|
Republicans in Georgia advanced Trump's pick for senator but not governor in the state's runoff primary on Tuesday.
|
|
President Trump denied that the United States would be part of a $300 billion rebuilding fund for Tehran and argued that his agreement was better than the one Barack Obama struck in 2015.
|
|
The United States and Iran are set to formally sign an agreement Friday to end military hostilities, reopen the Strait of Hormuz and begin negotiations on a long-term peace accord between the two countries.
According to terms of the memorandum of understanding obtained by CNN and other media outlets, there is to be "an immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon." The leaked text also promises sanctions relief for Iran and access to the country's frozen assets held abroad, as well as a $300 billion fund for reconstruction and development. The memo reiterates Iran's long-held position that it will never produce nuclear weapons, with the fate of its nuclear program delayed until further negotiations.
Israel has vowed to ignore the U.S.-Iran agreement and maintain its occupation of southern Lebanon, with many Israeli leaders and commentators expressing outrage about the apparent terms of the deal for being too conciliatory to Iran. President Trump, meanwhile, has expressed criticism of Israel's actions in Lebanon.
"Trump's had enough," says Israeli political analyst Ori Goldberg, speaking to Democracy Now! from Tel Aviv. "He hasn't had enough because he cares about the Palestinians or about Lebanon. He's had enough of Netanyahu's disrespect. He's had enough of the notion that it's actually Netanyahu who's calling the shots."
|
|
President Trump is under pressure to significantly improve upon the Obama-era deal in order to justify the huge human and economic cost of taking the United States to war.
|
|
Mr. Hern, a congressman in the deep-red state, is now likely to be elected to the Senate to fill the seat of Markwayne Mullin, now the homeland security secretary.
|
|
The U.S. and Iran reached a memorandum of understanding on Sunday extending the ceasefire by 60 days. It is set to be formally signed in Geneva on Friday. The text of the agreement has not yet been released, but Iran has agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, while the U.S. will lift its naval blockade. According to Iran, the deal calls for a permanent and immediate cessation of hostilities on all fronts, including in Lebanon. But Israel, which is not a party to the agreement, says it plans to keep troops in parts of southern Lebanon. "The Israelis are trying to destroy this deal, and they will continue to try," says Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. "It will require persistent, consistent pressure by Trump on the Israelis in order to hold them back."
We also discuss how The Free Press, founded by Bari Weiss, published an article last week claiming the State Department had opened a probe into Parsi that could lead to his deportation. The State Department issued a statement just hours later claiming that it had "no plans to revoke the green card of Mr. Parsi at this time."
"I do believe that there were elements inside the State Department that wanted to move in this direction," says Parsi. "They thought that this hit piece would help move things forward, but I think, frankly, it backfired."
|
|
More than 100 days into hostilities, Iran and the United States say they have reached a preliminary deal to end the war. Israel, however, is not a party to the tentative deal and says it plans to keep occupying areas of southern Lebanon — a position still contested by Iran and the key sticking point to the partial ceasefire deal agreed to by the U.S. and Iran in April. Although the new agreement is set to be signed Friday, Israel's unrelenting assault on Lebanon could once again spoil any deal.
"This is going to become the center of whether any actual agreement takes place," says Drop Site News's Jeremy Scahill, who joins Democracy Now! to break down what we know about this latest round of diplomacy. As the U.S. now intends to end the war without accomplishing its initial goals of regime change and nuclear capitulation, it appears that Trump has "finally accepted some version of his manufactured and almost entirely false victory narrative." Scahill, who has spoken extensively to Iranian officials about the negotiations, says it remains to be seen if Iran can successfully "decouple" the U.S.-Israeli alliance from Israel's expansionary front in Lebanon, or whether it has relinquished too much of its own "strategic leverage" by agreeing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
|
|
Ahead of the initial public offering for SpaceX, we speak with historian Quinn Slobodian, author of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. He says Elon Musk is "creating a situation where he becomes deeply reliant on state contracts" as the U.S. government then becomes reliant on Musk. "It's not about demolishing the government," Slobodian says of his work with DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency that Musk led for the Trump administration. "It's about making the government more compatible, ready for the kind of products that Musk offers, and to make him then an indispensable part of the infrastructure." Slobodian goes on to warn that Musk's wealth is helping to fuel his anti-immigrant, racist political ideology. "We really should be worried about the possibility of those things to live together: tech-driven prosperity and right-wing racist politics."
|
|
Nearly two months after the United States and Iran agreed to a ceasefire, are the two sides any closer to a lasting peace deal?
We speak with Robert Malley, the Middle East program director at the International Crisis Group, who worked in multiple Democratic administrations and helped negotiate the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal with Iran. He says Trump's decision to pull the U.S. out of that deal in 2018 "was a completely reckless and absurd one," with the Trump administration renegotiating many of the same issues, as well as pushing to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran did not previously control. "We should never have been in the position we're in now."
|
|
