the pope. Tucker Carlson attacked Mr. Hannity. And President Trump suggested ranking MAGA figures: "good, bad, and somewhere in the middle."
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At an economic event, the president sought to downplay the financial hardship that has followed his war with Iran, saying that "we're having some fake inflation because of the fuel, the energy prices."
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The president did not specify which leaders. Meanwhile, Pakistani officials were working to extend the U.S.-Iran ceasefire and arrange new negotiations.
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After the first round of ceasefire negotiations in Pakistan collapsed over the weekend, we speak to two former nuclear negotiators about prospects for ending the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, including what another nuclear deal might look like. Robert Malley, a U.S. negotiator for the 2015 nuclear deal (which President Trump withdrew from in his first term), says Trump's "mercurial" behavior makes it difficult to predict his objectives and the course of any future talks. "Iran was in full compliance with the JCPOA" and was blindsided by the U.S.'s decision to pull out of the deal, says Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who served as spokesperson for Iran's nuclear negotiation team from 2003 to 2005. Now its leaders "don't know whether the U.S. is really for diplomacy or not."
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The White House is seeking a record-shattering Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion for the next fiscal year, the largest year-over-year increase in a presidential military spending request since World War II. The United States already has the world's largest military budget at roughly $1 trillion, more than the combined budgets of the next nine highest-spending countries. The Trump administration's budget request includes funding for F-35 stealth fighter jets, new warships and President Trump's "Golden Dome" missile defense shield, among other priorities.
"All it means is buying more weapons for more," says Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen. "It's beyond the wildest dreams of the military-industrial complex." The budget proposal also includes deep cuts to social programs.
We also speak with Josh Paul, a former State Department official involved in arms sales who resigned in 2023 over Israel-Palestine policy. He notes that the $1.5 trillion figure does not even include the costs of the Iran war. "It's just a vast amount of money in a way that is reckless by an administration that is corrupt," says Paul.
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