What happened

The U.S. military early Monday morning completed a ninth consecutive night of airstrikes on Iranian targets, and Iran again fired missiles and drones at Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan. The Pentagon said a U.S. service member was killed in Iraq on Saturday during the “controlled detonation” of a downed Iranian drone, and human remains were found at a military base in Jordan hit by Iranian strikes last week. That attack killed two U.S. troops, and if the remains are confirmed to be a soldier missing since the strikes, the U.S. death toll from the Iran war will be 18. Iran said U.S. strikes had killed at least 50 people since a ceasefire collapsed this month.

Who said what

The U.S. hit Iran “very hard again” throughout the night “in honor of” the “great patriots” killed, Trump told reporters. “We feel very badly,” but “those great people” were “fighting that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.” Iran has been “stepping up” its strikes on Jordan “as it seeks to produce American casualties and deter Washington from escalating its test of wills with Tehran,” The Wall Street Journal said.

What next?

“Even larger American attacks may be coming” as “more U.S. warplanes head to the Middle East,” the Journal said. “The U.S. is planning for a wider war,” a U.S. official told The Washington Post, but with dwindling munitions stockpiles and growing battle damage, “we do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that.”

For months, equity markets have been able to treat higher oil prices, higher government bond yields and vast AI costs “as separate problems arriving on different days”, said Stephen Innes on Investing.com. But Wall Street is now finally on “the collision course it had spent weeks pretending would never happen”.

The catalyst was the Strait of Hormuz, where the standoff between Washington and Tehran entered a dangerous new phase, pushing the price of Brent crude up by more than 10% to $85/barrel, the highest in four weeks. For investors, central bankers and governments, the spectre of an inflation shock that many had hoped was behind us has hoved back into view.

No shelter

“I’m left wondering why the smart money failed to hedge against what was always a highly probable breakdown of this fragile ceasefire,” said Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times. “The interim peace deal was clearly resting on a knife’s edge, yet investors chose the comfort of short-term optimism over geopolitical probability. Again.” Iran isn’t the only conflict vexing the oil market, said Javier Blas on Bloomberg. “What matters for Main Street” isn’t the cost of crude, but of petrol, diesel and jet fuel. On that score, the concurrent escalation of the Ukraine War in recent weeks is troubling, given shortages in global refining capacity, in Russia and beyond.

The difficulty investors face is finding shelter from these geopolitical crises, said James Mackintosh in The Wall Street Journal. “In the old investment paradigm, government bonds acted as shock absorbers, with prices rising and yields falling when the economy takes a hit.” But that doesn’t work when shocks are inflationary – particularly “when government debt levels are so high”.

Challenge for Burnham

Bonds have suffered a painful sell-off on both sides of the Atlantic, with prices of benchmark ten-year UK gilts spiking above 5% for the first time since May. Bond yields have broadly tracked oil prices since the start of the Iran conflict, said Mehreen Khan in The Times. And, once again, the UK – highly exposed to global energy and food prices – is vulnerable. Andy Burnham’s economic inheritance as the incoming PM is suddenly looking much more troubling.

“Rising gilt yields eat into the government’s fiscal buffers” by raising the cost of servicing debt, and the unknown identity of the new chancellor is adding to the jitters in debt markets. Some investors are already voting with their feet. Asset manager Rathbones has slashed its gilts holding, as a hedge against potential “fiscal irresponsibility” – out of fear that Burnham “does a Truss”. Given an increasingly fragile fiscal backdrop, more may follow.

What happened

The price of oil has jumped nearly 10% following renewed violence in the Strait of Hormuz. Brent crude futures climbed to $83 a barrel Monday, marking the “largest daily percentage gain since May 2020,” The Wall Street Journal said. The U.S. military launched its third straight night of attacks against Iran Monday night; Iran responded by striking two United Arab Emirates tankers.

Who said what

The new attacks “signaled a return to open conflict” in the region less than a month after the two nations agreed to a ceasefire, The New York Times said. They follow President Donald Trump’s social media declaration that the U.S. is “reinstating THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE,” and will take over the strait, charging a 20% fee for secure passage. That would “be a major new tax on global energy flows and would drive up the cost of the world’s oil and gas,” The Washington Post said.

What next?

The blockade goes into effect Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern time. Oil markets are facing a new reality, the Journal said, as the Strait of Hormuz is “no longer expected to return to a prewar norm.”

What happened

The U.S. military on Sunday night conducted a fresh wave of airstrikes against Iranian targets as retaliatory attacks between the two nations increase. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed responsibility for attacks on a U.S. refueling facility at the Omani port of Duqm, as well as attacks on American bases in Qatar and Jordan. Tehran also said it had shut the Strait of Hormuz and struck commercial vessels transiting the strategic waterway. The latest exchange follows fresh U.S. airstrikes on 140 Iranian military targets.

Who said what

Iran accused the U.S. of undermining diplomatic efforts, saying American attacks had “rendered futile” recent negotiations. The two nations have “traded fire and recriminations,” said The New York Times. Both have accused the other of violating the terms of the ceasefire and “leaving the region suspended between war and peace.” As the war “heats up” again, CNN said, U.S. weapon stocks “remain significantly depleted,” risking the military’s “ability to fight” any “future war.”

What next?

In a televised statement, Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who has not been seen since the Feb. 28 death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that “vengeance” for his father’s killing “is the will of our nation and must certainly be carried out”.

Tensions between Iran and the US are ratcheting up a new notch. Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new Supreme Leader, has said “revenge” for the death of his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “is the will of our nation and must certainly be carried out”. Donald Trump has called Iranian leaders “scum”, and said any attempt by Tehran to assassinate him will be met by bombings “at levels they’ve never seen before”.

Meanwhile, both countries have renewed air strikes, as Iranian hardliners insist on control of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, “their principal source of strategic leverage”, said US-based security think tank The Soufan Center. It seems the stage is set “for a return to major combat”.

What did the commentators say?

In “a high-stakes gamble”, Iran is “playing what it believes is its key card”: announcing the closure of the strait “in an attempt to pressure Trump to bend to its will”, said the Financial Times. Its “belligerent” stance, and its attacks on ships and on US-aligned Gulf states, poses “the most severe test yet” of the fragile ceasefire. “It also lays bare” the “hawkish mindset that has taken hold in Tehran”.

The leadership that has emerged in Iran since Khamenei’s death “looks keener to project strength” and wear down Trump “through military pressure, rather than diplomacy”, said The Economist. There has been a noticeable “shift in the regime’s centre of gravity” towards the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which “has accelerated Iran’s transition from a theocracy to an ambitious nationalistic state dominated by military men”.

Their aim is “preventing the erosion of their perceived influence”, Sanam Vakil, Middle East director at UK think tank Chatham House, told the FT. “They feel they have to do this to survive.” They are wagering that “Trump is risk-averse” and that they can “absorb” some “low-level conflict. But this is a quagmire.”

The recent trading of strikes “raises questions for the future of the region”, said The Soufan Center. While Tehran seems “willing to suffer the consequences of escalation, neither they nor Trump appear to want to return” to all-out war. “Each side prefers a ‘no war, no peace’ status”, even while a return to negotiations looks “bleak”.

What next?

The conflict has “descended into a mutually unsatisfying stalemate”, with Washington “unable to topple the Islamic Republic” and Tehran “unable to force the US to vacate its backyard”, said Ali Vaez on Foreign Affairs. US-Iranian tensions are “worse than ever before” but, “paradoxically”, this may be “a moment of opportunity” for both countries “to repair their broken relationship”.

Now that it is “plainly apparent” that neither side can “deliver a knockout blow to the other” or sustain “unmanaged hostility”, there are “decision-makers” in each nation who “have started looking for ways to co-exist”.

Even though the United States and Iran are embroiled in war, a new lawsuit against the Trump administration is claiming that the two countries’ governments actually began working together last year — and jeopardized Iranian asylum seekers’ lives in the process. The White House has dismissed these claims, but those who filed the lawsuit are not backing down.

‘Confidential information’

The issue first arose in 2025 when the Trump administration “adopted a policy of providing” the Iranian government with “confidential information from the immigration files of Iranians seeking asylum in the United States,” according to the lawsuit filed by the Iranian American Legal Defense Fund (IALDF). Many of the asylum seekers whose information is allegedly being shared are people who “seek refuge in the United States because of the grave dangers they face in Iran,” such as pro-democracy activists and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Disclosing the confidential information of these asylum seekers “violates federal regulations requiring confidentiality, endangers their family members and acquaintances who may still be residing in Iran, and puts those who are subject to removal to Iran at risk of persecution,” the IALDF said in a statement. The lawsuit is requesting that the court “order the U.S. government to stop sharing asylum-applicant information with the government of Iran.”

The allegations are based on accounts from “detainees who had been called into meetings with Iranian officials who seemed to already possess details from their U.S. immigration files,” Michael Kirkpatrick, a lawyer representing the Iranian fund, told The New York Times. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has denied any wrongdoing. DHS “provides illegal aliens the opportunity to contact their consular post and facilitates consular access to detained individuals, in accordance with applicable laws, regulations and agency policy,“ the department said in a statement.

‘Prohibit the government from sharing information’

The U.S. government is “allowed to work with government officials of foreign countries to coordinate deportation logistics,” said The Associated Press. But federal regulations generally “prohibit the government from sharing information that could reveal that the individual getting deported applied for asylum.” Congress “made these confidentiality protections mandatory precisely because lives depend on them, and no agency and no administration, of either party, may set them aside,” Ali Rahnama, the interim executive director of the IALDF, told the AP.

And while some may think that the conflict raging in the Middle East would have slowed the information sharing, the lawsuit “alleges that the Trump administration has continued to share confidential information during the current war between the U.S. and Iran,” said ABC News. Though the “in-person meetings reportedly stopped before the war began on Feb. 28,” the lawsuit claims the government continued to “mail or hand deliver document packages” to the Iranian Interests Section, which oversees the nation’s diplomatic duties in the U.S.

Some asylum-seeker data sharing may always occur, such as information on travel documents. What is “different here, though, is they are revealing information from the asylum applications, and that is a very specific category of information that is kept confidential,” Kirkpatrick said to NPR. The U.S. government “shouldn’t even reveal information from which one could infer that somebody had sought asylum.”

As Iran’s religious, political and military elite turned out to say farewell to the country’s former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, one figure was conspicuously absent.

Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his father as the de facto head of the Islamic Republic, has not been seen in public since the joint US-Israeli air strikes that killed many of his close family members and decapitated the regime on the first day of the war.

Khamenei, who is said to have been seriously injured in the attack, is believed to be in hiding due to Israeli threats to his life, but his absence has “raised questions about who is really running the country, and allowed extraordinary open divisions to fester”, said Farnaz Fassihi in The New York Times.

What did the commentators say?

For 36 years, “the question of who ultimately ruled Iran had one answer”, said Joshua Keating for Vox. While the country has an elected president and legislature, “whenever the US confronted Iran, American policymakers knew it was Khamenei who would make the final decision.”

But now “they’re no longer so sure”. With the sheer number of senior figures who have been killed over the past four months, “there’s something of a power vacuum in Tehran right now”.

In the void left by the killing of a supreme leader “who exerted absolute power over all important decisions”, the conservatives have “split” and generals in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have “consolidated power, effectively running the country”, said Fassihi.

With the power of the new supreme leader greatly diminished, and various factions and facets of the state jockeying for influence, the question now is just who is actually in charge of the Iranian system.

“The system is in control of the system,” Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East program at Chatham House, told Vox. “I know we all want to think that there’s one individual that has power or authority. There’s no one commander in chief. It is a system that is commanding collectively for the time being.”

If the week-long funeral for Ali Khamenei represents a “calculated projection of strength by a regime determined to demonstrate continuity and resilience despite an extraordinary crisis”, it has done little to quell questions “over the country’s political succession”, said France24.

What next?

Amid the jostling for power, Khamenei’s funeral is undoubtedly a “big moment”, said BBC diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams: a “grand reminder that the old guard has given way to the new. And with the new faces comes a new approach with its own implications.”

The new leadership is not made up of ageing ideologues who emerged in opposition to the Shah and subsequently the US, “but of generally post-revolutionary leaders ruthlessly focussed on preserving the state and willing to act more decisively than their predecessors”, said Vali Nasr, professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

“A whole new generation has taken over. They have a very clear agenda. They managed the war and now they’re going to manage the peace as well.”

Even with the many streaming-induced changes to the film industry’s operations, July remains a month for blockbusters. This July will include an intriguing mix of madcap comedies, sweeping action epics and independent fare hoping to get as many viewers into theaters — or in front of their televisions — as possible.

‘Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass’

Gail (Zoey Deutch) is so shocked when her fiance, Tom (Michael Cassidy), uses his half-joking “celebrity sex pass” — an exception to marriage vows if the opportunity arises to sleep with your most-lusted-after famous person — that she decides to even the score by traveling to Los Angeles and convincing actor Jon Hamm to go to bed with her. Featuring a “tone that’s broad, antic, overemphatic and a bit wacked,” director David Wain (“Wet Hot American Summer”) brings us a film “so aggressive in its meta absurdity that it makes an episode of ‘Seinfeld’ look like Ingmar Bergman,” said Owen Gleiberman at Variety. (in theaters July 10)

‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’

After a year of protests and war for Iran, the timing for an adaptation of Azar Nafisi’s celebrated 2003 memoir is exquisite. Golshifteh Farahahi (“Invasion”) stars as Nafisi in Israeli director Eran Riklis’ film that follows her from her sacking as an English professor at the University of Tehran following the 1979 revolution to her emigration to the United States in 1997.

The book gets its title from the secret book club Nafisi conducted in her home for her students, including Sanaz (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) and Mahshid (Bahar Beihaghi), after her dismissal. The film’s “message about the humane power of literature” makes it a “work of art rather than an exercise in sloganeering,” said Arash Azizi at The Atlantic. (in theaters July 10)

‘The Odyssey’

There may be no more bankable director working in Hollywood today than Christopher Nolan (“The Dark Knight”). He has succeeded at everything from science fiction (“Interstellar”) to war (“Dunkirk”).

In “The Odyssey,” Nolan tackles Homer’s epic story of Odysseus (Matt Damon), the king of Ithaca, and his journey home to his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), following the Trojan War. An extraordinary cast includes Zendaya as the goddess Athena and Jon Bernthal as Menelaus, the king of Sparta. Nolan “has been circling this kind of scale for much of his career, but ‘The Odyssey’ marks a new technical milestone even for him,” said Rodrigo Perez at The Playlist. (in theaters July 17)

‘The Dink’

Sports comedies like “Dodgeball” don’t always get the critical love they deserve. In “The Dink,” director Josh Greenbaum (“Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar”) looks to capture the zeitgeist with a big-hearted satire of the pickleball phenomenon.

Jake Johnson stars as Dusty Boyd, an over-the-hill tennis pro slumming it as a children’s tennis teacher at his father Chuck’s (Ed Harris) country club, where pickleball is squeezing out tennis. When an injury forces Dustin to try pickleball, he meets Candace (Mary Steenburgen) and reevaluates his kneejerk loathing of the sport. It has “all the hallmarks of a typical sports redemption story,” said Ryan O’Rourke and Maggie Lovitt at Collider. (July 24 on Apple TV+)

‘A Sad and Beautiful World’

Nino (Hasan Akil) and Yasmina (Mounia Akl), who were born on the same day in a Beirut hospital, are childhood friends who rediscover each other as young adults and fall in love against the backdrop of Lebanese political turmoil and violence. The country’s tragic 21st-century travails provide much of the fodder for the couple’s drama in director Cyril Aris’ moving film, including whether to stay or emigrate, with touches of magical realism and whimsy providing levity. A movie that “combines exuberant comedy with soft-hearted drama,” it “builds its entire thesis on the idea that there is still reason for hope,” said Matthew Joseph Jenner at International Cinephile Society. (in theaters July 24)

What happened

Slain Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral procession began advancing through the streets of Tehran this morning after Sunday’s prayers at the capital’s sprawling Imam Khomeini Grand Mosalla complex. Three of Khamenei’s sons appeared publicly Sunday for the first time since their father and other family members were killed in the opening U.S.-Israeli strikes of the Iran war, but Mojtaba Khamenei, the son who succeeded him as supreme leader, has still not made any public appearances.

Who said what

The funeral procession route was “packed to capacity” with black-clad mourners “hoping to gain a glimpse of the passing cortège,” CNN said. Some mourners said they were disappointed at the absence of Mojtaba Khamenei, whose face was reportedly “disfigured” and “one or ​both legs” significantly injured in U.S.-Israeli strikes, Reuters said. He is believed to be in hiding “due to the dangers of Israeli threats to his life,” Al Jazeera said.

The “increasingly” common “threats from mourners to avenge Khamenei’s death” included chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” and signs calling for the “killing of both U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” The Associated Press said. As the poet Mohammad Rasouli asked why “the biggest bastard in the world” was “still alive” to cheering mourners at the Mosalla complex, Trump was boasting he “wiped out” Iran’s military during “a speech at the same time across the world” to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.

What next?

After a 12-hour procession through Tehran, Khamenei’s body will be transported to Qom, then to important Shiite shrines in the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, and finally to Thursday’s burial in his hometown of Mashhad.

‘The vultures arrived before the rescue teams’

Gisela Salim-Peyer at The Atlantic

Following two earthquakes, Venezuela’s “man-made disasters didn’t take long to exacerbate the natural one,” says Gisela Salim-Peyer. For “28 years and counting, Venezuela’s rulers have stolen or squandered much of the oil revenue of the most oil-rich country in the world” as “oligarchs pocketed the petrodollars.” The “humanitarian consequences of this wastefulness were well documented,” but “now they have acquired a fresh urgency.” In the “crucial first 24 hours following the quakes, the government response was practically nonexistent.”

Read more

‘250 years later, we must recommit to the ideals in the Declaration of Independence’

Willie Wilson at the Chicago Tribune

As Americans “celebrate 250 years of representative democracy, independence and freedom, consider recommitting to the ideals found in the Declaration of Independence,” says Willie Wilson. The declaration was “written by imperfect men. However, the message of freedom has endured and inspired others around the world.” Within, there are “suggestions to strengthen our democracy.” Congress “should amend the Constitution to establish for all Americans an affirmative right to vote,” and “every citizen should read the Declaration of Independence.”

Read more

‘Iran has zero chance of honoring the MOU’

Mike Evans at The Jerusalem Post

There are “people in Washington who still believe the Iranian regime can be persuaded to change through diplomacy,” says Mike Evans. They “believe another agreement,” another version of the Memorandum of Understanding or “another round of negotiations will somehow convince the ayatollahs to abandon their nuclear ambitions.” But Iran has “repeatedly shown that it views negotiations as a strategic tool.” Every “concession allows Tehran to strengthen its military, rebuild its economy and continue pursuing the very objectives it promised to abandon.”

Read more

‘How Trump plans to crush fast food workers’

Timothy Noah at The New Republic

Corporate America has “systematically shed low-wage workers, either by offshoring them, contracting out their work or designating them as independent contractors,” says Timothy Noah. The “consumer welfare standard is on its way out, but that transition is not happening quickly.” Today “fast food employees are mostly grown-ups, often with families, and their best recourse, if they can’t make ends meet, is to go on welfare.” President Donald Trump’s “proposed joint-employer rule will impoverish these workers even more.”

Read more

What happened

The U.S. last week removed sanctions on Iranian oil even as peace talks between Washington and Tehran appeared to descend into confusion, with the two sides issuing conflicting accounts of discussions on nuclear inspections and the unfreezing of billions in Iranian funds. An initial round of talks in Switzerland “laid a very good foundation” for a final peace deal, said Vice President JD Vance, who led the U.S. delegation. But the two sides soon sparred publicly over Iran’s nuclear program, with Vance and President Trump saying Tehran had agreed to U.N. inspections of its damaged nuclear sites while Iranians insisted they hadn’t. “They know they’re wrong,” Trump said. “They told us inside.” The two sides also disagreed over the fate of Iran’s highly enriched uranium, which the preliminary agreement states will be diluted. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said his country will “never back down from the right to enrich uranium”; Trump shot back that “he better watch his mouth” or “we’ll take over the rest of the country.”

Citing “productive” talks, the U.S. waived long-standing sanctions on Iranian oil through August and cleared the way for Tehran to be paid in dollars, including by U.S. buyers. Iranian officials said steps had been taken toward the release of $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets. Vance said if assets were released, Iran would have to spend them on U.S. exports, but Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei insisted Iran can spend any released funds “freely.” There were also sharp divisions over the Strait of Hormuz, where hundreds of ships were stranded during the conflict. Iran said it will charge “fees” to ships using the strait in exchange for unspecified services; Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that no country can charge fees for transiting an international waterway.

In Washington, the Senate passed a resolution barring Trump from resuming the Iran war without congressional authorization, with four Republicans joining Democrats in a rare rebuke of the president. The vote came amid broad GOP skepticism about Trump’s ceasefire deal, which has been widely criticized for ceding too much to Iran while achieving none of Trump’s war aims. “The administration acts like they want a deal much more than the ayatollah regime,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.). It “looks like weakness.”

What the columnists said

The “sweeping rollback” of U.S. oil sanctions reverses “years of pressure designed to cripple Iran’s economy,” said Anniek Bao in CNBC.com. The 60-day license issued by the Treasury Department will unlock the sale of 67 million barrels of Iranian crude floating in the strait, yielding a “windfall” of up to $9 billion for Tehran. And it reopens “Iran’s most important revenue stream.” Sanctions are unlikely to return after 60 days, said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. “Once Iranian oil is in the international supply line, they have Trump over a barrel,” because he won’t be able to impose curbs on Iranian exports without “pushing oil prices up again.”

This is quite the turnaround for the Trump team, said Andrew Kaczynski and Jennifer Hansler in CNN.com. For years, Trump, Rubio, and Vance assailed deals that provided financial concessions to Iran, saying they would enrich a dangerous foe that “fuels terror.” That was their “central indictment” of former president Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, which granted Iran sanctions relief and “access to frozen assets.” Now they’re poised to hand the regime piles of dollar bills.

And for what? asked The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Tehran has “made no serious concession on nuclear matters.” Lifting oil sanctions now will “gut” U.S. leverage and send cash flowing to the coffers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran claims some of its frozen assets have already been released, possibly $6 billion that was being held in Qatar. Even if Tehran complies with a U.S. dictate that such cash be spent only on food and medicine, “it frees up other funds for military purposes.”

Meanwhile, the preliminary deal signed by Trump treats our ally Israel as if it were a U.S. “puppet” with “no sovereignty beyond that which America grants it,” said Noah Rothman in National Review. By demanding a ceasefire in southern Lebanon, Iran has compelled America to tacitly take the side of the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists who use the region to strike at northern Israel. “And all in the craven pursuit of a ‘peace’ unworthy of the word.”

“Negotiating with Iran has always been an extraordinary challenge,” said David E. Sanger and Yeganeh Torbati in The New York Times, but it’s even more complex under Trump. Instead of letting negotiators quietly work toward a full agreement, he likes to trumpet “his preferred outcomes as fully negotiated side deals,” in a bid to force Iran’s hand. The Iranians have their own “spin strategy”: Deny every claim, even if it contains “an element of truth.” Some “posturing” is par for the course, but at this level it raises the question of whether the sniping “will ultimately sink the whole venture.”

Hanging over the negotiations is “an uncomfortable question,” said Aviva Klompas in USA Today. What exactly has the U.S. accomplished? The hardliners remain in power in Tehran. The fate of Iran’s highly enriched uranium is unsettled. The Strait of Hormuz, where oil shipping was uncontested before the war, is now a “bargaining chip.” Iran has “suffered enormous losses” to its military and nuclear infrastructure. But if it is financially rewarded and retains its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, it’s fair to ask “whether Tehran has once again accomplished a tactic it has spent decades perfecting: losing the war while winning the negotiation.”

‘We're eating too much sugar. There are ways to change that.’

Priya Fielding-Singh at USA Today

Added sugar “isn't just in candy and soda,” says Priya Fielding-Singh. It is “pervasive, hiding in everyday staples families depend on — from bread and yogurt to tomato sauce.” The government “should set stricter standards around added sugar in the places where children learn and play, from childcare and schools to aftercare programs.” The USDA “should further reduce how much added sugar is allowed, while investing in kitchen infrastructure so schools can prepare more food on site.”

Read more

‘Once, cyber attacks required great skill. AI is changing that.’

Bruce Schneier at The Guardian

“Cyber attacks — both large and small — have been a significant issue since long before the current crop of generative AI models,” says Bruce Schneier. What has been “changing over the decades, and what AI is changing even faster, is the gap between skill and ability.” These “models can, with little detailed direction, autonomously hack into networks, steal data, deploy ransomware and destroy systems.” To the “extent there is a solution, it’s going to involve harnessing AI for the defense.”

Read more

‘What's really driving Latin America’s rightward elections’

Orlando J. Pérez at The Dallas Morning News

Latin American voters are “not embracing a coherent right-wing program any more than voters in 2018 and 2019 embraced a coherent left-wing one,” says Orlando J. Pérez. They are “doing what Latin American electorates have done for decades: punishing whoever holds office when crime rises and the economy stalls, and backing whoever promises to fix both.” Latin Americans are “exhausted with their governments and quick to replace them.” When “citizens feel unsafe, they back almost anyone who promises order.”

Read more

‘The threat of force was a far more effective deterrent than Trump’s show of force in Iran’

Gilles Paris at Le Monde

Donald Trump “pledged to deliver results that would last for at least the next half-century, but the outcome was disappointing,” says Gilles Paris. The Iran memorandum’s “positions are especially difficult to hold today, notably the belief that Washington’s ‘trustworthiness’ will ‘continue to make us the global partner of first choice.’” The “war, which caught U.S. allies off guard and resulted in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, triggering a systemic global crisis, demonstrated the exact opposite.”

Read more

What happened

The U.S. attacked Iranian targets twice over the weekend while Iran struck an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz and fired drones and missiles at U.S. military sites in Kuwait and Bahrain. The “renewed fighting was sparked by competing interpretations of the memorandum of understanding” to end the war, Axios said, especially regarding the strait.

Who said what

Hours after Saturday’s oil tanker strike, President Donald Trump warned on social media that if Iran kept violating the ceasefire, the U.S. might be “forced to militarily complete the job” in Iran, which would then “no longer exist!” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Sunday said the MOU gave Tehran sole responsibility for “the management and full restoration of maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Attacking ships transiting the economically “pivotal” waterway “through Omani waters” was a risky but “necessary gambit” for Tehran, The New York Times said. Its “newfound power to disrupt traffic” in the strait is “critical leverage it cannot afford to lose — either at the negotiating table or back at war.”

What next?

After the weekend’s fighting, “both sides will stand down for now and vessels can move freely,” a Trump administration official told news organizations. “Iran has yet to confirm an agreement,” the Times said. U.S. officials said talks with Iran will resume tomorrow in Qatar.

Iran has become a “lose-lose issue” for Donald Trump, which is alienating his entire political base, said Zeeshan Aleem on MS Now. When he attacked Iran, he infuriated the isolationist wing of his coalition, who believed his promise that he’d start “no new wars”. Now, his scramble to end the conflict “is alienating the hawkish sector of his party”, who believe it amounts to a humiliating surrender.

One Republican senator described the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Trump last week as “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades”. Texas senator Ted Cruz said Trump must be getting “very poor advice”. Critics are particularly outraged by the potential creation of a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran. Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen called the provision a “disaster”, likening it to offering the “Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany while the Nazis were still in power”.

Vance under fire

Furious as they are, many Republican hawks are still reluctant to criticise Trump directly, said Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. So they’re turning their fire instead on the vice-president, J.D. Vance. “Trump effectively won the war and at the 11th hour Vance is negotiating his way to a loss,” raged one unnamed congressman to a Washington correspondent.

The president has done nothing to discourage such talk. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” he said, half-jokingly, of the peace deal. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D.” The irony, said Jim Geraghty in The Washington Post, is that Vance opposed starting this war. Now it has fallen to him to sell the peace deal and serve as the fall guy when it goes sour. “You almost have to feel sorry for Vance. Almost.”

Face of peace

“Playing the part of Trump’s surrender monkey” will hurt Vance’s image in the short term, said Jonathan V. Last on The Bulwark, but few Republican voters are likely to remember any of this stuff in two years’ time if petrol prices are back to normal and Iran hasn’t tested a nuclear device. Vance will just be the guy who helped bring an unpopular war to an end.

He has certainly been happy to serve as the face of this peace agreement, said Adam Cancryn on CNN. He asked to play a leading role in the talks, rather than being pushed into it. Vance may get the blame if the deal blows up, but he has no doubt concluded that if the two sides return to an intractable conflict, his hopes of becoming president are probably scuppered in any case.

What happened

The International Maritime Organization on Thursday paused a nascent effort to evacuate ships stranded in the Persian Gulf after Iran struck a cargo vessel, causing damage but no casualties, according to the ship’s owner. The IMO, a United Nations body, earlier this week began shepherding ships through the Strait of Hormuz along a route hugging Oman’s coast. Hundreds of ships and more than 11,000 seafarers have been stranded in the Gulf since the Iran war broke out, and Iran’s drone strike demonstrated its “continued ability to restrict the critical waterway, despite the agreement reached last week with the United States,” CNN said.

Who said what

The attacked vessel did “not transit under IMO’s evacuation framework,” IMO chief Arsenio Dominguez said in a press release, but “the evacuation plan will be paused until further clarity is obtained” on “necessary safety guarantees.” Hours before the strike, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned that transiting the strait outside routes “authorized” by Iran was “unacceptable and completely dangerous.” The opening of an alternate passage “would relieve pressure on the world economy,” The Associated Press said, but also “remove Iran’s main source of leverage in ongoing peace talks.”

What next?

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday during a “visit to the Gulf to reassure American allies” that “Washington was committed to the new route” and free passage through the strait, the AP said.

What happened

The Senate on Tuesday voted 50-48 to adopt a resolution instructing President Donald Trump to end the Iran war or obtain congressional authorization. Four Republicans joined all but one Democrat to pass the resolution, and two Republicans were absent. The House approved the measure 215-208 on June 3, and Trump cannot veto it.

Who said what

The resolution’s adoption is a “significant rebuke” to Trump, CNN said. It reflects “growing concerns” among GOP lawmakers “over both the war and the deal Trump struck with Iran to end it,” The Associated Press said. Trump called the vote “poorly timed and meaningless.”

This is the “first time since the enactment of the War Powers Resolution of 1973” that both chambers “approved a concurrent resolution directing a president to end a military conflict,” The New York Times said. Whether it’s legally binding without a president’s signature “has never been definitively tested before the Supreme Court.”

What next?

The White House is expected to request $80 billion this week to pay for the war. Trump will “meet with restless GOP senators” on Wednesday on Capitol Hill, where his preference that lawmakers just “pony up, and don’t ask too many questions” about the war, is “grating on many congressional Republicans,” Politico said.

What happened

The U.S. and Iran made “encouraging progress” after a rocky start to high-level peace talks in Switzerland, mediators Qatar and Pakistan said in a joint statement early Monday morning. The two sides approved a “roadmap” to reach a final deal during a 60-day truce, a “de-confliction cell” to ensure an end to “military operations in Lebanon” and a “communication line” to “avoid incidents and miscommunication” in the Strait of Hormuz.

The mediators had “delivered major progress to end Lebanon War,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on social media. Vice President JD Vance, the lead U.S. delegate, said in a press conference Sunday that “great progress” was being made.

Who said what

The negotiations “had a tense start,” The Associated Press said. As Vance talked of turning over “a new leaf” with Iran, President Donald Trump threatened on social media to “hit Iran very hard again” if it didn’t “immediately stop” Hezbollah from “causing trouble” in Lebanon. Trump told Fox News he had warned Iranian officials that if they closed the Strait of Hormuz, as they purported to do over the weekend, “you won’t have a country” or “even make it back to your f---ing country.”

Iranian state media reported that Trump’s threats “prompted the Iranian delegation to leave the negotiation venue,” The Wall Street Journal said. They continued negotiating through the mediators.

What next?

Lower-level technical negotiations will continue at Switzerland’s lakeside Bürgenstock resort for the rest of the week, the mediators said.

‘What a 150-year-old oak teaches about Juneteenth’

Theodore R. Johnson at The Washington Post

The “white oak in my backyard is living history,” as it has “been standing for about a century and a half, dating to the end of Reconstruction,” says Theodore R. Johnson. With “trees, as with history, what is measured matters as much as how.” Juneteenth “signifies both the end of slavery and the rebirth of a nation.” But the “majority of Americans don’t celebrate,” and that “makes it harder for the idea of a second founding to take root.”

Read more

‘Trump and Vance’s spin on the Iran agreement is completely incoherent’

Michael A. Cohen at MS NOW

The White House agreed to a “ceasefire extension that met none of its prewar objectives while providing enormous financial concessions to Tehran” and “now, the administration is desperately trying to argue otherwise,” says Michael A. Cohen. Donald Trump “got played by the Iranians, and no one is buying his spin job.” The “most telling sign that the ceasefire deal is a dud is the White House waited until Wednesday to share the text.”

Read more

‘The culture wars in pro sports go on — for now’

Michael Brendan Dougherty at the National Review

The San Francisco Giants “recently held a Pride Night” and “two Christian players wrote Bible verses on their caps,” says Michael Brendan Dougherty. This is “far from the first controversy about Pride celebrations and American sports, and probably far from the last.” The “major sports leagues are perhaps the last relics of 20th-century American mass culture.” There are “fights over the values expressed in these arenas precisely because there is an assumption that they reflect shared American values.”

Read more

‘Federal cap on student aid will hurt nursing workforce’

Jinhee Jeong at The Seattle Times

Some states are “already experiencing a nursing faculty shortage, and the problem will only get worse with the U.S. Department of Education’s Reimagining and Improving Student Education, or RISE, rule,” says Jinhee Jeong. This “excludes post-baccalaureate nursing degrees from the ‘professional degree’ category, and sets nursing students’ loan limits at $20,500 annually.” With the “increasing cost of graduate school, fewer nurses will be able to obtain a graduate degree in nursing, which will significantly worsen the shortage.”

Read more

With the U.S. and Iran arriving at a “memorandum of understanding” to end hostilities, President Donald Trump seems to think petroleum prices will come down immediately. “Let the oil flow!” he wrote on social media. But while average gas prices did fall just below $4 per gallon after the deal was signed, economists say extended relief from high prices could take much longer to arrive.

When will gas prices come down?

Drivers might expect that oil prices will start to lower as soon as the deal with Iran is inked, but they will “probably have to wait weeks or longer to see meaningful improvement,” said The New York Times. Gas prices often fluctuate in an “up-like-a-rocket, down-like-a-feather” manner, meaning gasoline costs “quickly rise alongside the price of crude oil but are slow to follow its descent.” Gas stations tend to lose money when the price of gas goes up, so when oil starts to “go down, station owners are slow to bring retail prices down to make up for their poor financial performance on the way up.”

Trump is also hopeful that the reopening of the long-contested Strait of Hormuz, and the reactivation of its oil-shipping lanes will help ease the price burden. But there is a “big difference between reopening the Strait of Hormuz on paper and actually resuming the flow of oil through it,” said The Atlantic. While a small number of ships have started traversing the strait, the U.S. and Iran are “far apart on crucial issues, including Iran’s nuclear program,” which could “dissuade oil producers from resuming operations, insurance companies from reducing currently sky-high rates and ‘Ships of the World’ from starting their engines.”

Once ships do start moving again, there will be a “gradual process of resuming east-west traffic, with international actors providing additional support,” Gregory Brew, a senior analyst on Iran and oil at the Eurasia Group, told Intelligencer. But it will “take longer — probably between three and four months — for the region to return to normalcy.” Many countries in the Middle East aside from Iran have had their oil production affected. In Saudi Arabia, virtually “all oil production has been shut in” or capped, said Brew. So a “full return to prewar production and refining levels is likely to take weeks, months or even years,“ said Reuters.

What is the bigger picture?

Fas prices presumably staying high for a while could affect more than just the gas itself. Republicans are “hopeful prices will soon ease near pre-war levels” because the midterms are on the horizon, said Politico. Even if prices go down, voters may carry negative thoughts about Trump’s economy with them into the voting booth.

Other economic elements that rely on petroleum will still be affected as well, most notably airline travel. Aviation experts “have spent months warning that even if the war ended, travelers should not expect airfares to go down immediately,” said The Associated Press. Airlines often buy fuel in advance and adjust their schedules according to demand, meaning “lower oil and jet fuel prices can take weeks or months to get factored into the cost of commercial flights.”

Fuel prices remaining elevated will also affect the grocery aisle. Fuel accounts for 15% to 30% of the total price of food, according to the Independent Grocers Alliance. It “can take months for an energy shock like the one caused by the Iran war to wind through the food supply chain and raise grocery prices,” said the AP. Food, much like gas and travel, may be expensive for a long time to come.

Babak Anvari’s Bafta-winning film “Under the Shadow” (2016) tells the compelling – and frightening – story of a woman living in Tehran at the height of the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, whose grip on reality starts to fragment after her doctor husband is sent to the front, and her apartment is hit by missiles.

This taut and nerve-shredding stage adaptation, by Carmen Nasr, “could scarcely be timelier”, said Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian. “When Shideh and her neighbours huddle together in their bomb shelter, cursing Europe and the US for abandoning them, this could be a livestream from 2026.”

Director Nadia Latif’s stylish, well-acted production honours the original film – and its paranormal elements – but “escapes its shadow”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph.

For Shideh (Leila Farzad), life has become a “form of entombment”. With the action confined to a single room and a bomb shelter, we share her “dementing claustrophobia” – and her horror at the idea that her home has been invaded by a djinn, or malevolent ancient spirit.

There are several jump scares as the atmosphere becomes increasingly unnerving. In a superb performance, Farzad conveys the “surreal, terrifying ordeal of living in a war zone and the misery of having your life ripped away by forces beyond your control”, said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times. Her Shideh is “truculent, grieving” and consumed by cold rage.

The piece is beautifully realised by Latif and designer Ben Stones, said Sarah Crompton on WhatsOnStage. A bomb blast, and the shock of “inexplicable happenings” in the apartment, are magnificently conjured. This production is “intriguing and always watchable”. But as the djinn becomes embodied, the delicate balance between the real and the supernatural starts to falter. “The play’s shocks begin to stray into ‘Woman in Black’ territory, and its shifts in tone become too jarring.”

Some special effects simply “work best in a multiplex”, said Clive Davis in The Times. Still, this intriguing play “succeeds in taking us into an unsettling realm; one where ideology, rather than a ghost, is the enemy”.

Almeida Theatre, London N1. Until 4 July

What happened

President Donald Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Wednesday signed a memorandum of understanding to open the Strait of Hormuz, allow Iran to sell oil on the global market and start unfreezing its assets. The deal also kicked off 60 days of negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program and “at least” $300 billion for Iran’s “reconstruction and economic development.”

The text of the 14-point agreement was read to reporters by a U.S. official, and Iran later released a similar version. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, a key mediator, said the agreement was in “force with immediate effect.”

Who said what

The truce will mostly “restore the status quo before the war,” The Associated Press said. However, the text suggests Iran might “negotiate some permanent way to exercise sovereignty” over the strait, including new shipping “fees,” after 60 days, said The New York Times. The Iranians have “emerged from a confrontation with the world’s most powerful military” intact and “with much to celebrate.”

“Everything we sought to achieve through military action, we obtained several times over through negotiation,” Iran’s lead negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said on state television. The deal is “very strong,” Trump told reporters at the G7 summit in France. “Most people seem to be very happy.” Critics, including many Republicans, are “stupid and bad people,” he said. But “if I don’t like it, we’ll go back to shooting at them, dropping bombs.”

What next?

Instead of the planned signing ceremony in Geneva on Friday, Vice President JD Vance and other Trump envoys will “attend three days of negotiations with their Iranian counterparts,” The Wall Street Journal said.

When a coalition of “clerics, leftists, students, nationalists and secular intellectuals” launched the Iranian Revolution in 1979, they were united less by a shared vision than “a shared rejection” of the Shah’s rule, said Reza Aslan in The New York Times. And as Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati observe in “Stolen Revolution”, “egalitarian ideals and immense hopes” were snuffed out as “the religious regime hunted, expelled and jailed its former allies”.

That is the story of this “quietly devastating” book, which charts Iran’s transformation over the past half century into a “mafia state”. The authors tell it through the lives of six Iranians, including a revolutionary ideologue, a tech entrepreneur, and two women at the forefront of the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

“The result is one of the most perceptive books on modern Iran in years, capturing not only the machinery of repression, but the fragile forms of hope that survive beneath it.”

Once in power, Iran’s first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, swiftly “abandoned his revolutionary promises”, said Dina Nayeri in The Guardian. All talk of prosperity ended (our saints “gave up their lives for Islam, not for economics”, he intoned). Conservative dress codes were enforced, and a new military police force – the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – was entrusted with preserving the revolution.

While the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) marked a more liberal, “reformist era”, the hardliners regained control when he left office and have ruled the country ever since.

“Stolen Revolution” is both an “unwavering account of the regime’s absurdities” and a “meticulously researched primer on modern Iran”.

Parts of it will “move some readers to tears”, said Justin Marozzi in The Times. The authors describe the fates of Kosar Eftekhari and Rozhin Yousefzadeh, who joined the “protests that erupted after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini”, a young woman arrested for not wearing her hijab properly. “Eftekhari had her right eye shot out by a smirking plain-clothes officer”; Yousefzadeh was thrown into the “filthy and dangerous Qarchak women’s prison”.

It was ostensibly in the hope of ending such tyranny that the US and Israel launched their war against the regime. This “blistering” book suggests that, on the contrary, the conflict will only entrench its most hardline elements further – and that it will prove to be “yet another US blunder in the Middle East, [and] one that will cost Iranians, and the rest of us, dearly”.

What happened

Vice President JD Vance said Monday that he and President Donald Trump had “digitally” signed an interim peace agreement with Iran and expected the text of the memorandum of understanding to be released before a ceremonial signing in Geneva on Friday. The potential breakthrough “drew cautious optimism and frustration” in Congress, where “even some Republicans were reluctant to praise a deal whose terms the administration has yet to disclose,” The New York Times said. “If it’s a secret deal, then how can I take it seriously?” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said to reporters.

In Israel, people “from across the political spectrum reacted angrily” to news of the deal to end the war that their government launched alongside Trump, The Associated Press said. And they directed their “fury at one man: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Who said what

It’s unclear if Trump’s deal is “one that Netanyahu will stomach — or one he will seek to derail,” The Washington Post said. Politically, he “has every incentive to continue fighting, especially in Lebanon.” For Trump, “this is his decision,” Netanyahu told reporters. For Israel, “the struggle has not ended.”

What next?

“Early signs of bumps ahead” included Netanyahu’s insistence that Israeli forces would remain in Lebanon and Iran saying it “intended to charge ‘fees’ but not ‘tolls’” to ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, the Times said. But “for all the confusion,” oil prices “tumbled, and Iranians expressed wary optimism that a war that has killed thousands could soon end.”

What happened

President Donald Trump and Iran said Sunday they had reached a preliminary deal to end hostilities and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Neither side released the text of their memorandum of understanding, but it was slated to go into effect on Friday after a signing ceremony in Geneva and last for 60 days while they negotiate Iran’s nuclear status and the lifting of U.S. sanctions.

Who said what

The deal with Iran “is now complete,” Trump said on social media. “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” He later said implementation had been pushed back to Friday “for purposes of mine removal.”

The U.S. and Iran “offered conflicting accounts” of what happens after the deal is signed, CNN said. Iran’s deputy foreign minister said negotiations would begin after the U.S. releases billions in frozen funds, a claim rejected by U.S. officials. Trump told The New York Times the agreement would assure that the Strait of Hormuz was “permanently toll-free” and that Iran “cannot develop or purchase a nuclear weapon.” In both cases, Trump “appeared to be celebrating” a “return of the prewar status quo” or “Iranian concessions that the country has not yet made,” the Times said.

What next?

The interim deal, if signed, likely “returns the region to a status that existed before the war, but with Iran having proven its ability to disrupt shipping in the strait,” The Associated Press said. Solving the Iranian nuclear impasse in 60 days is also a “tall order,” Axios said, given how “difficult it was to reach the much less detailed memorandum of understanding.”

What happened

The U.S. struck “multiple targets in Iran” for a second night “in response to Iran’s unwarranted and continued aggression,” U.S. Central Command said late Wednesday. Iran responded by firing missiles and drones at U.S. military targets in Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait, and announced that the Strait of Hormuz was closed to all traffic.

Who said what

President Donald Trump is “pivoting back toward a war footing after months of failing to reach a lasting diplomatic resolution” that he has “repeatedly” claimed is close, The Wall Street Journal said. “We were really close to a deal, but they keep tapping us along, they keep playing us for suckers,” Trump told reporters Wednesday. Iran has “taken too long to negotiate,” he said on social media, and “now they will have to pay the price!!!”

Trump and Tehran both “seem to be looking for a way to end the conflict — if they can manage to sell it as a win at home,” The Associated Press said. Trump likely could have “concluded an initial agreement” two weeks ago if he had “accepted the terms his envoys had negotiated,” Axios said. Now, he’s “growing more and more frustrated” as Iran fails to respond to his requested changes amid “negative, even mocking media coverage about his unfulfilled promises of a deal.”

What next?

Trump said the U.S. attacks would resume Thursday if Iran did not capitulate to his demands.

What happened

Iran and Israel on Sunday night fired missiles at each for the first time since a U.S.-backed ceasefire took effect in April. Iran said it targeted an Israeli air base in response to Israeli strikes in Lebanon, and Israel said it retaliated by striking military targets in western and central Iran. Israel also said it intercepted a missile from Yemen.

President Donald Trump told Fox News earlier that the U.S. was not involved in Israel’s strike on Beirut’s suburbs and “I’m not happy about it.” After Iran launched missiles at Israel, Trump warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to imperil peace talks by firing back, according to several news reports. “I call all the shots,” Trump told the Financial Times. Netanyahu “doesn’t call the shots.”

Who said what

Trump told Netanyahu to stand down because “we are close to doing something good in terms of a deal,” a U.S. official told Axios, and Netanyahu “pseudo-agreed.” Israel “has responded enough, they don’t need to respond anymore,” Trump told Israeli public broadcaster Kan. “We can achieve peace after 3,000 years.” No “self-respecting country in the world would tolerate such an attack, and neither will Israel,” Israel’s U.S. ambassador, Yechiel Leiter, said on X.

What next?

The tit-for-tat attacks continued Monday morning and “threatened to drag the wider Middle East back into a regional war,” The Associated Press said.

Israel and Iran have traded tit-for-tat strikes, in defiance of Donald Trump, for the first time since a fragile ceasefire was agreed in April.

The Israeli Air Force confirmed hitting military targets in western and central Iran, in response to Iranian missile attacks on its own air bases. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it had attacked the air bases after an Israeli strike on an alleged Hezbollah site in southern Beirut.

This escalation is a “major test for negotiations”, said CNN. Donald Trump said both sides must “stop shooting”, and told the media he had urged Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu not to retaliate to the Iranian attack. “We are very close to a final deal with Iran,” he told Israel’s Channel 12 News. “It is going to be a good deal. I don’t want it to blow up because of what is happening now.”

What did the commentators say?

Tensions between Iran and Israel have been heightening over Lebanon, said Maziar Motamedi at Al Jazeera. The Lebanese government was alarmed by Israeli troops crossing its Litani River last month. And, despite reports that Trump had convinced Netanyahu not to target Beirut, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned last week that “there will be no calm in the region” if Israel continued its occupation of southern Lebanon. The Israeli strike on the alleged Hezbollah site crossed “an unofficial red line for Tehran”.

Israel’s decision to strike back at Iran was “deliberate”, said Alex Winston in The Jerusalem Post. “It could not afford to leave unanswered” Tehran’s retaliation for the strikes in Lebanon. Had it not responded, “the message to Tehran would have been pretty clear”: “any Israeli response to Hezbollah could be framed by Tehran as a provocation, allowing Iran to fire directly at Israel while assuming that American diplomatic pressure would keep Jerusalem’s hands tied”.

Netanyahu’s decision to defy Trump’s instructions underscores a relationship that is increasingly at odds on how to prosecute the war on Iran, said The Wall Street Journal. “Under pressure from his political allies and the opposition to respond to the Iranian missile barrage”, the Israeli PM’s order to resume direct attacks on Iran “threatened to escalate a conflict that has been largely contained”.

What next?

Iran has now announced “a halt to the operations of the armed forces”. Mediation efforts “are naturally continuing”, said Esmail Baghaei, spokesperson for the Iranian foreign ministry, earlier today, but he warned that Iran believes the US “bears responsibility for the Israeli regime’s aggression”. No one would believe that the Israeli regime would take action “without coordination with the US,” he said. America will “be responsible for the consequences of any escalation in tensions”.

Tehran has also used its Houthi proxies in Yemen to threaten a blockade of the Bab al-Mandab Strait if Israel continues to escalate its use of force. The route is “another vital artery connecting major trade routes between Europe, Asia and the Arab world”, said CNN; closing it “would compound the worldwide economic pressure” generated by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

The death of a British soldier in Iraq has refocused concerns over the UK’s military presence in the Middle East.

Lance Corporal James Stewart Freeman died in northern Iraq on Sunday during a training exercise, the Defence Secretary John Healey has said. The US has confirmed that the Briton, and an American soldier, died at a US-controlled base in Erbil, in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region near the Iranian border.

The UK’s position on the Iran war is to participate in “defensive action” only. But after Iran began retaliating against US-Israeli strikes, the UK deployed more personnel to the region, bringing the total number to about 1,000.

The heightened risk to British troops

Northern Iraq has been “one of the most dangerous places for British troops” since Iran launched retaliatory attacks on Gulf countries, said The Times. Tehran has been targeting “US strongholds” across the border in Iraq; specialist soldiers stationed in Erbil have “shot down more than 100 kamikaze drones” since the US and Israel started the war. British personnel “have been within a few hundred feet of successful Iranian strikes”. There is a “heightened risk” that Iran or its proxies could “hit coalition bases in the Middle East”.

The US has about “two dozen significant air bases, naval facilities and outposts scattered from Turkey to Oman”, said The Independent. About 50,000 US service personnel are stationed across the Middle East, many in Arab Gulf countries such as Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar and the UAE – “all of which are at risk of Iranian retaliation with short-range weapons”. There are also about 200 British service personnel deployed in Iraq, involved in “training and supporting Iraqi and Kurdish security forces”.

Oman has been a “strategic hub” for the UK since the Royal Navy opened a “joint logistics support base” at Duqm port. The MoD said Duqm gives the UK a “strategically important and permanent maritime base east of Suez, but outside of the Gulf”. The UK also has two Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus: Akrotiri and Dhekelia. A string of drone attacks, presumably by Hezbollah, appeared to target the RAF Akrotiri base in March.

Britain: an unwilling participant?

“The UK’s armed forces have long had a presence across the Middle East,” said Geraint Hughes, military historian at King’s College London, on The Conversation. The UK’s naval support facility, which supports the Royal Navy’s “longstanding maritime security mission” in the Persian Gulf, has been in Bahrain since the 1980s. The base and its 300 personnel were “close to the Iranian missile strike” targeting the US Fifth Fleet headquarters in February. That shows that British military personnel “could potentially be at risk from an Iranian attack, even if indirect”.

Keir Starmer maintains that the UK will not join in “offensive action”, and that military assets are only being used to “support the defence of the Gulf states”. But Iran is “unlikely to acknowledge this distinction between ‘defensive’ operations and more ‘offensive’ ones”. As part of the Five Eyes alliance, Britain also “closely coordinates its eavesdropping operations” with the US.

Fundamentally, said Hughes, the regime in Iran is “profoundly Anglophobic”. It presumes the US and Britain will “always collaborate” – as they have done in the Middle East in the past. Iran may have “assumed British complicity in the launching of Operation Epic Fury”, and may “target the UK’s military assets in the Gulf and beyond”. Whatever Labour’s intentions, the UK “may find itself drawn into a war it had no say in starting”.

When is a ceasefire not a ceasefire?

Agreements have been announced in recent months “to great fanfare” in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, said PBS News, yet fighting continues. So the term “ceasefire” is “rapidly losing its meaning”.

What is happening?

Israeli forces have captured more territory in Gaza, contravening the US-brokered truce with Hamas in October, and at least 900 Palestinians have died in strikes, according to the strip’s ministry of health. Israel has also been increasingly bombarding Lebanon and making deeper incursions across the border, while Hezbollah has kept up rocket fire into northern Israel. The US and Iran have also continued to trade fire since the agreement in April, as they try to reach a permanent truce.

Advantages of an imperfect ceasefire

Ceasefires “often seem to be just smoke and mirrors that precede another round of fighting”, but “even when they don’t hold, they still have value”, said academics Avishay Ben-Sasson-Gordis and Simon Frankel Pratt on Foreign Policy.

They can “establish new bargaining baselines that, over multiple iterations, can become a ladder to a more permanent peace agreement”. The Northern Ireland peace process was primarily driven by two ceasefires in 1994, which ultimately paved the way for the decisive Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Even a partial decrease in fighting can save lives, reduce injuries and limit the destruction of infrastructure and homes. A ceasefire that cuts violence by 50% is often preferable for many than no ceasefire at all.

Truces can also help with humanitarian access because aid organisations can deliver food, medicine, fuel and other supplies to affected populations. Civilians may be able to evacuate dangerous areas. Even brief pauses in fighting can enable exchanges of detainees, recovery of bodies, or arrangements for missing persons. Meanwhile, observers can assess conditions on the ground.

What are the disadvantages?

Sceptics argue that imperfect ceasefires allow forces to regroup militarily. They can be exploited for propaganda, or they may create a false impression that a conflict is being resolved.

So “cynics begin to see ceasefires as jokes from the start, while the naive fall into a cycle of optimism and despair”, said Ben-Sasson-Gordis and Frankel Pratt. Diplomacy “starts to look false and pointless”.

An imperfect ceasefire can create long-term problems if policymakers do not have a clear objective. After the first Gulf War in 1991, the US stumbled into a “decade-long trap of its own making”, said academics Daniel Chardell and Samuel Helfont on Foreign Affairs.

Washington “crafted a cease-fire agreement” with Iraq that led to ongoing tensions, repeated military confrontations and a long-term containment strategy rather than a durable peace. Subsequent US presidents were unwilling to accept Saddam Hussein remaining in power or fully commit to removing him.

The US enforced no-fly zones, sanctions, military patrols and repeated air strikes, effectively becoming a policeman. Meanwhile, international support eroded and frustration grew in Washington. Ultimately, the ceasefire became a stepping stone to the larger war in 2003.

What happened

The House of Representatives on Wednesday voted 215-208 to force President Donald Trump to stop military operations in the Iran war unless he gets authorization from Congress. Four Republicans joined all Democrats in passing the war powers resolution, which a bipartisan coalition pushed to the floor over the objections of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). It’s the first legislation to end the war approved in either chamber, though the GOP-led Senate advanced a similar measure in a procedural vote two weeks ago.

Who said what

The resolution’s adoption is a “remarkable rebuke” to Trump and his “handling of the conflict” from a GOP-led Congress that has “largely ceded its prerogatives” to curb his power, The New York Times said. Republicans who initially backed him on the war “have started to waver,” The Wall Street Journal said, as the conflict has “dragged on with no clear resolution in sight” and gas prices “continue to climb” while Trump’s poll numbers continue “sagging.” Later Wednesday, the House “bucked” Trump and Johnson on a “second foreign policy issue,” said The Washington Post, voting 218-204 to advance funding for Ukraine and “impose additional sanctions on Russia’s finance and energy sectors.”

What next?

The Iran war vote was “largely symbolic,” as the resolution is unlikely to gain the force of law, Politico said. But it “further stymies the White House’s political priorities” after Republicans recently “scuttled several Trump goals,” including funding his White House ballroom and paying off supporters with his $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund.

Donald Trump “lashed out” at Benjamin Netanyahu last night in an “expletive-laden call” with the Israeli PM about the country’s actions in Lebanon, according to US officials speaking to news site Axios. The official paraphrased Trump’s remarks as: “You’re fucking crazy. You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.”

Trump himself described the call as “very productive”, saying he had demanded Israel abandon plans for a “major raid” and that Netanyahu had “turned his troops around” as a result.

The Israeli prime minister is caught between Donald Trump’s demands to end the bombardment of Lebanon, which threatens peace talks with Iran, and domestic pressure to escalate the campaign against Hezbollah, which has seen the Israeli army moving deeper into Lebanon and escalating air strikes.

What did the commentators say?

Since the 7 October attacks, Netanyahu has “struggled to assure Israelis he will keep them safe” against Iran and its proxies, said The Times. There was already “mounting frustration in Israel at the failure to defang Hezbollah”, said the Financial Times’ Jerusalem correspondent, James Shotter. Most polls suggest Israelis “favour more aggressive action” against the group, and Netanyahu’s “climbdown” to Trump provoked criticism from “across the political spectrum”.

National security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, of his own coalition, urged him to ignore Trump’s demands and ratchet up the campaign against Hezbollah. “This is the time to tell our friend, President Trump – ‘no’,” Ben-Gvir wrote on X. Naftali Bennett, the right-wing former prime minister “widely regarded as one of Netanyahu’s main rivals” in the crucial upcoming election, accused him of “losing control over Israeli sovereignty”.

Netanyahu is also worried that any US-Iran deal will “leave Israel’s core concerns – Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium, its ballistic missile program and regional proxy network – largely unaddressed”, said Tal Shalev of CNN’s Jerusalem bureau.

For more than three decades, Netanyahu has “defined himself as the leader who would confront Iran’s nuclear ambitions”. But a recent poll from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies found that 45% of Israelis believe the situation with Iran has worsened compared to before 7 October; only 31% believe it has improved. Nearly half believe Israel will probably not win, or has already lost, the war against Iran.

“It’s hard to overstate how deeply Netanyahu views this moment as a possible personal and political defeat,” Danny Citrinowicz, senior researcher at the institute, wrote on X. “Mr. Iran” may be forced to accept an agreement that “not only legitimises the very regime he sought to weaken but also exposes the collapse of his long-standing Iran doctrine”.

Ultimately, Netanyahu has to defend his own citizens, said The Jerusalem Post in an editorial. Northern Israel is “under constant rocket and drone fire”. Hezbollah had used the ceasefire as a “tactical opportunity” to regroup and rearm. It has “no intention of genuinely ending hostilities”; its purpose remains the destruction of Israel. The ceasefire “prioritised a quick diplomatic achievement for Washington” over the security needs of Israel; extending it further would mean “trading Israeli lives for a few more days of quiet”. The US negotiations with Iran over Lebanon “are certainly not worth the lives of Israeli citizens”.

What next?

Just hours after Trump announced the ceasefire agreement, Israeli attacks on southern Lebanon resumed. At least eight people have been killed today, according to Lebanese state media.

In a statement, Netanyahu said that he had told Trump that Israel would continue its operations. “Our position remains the same,” Netanyahu wrote. The Lebanese government, which wants Hezbollah to disarm, has begun direct negotiations with Israel today.

Iran continues to insist that any ceasefire between the US and Iran hinges on peace in Lebanon, with a senior military officer saying today that resumption of war with the US is “inevitable”.

What happened

U.S. and Iranian negotiators on Thursday reached a tentative agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and extend the ceasefire for another 60 days while thornier issues like Iran’s nuclear program and U.S. sanctions are hashed out, U.S. officials said. “We’re not there yet, but we’re very close,” Vice President JD Vance told reporters, adding that it’s “still TBD” if and when President Donald Trump “can endorse the agreement.” Tehran did not comment.

Who said what

The “emerging memorandum of understanding came as the fragile ceasefire” appeared to be “wavering,” The Associated Press said. Several “brief exchanges of fire” this week have added “pressure on negotiators,” The New York Times said. Meanwhile, Trump’s “seemingly haphazard approach to the conflict is bewildering allies” as he “veers between diplomatic dealing, military strikes and increasingly far-fetched ideas” to clinch some sort of victory.

Trump “finds himself in a bind,” Reuters said, as he “seeks to end the war” and secure a “quick solution to high gas prices” while avoiding a “potential backlash from Iran hawks” over “any concessions to Tehran.” Those “competing demands” leave him “little room to maneuver.”

What next?

Trump was “leaning toward signing off on the deal” as of Thursday afternoon, Axios said, citing senior U.S. officials. But he “wants to wait another few days” to “make sure Iranian officials would sign” and to “see how the domestic political debate around the deal plays out.” In Iran, officials “said Tehran is concerned Trump will scuttle the deal under Israeli influence,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

Any path President Donald Trump takes to end the war with Iran is bound to generate a lot of dissatisfaction among his GOP supporters and advisers. Hawks like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) continue to “press for more aggressive U.S. military action,” Daniel R. DePetris said at the Los Angeles Times, and Republicans “consider anything short of Iran’s total surrender a failure.” But Trump’s in-house political strategists want a quick end to the unpopular war to “minimize political repercussions against the Republican Party” in November’s midterm elections. Trump clearly wants the deal that he keeps promising to the U.S. public, yet accomplishing that may put him at odds with Republicans who “would consider anything short of Iran’s total surrender a failure.”

‘A bad option and a worse one’

The president “seems conflicted,” said DePetris. He’s “fed up with the current situation” but also “afraid of escalation,” said Danny Citrinowicz, of The Atlantic Council, to The New Yorker. The president is “fed up with the current situation,” but he is also “afraid of escalation,” the Atlantic Council’s Danny Citrinowicz said in an interview with The New Yorker. Escalation probably will not work “because the Iranians are not going to capitulate.” The other option to end the war, then, is a deal that provides both money and sanctions relief to the Islamic regime in exchange for the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s choices are “between a bad option and a worse one.”

“Will Trump bail out Iran’s regime?” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. Inflation pressures at home are likely behind the president’s desire to “reopen the Strait even on Iran’s terms.” But a “bad deal would leave him worse off politically” even if domestic prices recede. Iran’s regime was beset by domestic crises that the war has exacerbated. A “half victory” by Iran now “would hurt America’s standing — and Mr. Trump’s.”

The issue is not Trump “terminating the conflict too soon,” Jacob Heilbrunn said at The Spectator. It is “that he began it in the first place.” The war is undermining both his presidency and U.S. military power, and the idea that escalation would result in Iran’s surrender “defies credulity.” The ugly truth illustrated by the Hormuz closure is that Trump “does not hold the cards.”

‘Leaving core issues unsolved’

Trump is looking to get a ceasefire deal now and “deal with the toughest problems later,” said The New York Times. He took the same approach in Gaza, where he brokered a truce last year. That effort ended the fighting but left issues of Hamas’ future and the rebuilding of Gaza to be figured out at a later date. So far that has not happened. Such an approach can be a way for Trump to “claim victory while leaving the core issues unsolved.”

“Doubling down” on the war remains a possibility, Ravi Agrawal said at Foreign Policy. But that would come with “uncertain benefits” and “much more potential pain.” We may soon find out one way or another, as the U.S. on Monday conducted strikes on Iranian positions, a sign the temporary truce is faltering.

Iran has signalled that any peace deal must include an end to Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. But it’s unclear if the US could get Israel to agree to that, even if it wanted to.

Despite last month’s ceasefire, Israel has continued to pound Lebanon with airstrikes, killing at least 608 people, according to the World Health Organization. Yesterday, in response to a Hezbollah attack on its military posts, Israel launched one of its most intense waves of bombings, saying it had hit more than 100 Hezbollah targets. “I have ordered an even greater acceleration of our operations,” Benjamin Netanyahu said. “We will intensify our blows, increase our firepower, and we will crush them.”

What did the commentators say?

“Lebanon is in danger of becoming an overlooked but increasingly deadly sideshow”, as both Israel and Hezbollah violate the ceasefire, said Tom Kington in The Times. Israeli troops are occupying swathes of southern Lebanon, and won’t withdraw unless Hezbollah disarms. But the Iran-backed group says it won’t stop attacking Israeli positions until Israel withdraws. “The result has been a stand-off.”

Hezbollah is “waiting for a cue from Iran, which in turn depends on how Iran’s talks with the US go”, Michael Young, of the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Centre in Beirut, told The Times. “If Iran emerges stronger from its clash with the US, Hezbollah will feel reinvigorated.” They will “be able to say they resisted and claim victory”. Meanwhile, Israel will be trying “to torpedo any deal”.

Washington is “pressuring” Lebanon’s leaders to disarm Hezbollah or else “face more Gaza-style destruction”, said Rami G. Khouri, a policy analyst at the American University of Beirut, in Al Jazeera. It has also “tied financial support” for the country’s reconstruction to “Beirut’s compliance with US-Israeli terms”. The Lebanese government faces “a disgruntled, deeply impoverished population, exasperated by relentless Israeli attacks”.

April’s ceasefire agreement heralded “weakened US-Israeli positions in the region”, as well as dealing “deep political blows” to Netanyahu and gifting “new diplomatic leverage” to Iran and Hezbollah. Having survived their “existential” battles and now pressing for permanent ceasefires, they could “weaken Israeli postures and help reshape Lebanon’s internal dynamics”.

“But far-right members of Netanyahu’s coalition are pushing him to challenge” Donald Trump on the “ceasefire with Hezbollah”, said The Guardian’s chief Middle East correspondent, Emma Graham-Harrison. “It is time for the prime minister to bang on Trump’s table and inform him that we are returning to war in Lebanon,” said Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, on social media. “There is an urgent need to put an end to the threat posed by Hezbollah’s explosive drones,” the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, posted on Telegram. Hezbollah has “ignored repeated requests to stop firing at Israel”, a US official told Reuters. Israel will never “​passively absorb attacks on its forces and civilians”.

But Tehran won’t accept such attacks on its proxy, either, Danny Citrinowicz, a Middle East expert at the Atlantic Council, told The New Yorker. Lebanon is of “real strategic importance” to Iran; Hezbollah is “a vital element” of its “so-called Axis of Resistance”. So Trump “has a mountain to climb”. If he wants an agreement with Iran, he will have to “force Netanyahu’s hand on Lebanon”.

What next?

On Friday, delegations from Israel and Lebanon will meet for direct talks in the US, in preparation for further negotiations on 2 and 3 June.

The shaky US-Iran ceasefire, meanwhile, is under increasing strain: Iran has said US strikes near the Strait of Hormuz on Monday were a “gross violation”, and validated its “deep suspicion”. The US said its attacks were “defensive”.

But “even if Lebanon is part of a US-Iran peace deal, the Lebanese people will be wary”, said Kington in The Times. After all, April’s Pakistan-brokered ceasefire between the US, Israel and Iran, supposedly included Lebanon – but Israel “denied this was the case and launched 100 attacks in a few minutes”.

What happened

The U.S. military on Monday night said it had “conducted self-defense strikes” on Iranian missile sites and “boats attempting to emplace mines,” interrupting a weekslong ceasefire after a weekend of positive signals about an imminent peace deal. Earlier, President Donald Trump said talks on ending the war were “proceeding nicely.” An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said a “large portion of the issues” had been resolved but no “agreement is on the verge of being signed.”

Who said what

The emerging framework indicates that Trump’s “mixture of threats and limited military operations” in Iran hasn’t “decisively shifted” Tehran’s negotiating stance, The New York Times said. After Republican hawks “slammed the contours of the deal,” The Wall Street Journal said, Trump “expanded the scope of his diplomatic ambition,” saying Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Muslim countries must normalize relations with Israel as part of any agreement. Trump posted Monday that it “should be mandatory” for all of them to “simultaneously” sign the Abraham Accords.

What next?

Trump’s Israel normalization push could give him a way to cast any peace deal “as a larger regional success story instead of a climbdown,” the Journal said. But it’s “highly unlikely to be heeded” by the Saudis or Qataris, given Israel’s intransigence on Palestinian rights.

Donald Trump’s claim that the US and Iran are closing in on a peace deal has already been met with widespread criticism within his own Republican party.

The details haven’t been made public but Iran is said to have agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, without charging tolls, and dispose of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. In return, the US would cease hostilities, unfreeze billions of dollars of assets, and gradually remove economic sanctions.

But Republican Senator Ted Cruz said it would be a “disastrous mistake” to leave Iran “able to enrich uranium and develop nuclear weapons, and having effective control over the Strait of Hormuz”. And Senator Roger Wicker, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, warned that the emerging deal “would not be worth the paper it is written on”.

What did the commentators say?

The “grim reality” is that, by closing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has “leverage” over peace talks, said the Financial Times’ chief foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman. And now the US seems poised to agree to a deal that “threatens to leave Iran in a stronger position than before the war began”. Trump likes to “deride” the nuclear non-proliferation agreement that Barack Obama negotiated with Iran in 2015, but this looks in many ways “worse”. Perhaps the US president “should have reread” his book, “The Art of the Deal”.

Eli Groner, a former director-general of Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, said Iran’s knowledge that it can now close the Strait of Hormuz at any point “is a victory far deeper and more strategic than any point-scoring military achievement”. His summary? “Disaster.”

The framework of the deal described by US officials would be “a series of compromises, well short of the capitulation that Trump sought”, said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. Iran hasn’t accepted his demand that its highly enriched uranium be delivered to the West, nor has it agreed to give up its “right to enrich” in the future. But Trump “doesn’t appear to have any better options” to escape what has become “a military morass and a strategic dead end”. Tehran “can claim victory simply by having survived” the US assault.

Some Republicans are arguing that “peace could bring a pay-off for voters” by lowering petrol prices and easing inflation as oil tankers start to move through the Strait of Hormuz again, said CNN’s Stephen Collinson. But recovery from the strait’s closure will take time and won’t “immediately improve global economic prospects or affordability in the US”. Trump “can’t win politically”: given that a majority of Americans oppose the war, he would face a huge “backlash if he ordered new strikes”.

There’s no way to spin this humiliating “catastrophe”, Middle East expert Danny Citrinowicz, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, told The New Yorker. Rather than toppling the Iranian regime, the US and Israel have “ended up strengthening” it. It’s hard to imagine Tehran will just “give up its nuclear material” – to Trump or anyone else – because “they’re so much in the driver’s seat” here. Iran is already rebuilding its missile capacity and still has most of its launchers. Now we have “a more radicalised regime that can rush into a nuclear bomb and still have a conventional missile capacity. It’s a shit show.”

What next?

We have “reached a conclusion on a large portion of the issues under discussion”, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baqai told a news conference in Tehran yesterday. “But to say that this means the signing of an agreement is imminent – no one can make such a claim.” The two sides were not discussing Iran’s nuclear programme “at this stage”, he added.

This is “not a final settlement”, said the BBC; this “memorandum of understanding” seems simply to involve a 60-day extension of the ceasefire and a plan for further negotiations on “some of the thorniest issues”, including the nuclear one. That timeline seems “rather compressed, given the complexity of the issues”, said CNN’s Collinson. “History shows Iran would love to drag the United States into a prolonged period of inconclusive diplomacy that lasts months or years.”

A rare event occurred last week, said Fred Kaplan on Slate: President Trump posted a completely accurate observation on social media. Commenting on Iran’s response to a US ceasefire proposal, he declared it “totally unacceptable”.

He’s right about that. Iran’s statement – which included no concessions and a long list of demands, including war reparations, the lifting of all sanctions and Iran’s continued control over the Strait of Hormuz – read like something “the winner of a war would issue”. The question is, what can Trump do about it?

He has repeatedly threatened to resume bombing Iran if the regime rejects his peace proposals, but it’s hard to see what that would achieve. If the 38 days of devastating air strikes that began on 28 February failed to bring Tehran to heel, what difference would obliterating a few more targets make?

‘Wiggle out of this conflict’

“If this isn’t checkmate, it’s close,” said Robert Kagan in The Atlantic. Trump halted the bombing campaign on Iran “not because he was bored, but because Iran was striking the region’s vital oil and gas facilities”. If he’s not willing to accept the risk of more such retaliation, or to mount a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the Iranian regime, “walking away now could seem like the least bad option”.

Trump, to his credit, shows no sign of wanting to “wiggle out of this conflict” or sign some meaningless deal, said Noah Rothman in National Review. He’s rightly determined to stop Tehran getting a nuclear weapon. But to succeed, he’ll need to solicit the public’s support for this project, which requires showing a bit more patience and “humility”. He’s not going to win people over by branding all critics “stupid”, or dismissing the inflationary effects of the war. He recently claimed that he was motivated only by the nuclear issue, saying “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation at all”. That quote is going to be used against him in countless Democratic campaign adverts.

‘We will all reap the whirlwind if Iran comes out of this stronger’

Trump’s rudeness and arrogance has also made Nato allies very disinclined to come to America’s aid, said Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times. Which is too bad, as the administration could really do with their help. The reality is that it’s in all of our interests to fix the Iran situation. It will be terrible for Europe if Tehran is allowed to decide who can and who can’t pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

And it will be worse still for the Arab Gulf states that rely on the channel, endangering their modernising, pluralistic reforms. “The Dubai model is precisely the one Tehran wants to destroy.” It’s understandable that Nato allies are loath to help Trump, but make no mistake: “we will all reap the whirlwind if Iran comes out of this stronger”.

What happened

The Senate on Tuesday voted 50-47 to advance legislation that would halt the Iran war unless President Donald Trump obtained authorization from Congress. A trickle of Republicans began supporting the war powers resolutions over seven previous votes, and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) joined them Tuesday, providing the crucial 50th vote.

Who said what

The vote “showed how Republicans are increasingly uneasy with a conflict” that’s “stuck in a fragile ceasefire” while “causing rising gas prices in the U.S.,” The Associated Press said. The “sliver of GOP skepticism” about Trump’s handling of the war “widened last week,” The New York Times said, a shift “fueled in part” by his “ignoring” of a 60-day legal deadline to seek congressional authorization.

Even Trump supporters are “concerned about this war,” and Congress is “in the dark,” Cassidy, who lost his primary campaign after Trump endorsed his opponent, said on social media. “Until the administration provides clarity, no congressional authorization or extension can be justified.”

What next?

This was “only the first step” toward passing the bill, and GOP leaders believe it would have failed if three Republican Senators hadn’t been absent, Politico said. The House is “expected to vote on a similar war powers resolution” Wednesday, the AP said, and “Democrats are bullish” on passing it.

As the Iran war continues, food and vital medicines in the country are becoming increasingly scarce, said The Australian. The costs of some medicines “have risen by 400%”, and antidepressants and sleeping pills are reportedly being “dispensed without prescriptions”.

This is not unique to the Middle East, as other countries around the world face the threat of conflict, or suffer under pressures of economic and political repression. As mental health crises and resources continue to stretch, many fear the consequences could echo the fallout from the Covid pandemic.

A ‘kind of coma’

Some pharmacists in Iran have called the boom in antidepressants a form of “mass sedation”, said The Australian. These healthcare professionals believe that relaxing the strictness of distribution policy keeps the public in a “state of artificial calm” designed to “delay any popular uprising while the war continues”.

Access to the country’s black market has also been damaged since the start of the war. Built on sanctions, import shortages and “hoarding” by middlemen, the black market is “not new”. But with the joint threat of war and internet shutdown, the “shadow supply chain” has been significantly “disrupted”. As the war continues, Iran is stuck in a “kind of coma, caught between economic collapse and the dream of a better future”.

The rise in antidepressant use is part of a broader system to “doctrinise control of Iranians’ minds and bodies”, said Atlantic Council. Observers from abroad have “overlooked the concerted regime strategy to deliberately engineer this state of depression as a suppression mechanism”. By outlawing cultural events such as Valentine’s Day, “Chaharshanbe Suri (the festival of fire)” and “Shabeh Yalda (winter solstice)”, the regime has arguably “promoted gloom and hopelessness to the extent that citizens become paralysed and incapable of challenging the political status quo”.

Like Iran, Lebanon has been struck by the ongoing conflict, and has appeared to follow a similar pattern of “pushing anxious residents toward sedatives and sleeping pills”, said Y Net News. Though no official data has been released, news outlet Al-Akhbar, which has ties to Hezbollah, claimed that the “demand for sedatives had jumped by 300% since the fighting began”, said Y Net. This figure, though unverified, “points to a population under mounting psychological strain”.

Global impact

And in Cuba, economic and political crises present an “outlook that feels bleaker than the collapse of the Soviet Union”, said The Guardian. As a growing mental health crisis “envelops the island”, many citizens are “turning to prescription drugs” to cope with the US-imposed oil blockade, and still reeling from years of economic decline.

Cuba is stuck in a vicious cycle, as the economy shrinks – GDP has “contracted by 17% since 2019” – it means state pharmacies lie “empty”, while demand for their services increases. People are “leaving in large numbers”, which exacerbates the cycle further. In the last five years, “up to 20% of the population” has emigrated, which has in turn added to the “psychological load on those who chose (or were forced) to remain”.

In its ongoing campaign against Ukraine, Russia is experiencing a “spiral” of antidepressant use, said El País. The country has registered “record sales” of the medications every year since 2020. Last year’s total “nearly tripled pharmaceutical consumption” from 2019. In the same year, figures from Russian consultancy DSM show that after peace negotiations were “unsuccessfully reinitiated” in 2024, sales of antidepressants grew 36%. It appears the war, with its subsequent health crises, has had a “larger emotional impact on its population” than the Covid pandemic.

The UAE has denied Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that he made a secret trip to the Gulf state during the Iran war to meet the president, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

With The Wall Street Journal reporting that the UAE has carried out its own strikes on Iran, there is a renewed focus on the Abraham Accords – the peace and cooperation agreements between Israel and several of its Arab neighbours.

What are the Accords?

The Abraham Accords are a series of agreements between Israel, UAE and Bahrain, normalising Israel’s relations with several Arab nations. The initial accords, which were mediated by the US, were signed on 15 September 2020. Three months later, Sudan and Morocco joined the pact.

States such as the UAE and Bahrain saw the Accords as strategically useful but large parts of Arab public opinion remain strongly pro-Palestinian and opposed to closer relations with Israel. The Gaza war widened this divide and then the Iran war created a sense that the region was being dragged into instability through Israeli-Iranian confrontation.

So Arab governments face a growing dilemma because maintaining ties with Israel and the US risks a domestic backlash but breaking ties could damage security and economic interests.

Tehran’s “narrative” became that it could target “at will” the countries that had signed the Abraham Accords with Israel, said The Jerusalem Post. This reinforced fears in Saudi Arabia in particular that overt alignment with Israel could make the kingdom a direct target.

How might they be updated?

The original vision of the Accords – of a rapidly expanding regional bloc openly aligned with Israel and integrated economically across the Middle East – has become a significantly weaker prospect. So future agreements could involve cooler normalisation, selective security cooperation, quieter diplomacy and a slower expansion.

The power of China has also encouraged the players to think about an update. Beijing has “spent the better part of two decades cultivating Middle Eastern influence”, with infrastructure finance, arms sales and “diplomatic mediation”, said US conservative think tank the Hudson Institute. But an “expanded and strengthened” Accords would create a “competing network rooted in shared security interests and American sponsorship”.

What would it look like?

The Accords have “demonstrated resilience” despite the “turbulence” of the past two and a half years, including “growing criticism of Israel in parts of the Arab world”, said Roy Binyamini, a former National Security Council official, on Ynet.

But the US and its Accords partners could outline a “vision for regional stability, economic growth, interfaith tolerance and the containment of extremist influences”.

Meanwhile, Israel could “leverage its experience” to help regional partners in “strengthening civilian defence systems, including air defence capabilities and protection of critical infrastructure”.

As the Trump administration scrambles to control its war with Iran, both countries have turned to an unexpected moderator: Pakistan, which has led multiple rounds of ceasefire negotiations between the two nations. Now, Pakistan is quietly growing its influence in the region while Washington and Tehran circle one another for another round of talks.

From ‘kind of a sideshow’ to being in Trump’s ‘favor’

Islamabad’s role as a major player in this conflict, for many observers, has “come as a surprise,” given Pakistan’s “global position, domestic challenges” and “volatile relationship” with the first Trump administration, said the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA). But “perhaps it shouldn’t,” the BBC said.

Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir “is in U.S. President Donald Trump’s favor,” with the president asserting that the Pakistani leader knows Iran “better than most.” Pakistan, in its own messaging, has hailed a “brotherly” relationship with neighboring Iran, with the two nations sharing “deep cultural and religious ties,” said the BBC.

Although Pakistan was “kind of a sideshow” during the first Trump administration, it has “really reached out” to both the White House and “Donald Trump personally, as well as his family members, to try to build influence in Washington,” CCGA said. Pakistan’s connections to Saudi Arabia and China have also allowed it to “place itself in a mediator role” with a “greater level of geopolitical clout and influence than we might have expected a couple of years ago.”

Given Pakistan’s reputation for corruption and military authoritarianism, it “would not be an exaggeration” to describe it as a “failed state,” said The Spectator. But simply “being a nuclear power” affords Pakistan a “head start in terms of credibility” by gracing Islamabad with the “nuclear aura that Iran would love to possess.” China, which has played a “background but crucial role” in the peace negotiations, has also had a “longstanding close relationship” with Islamabad, as both nations “enjoy common cause against India.”

Pakistan as a ‘responsible middle power’

“Playing the role of mediator” between the United States and Iran — or “at least message-bearer” — has “been a boon for Islamabad,” Le Monde said. The country has undergone “its authoritarian drift,” in which it “silenced its large Shiite minority during the war and solidarity movements with Iran.”

After having sheltered Osama bin Laden, Pakistan “wants to convince international opinion that it is no longer a breeding ground for terrorism,” said Gilles Boquérat, an associate researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research, to Le Monde. Instead, it is portraying itself as a “responsible middle power, capable of ensuring regional security from the Arabian Peninsula to the Indian border.”

But Pakistan’s ties with Iran have earned Islamabad its share of critics during the current war, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R.-S.C.). “I don’t trust Pakistan as far as I can throw them,” Graham said during a Senate hearing this week regarding reports that the Pakistani government has aided Iranian forces. “If they actually do have Iranian aircraft parked in Pakistan bases to protect Iranian military assets, that tells me we should be looking maybe for somebody else to mediate.”

GPS jamming across the Middle East has exploded since the US and Israel began their war against Iran in February, “plunging both sides into an ‘electronic warfare arms race’”, said The Independent.

“Underlying the dramatic clashes across the region”, forces on all sides are “quietly fighting an invisible war by land, air and sea, distorting tracking information to sow chaos or hide in plain sight”.

‘Electronic warfare arms race’

Jamming of the Global Positioning System (GPS) works by disrupting signals from global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) with electromagnetic noise. “Spoofing” is more sophisticated and involves transmitting fake signals to provide a false location. Both are used to distort drone and missile guidance systems.

Interference “isn’t a new phenomenon”, said CNN. It has been used in modern warfare since the Second World War but has become “a major issue” for shipping and aircraft since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The problem is now “endemic” in regions such as the Baltic Sea, Black Sea and parts of the Middle East, said Michelle Wiese Bockmann, from shipping intelligence firm Windward.

While all sides engage in it, Iran is particularly “prolific” in spoofing. Tehran uses it to “add confusion and disrupt any of the allied intelligence gathering”, said Philip Ingram, an intelligence expert and former British Army colonel.

The tools used by Iran are likely to be domestically produced or made with equipment sourced from Russia or China, Thomas Withington, from the Royal United Services Institute think tank, told the BBC.

Tracking ‘has stopped telling the truth’

The problem with GPS jamming is that it cannot be contained within precise geographic boundaries and does not discriminate between military and commercial systems.

On the first day of the war alone, electronic interference disrupted the navigation systems of more than 1,100 commercial ships in UAE, Qatari, Omani and Iranian waters, according to a Windward report cited by Inside GNSS.

“The missiles and drones make for good headlines, but they’re a distraction,” said Erik Bethel, from investment firm Mare Liberum, and Windward CEO Ami Daniel in Fortune. The “real story” is that the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passes, has “gone dark. Not in some poetic sense, but literally.”

In effect, the Automatic Identification System (AIS) – the network that’s supposed to be the “gold standard” for commercial tracking and is used by ships to avoid one another – “has stopped telling the truth”.

The same thing happened in the region last year during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran and has also troubled vessel navigators in the Baltic Sea. But “this is next-level”, said Bockmann. “We can’t over-estimate the huge danger this places to maritime navigation and safety.”

“Without reliable and accurate” navigation systems, ships are “effectively sailing blind”, said The Wall Street Journal.

‘Anti-jam antenna system’

There are various technologies that offer protection against GPS jamming. These can include “automatically detecting jamming or interference and switching to unaffected frequencies”, said the BBC.

UK defence giant Raytheon produces an “anti-jam antenna system” device the size of an ice hockey puck that can be installed on different kinds of vehicles and uses multiple channels to overcome jamming. Other companies have “developed navigation tools that work around GPS’s flaws”.

Alternative navigational tools that do not rely on GPS at all but instead harness quantum technology are also in development “but remain a long way off operational use”, said CNN.

“GNSS is a wonder of the modern world,” said Ramsey Faragher, chief executive of the Royal Institute of Navigation in London. “You can switch it on and within a few seconds, it works out where you are to within a metre and what time it is to within a nanosecond. Unfortunately, the luxurious era of those signals not being messed about with intentionally is over. We need to rapidly catch up.”

What happened

U.S. policy on Iran whipsawed last week, with President Trump telling Tehran to accept a peace deal or face a new wave of bombing, soon after he’d hailed “great progress” in talks and halted a military operation to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump had announced that, in a “humanitarian gesture,” the U.S. would guide merchant ships through the strait, a key oil export route that has been effectively shuttered by Iran since the start of the nine-week-old war. Any interference with “Project Freedom” would be met “forcefully,” Trump said. But as U.S. warships escorted two commercial vessels through the strait, Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones. None of the ships were damaged, and U.S. attack helicopters sank six Iranian military speedboats; Iranian strikes hit a major oil hub in the United Arab Emirates and at least two commercial ships in the Persian Gulf. Trump declined to say Iran had violated a four-week ceasefire, calling the clash a “mini war.” A day later he paused Project Freedom, citing movement toward a “complete and final” agreement with Tehran.

Trump’s U-turn came hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that “Operation Epic Fury is concluded” and that the war’s objectives had been achieved, despite Iran’s continuing choke hold on the strait and the lack of any deal over its nuclear program. Axios reported that U.S. officials believe they are nearing an agreement with Tehran on a one-page “memorandum of understanding” to end the war and set the stage for detailed negotiations. The war will end “assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to,” Trump posted online, “which is, perhaps, a big assumption.” If they don’t, he said, bombing will resume, “at a much higher level and intensity.”

What the columnists said

Both sides are working with mediators to craft a 14-point “framework,” said Benoit Faucon in The Wall Street Journal. The working version calls for Iran to begin opening the strait and the U.S. to wind down its blockade of Iranian ports during 30 days of talks. Iran is said to be willing to discuss a possible halt to uranium enrichment and the removal of some of its stockpile of near-weapons grade uranium to a third country—but not the U.S. Divisions within Iran’s leadership could prove a roadblock, said Barak Ravid in Axios. Given the challenge of uniting disparate factions, some U.S. officials are “skeptical that even an initial deal will be reached.”

Project Freedom had two objectives, said Chas Danner in New York. One was to pressure Iran to fully open the strait and free 1,600 commercial ships stuck in the Persian Gulf, which failed miserably. The other was “a cynical attempt to rebrand the war,” which became illegal once it hit 60 days without congressional authorization. The administration wants the public to believe the offensive has ended and that the U.S. is now engaged in an entirely different “defensive” operation to open the strait.

The administration can say whatever it wants, but that “does not make it true,” said David E. Sanger in The New York Times. The war is not over. And its objectives have not been met. Trump cited five at the outset, including regime change and ensuring Iran can “never have a nuclear weapon.” Only one goal, disabling Iran’s navy, has been achieved. But the war has become a “political crisis,” and the White House is anxious to put it “in the rearview mirror.”

Americans can see the cost of this war everywhere, said Scott Waldman and Ben Lefebvre in Politico. Gas hit an average of $4.54 a gallon this week, up $1.56 since fighting began in February, and diesel hit $5.67, up $1.91. The spike in diesel, which powers trucks and trains, “in turn is expected to drive up prices for everything from groceries to postage.” Trump’s disapproval rating is climbing as well, hitting a record 62% in a new poll, said Scott Clement and Dan Balz in The Washington Post. Americans disapprove of his handling of the war by 66% to 33%, and his approval rating on the economy has dropped to 34%.

“There are now only two outcomes to the conflict,” said Scott Anderson in The New York Times. With Iran not about to cave, Trump can resume hostilities. But that seems unlikely, and “no amount of bombing” will change the fact that Iran has gained control of the strait and the ability to “paralyze the global economy.” The alternative is a settlement that will leave the “empowered” Iranian regime intact and “a blustering American president humiliated.” Operation Epic Fury is now looking more like “Operation Colossal Blunder.”

What happened

Tehran is considering a U.S. proposal to formally end the Iran war and start a 30-day clock to negotiate a full agreement, Axios and other news organizations reported Wednesday. Iranian and Trump administration officials “offered contradictory and rapidly changing assessments of the state of the war and peace talks,” The New York Times said, all “while providing few details about those negotiations.”

Who said what

If Iran doesn’t agree to “give what has been agreed to,” President Donald Trump said on social media Wednesday morning, the “bombing starts,” and “at a much higher level and intensity.” Hours later, he told reporters the two sides “had very good talks over the last 24 hours” and a deal was “very possible.” An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Tehran would relay its response through Pakistan, while another Iranian official dismissed the proposal as an “American wish-list.”

The one-page U.S. memorandum of understanding involved “Iran committing to a moratorium on nuclear enrichment, the U.S. agreeing to lift its sanctions and release billions in frozen Iranian funds, and both sides lifting restrictions around transit through the Strait of Hormuz,” according to Axios. But the proposal would “not initially require concessions from either ​side,” sources told Reuters, and it leaves “unresolved key U.S. demands” on Iran’s nuclear program and reopening the strait.

What next?

The “biggest obstacle to an Iran deal may be Trump’s ego,” Politico said, citing U.S. and Arab officials. Trump’s “history of nursing grudges, ridiculing opponents and insisting he wins everything doesn’t bode well” for striking a deal with Iran’s respect-conscious leaders.

‘Asian budget carriers need help to avoid Spirit’s fate’

Juliana Liu at Bloomberg

The “jet fuel crunch is hitting Asia’s low-cost airlines much harder than their full-service counterparts,” says Juliana Liu. Asian governments “should be preparing financial or operational support to avoid further flight cancellations during the busy summer travel season — as well as outright shutdowns like the collapse of America’s Spirit Airlines.” Policymakers “must consider targeted measures in the form of loans, grants or fuel price relief,” and they “should differ by country and reflect conditions on the ground.”

Read more

‘The rush to point fingers at the Secret Service’

Mitch Price at The Wall Street Journal

After an “incident involving presidential security, a predictable cycle begins,” says Mitch Price. Media outlets “elevate instant analysis from so-called ‘experts’ eager to diagnose Secret Service failures.” In the “immediate aftermath, there’s rarely enough verified information to support meaningful conclusions,” but “confident claims emerge anyway, often from people with little experience in presidential protection.” Risk “can’t be eliminated, only managed.” Safety plans “must balance threats, resources, public access and the president’s need to remain visible.”

Read more

‘Iran’s survival is not victory’

Menahem Merhavy at Foreign Policy

Iran previously “defined victory in expansive terms: exporting revolution, rolling back U.S. power and ultimately eliminating Israel,” says Menahem Merhavy. But “today, under sustained military pressure, its leaders are advancing a far narrower claim,” as “survival itself — withstanding strikes, avoiding surrender, remaining intact — is increasingly presented as victory.” This is “more than mere wartime rhetoric. It marks a shift in how the regime understands power, success and its own purpose.” The “language of Iran’s leadership reflects this shift.”

Read more

‘Miami’s drought wake-up call: Everglades restoration is our water insurance’

Michael Berkowitz and Meenakshi Chabba at the Miami Herald

For a “region that receives nearly 60 inches of rain annually, scarcity” in Miami “felt like someone else’s problem,” say Michael Berkowitz and Meenakshi Chabba. But a “drought has shattered that sense of abundance and revealed the vulnerability of South Florida’s water supply.” Most Miami residents “think of resilience mainly as flood adaptation, leaving water security as an under-acknowledged pillar.” Florida “cannot build a truly resilient Miami without bringing its most consequential resilience plan to the finish line.”

Read more

What happened

The four-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran faltered Monday as President Donald Trump’s attempts to reopen traffic through the Strait of Hormuz prompted Iranian attacks on U.S. warships and commercial ships. The United Arab Emirates and Oman also reported the first strikes on their territories since the ceasefire began, and the UAE blamed Iran. U.S. Central Command said that two U.S.-flagged merchant ships passed through the strait and that U.S. military helicopters sank six Iranian military speedboats; Iran said none of its boats were destroyed.

Who said what

Tehran “did not outright confirm or deny” its attacks, The Associated Press said. CENTCOM said it had shot down all Iranian missiles and drones fired at U.S. Navy ships and the commercial vessels they were guiding through a passage it had “successfully opened” through the strait. Trump appeared “willing to look past” Iran’s attacks, The Wall Street Journal said. But Monday’s violence put his “desire to end the Iran war” to the test.

What next?

Shipping companies said that Trump’s “offer to provide them safe passage” through the strait “fell short of the sort of arrangements that would persuade them to make the trip,” The New York Times said.

The war with Iran has hit a “toxic stalemate,” said Janna Brancolini in the Daily Beast. American officials poured cold water on a proposal from Tehran to end the two-month conflict, under which the U.S. would end its naval blockade of Iranian ports and Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial oil-shipping route whose closure is choking the global economy. The regime’s nuclear program, meanwhile, would be discussed at a later date. A U.S. official said the nuclear punt was a nonstarter because it “would deny Trump a victory,” and in a 4 a.m. social media post—accompanied by an image of Trump as a gun-toting action hero and the caption “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY”—the president made his feelings clear on Tehran’s offer. “They better get smart soon!” he wrote, saying the regime’s only hope is to go “nonnuclear.” For now, Trump is set on “an extended blockade of Iran,” said Alexander Ward in The Wall Street Journal. He’s decided his other options, walking away or resuming bombing, carry more risk than targeting “the regime’s coffers in a high-risk bid to compel a nuclear capitulation Tehran has long refused.”

“Time is on America’s side,” said Mark Dubowitz and Miad Maleki in the New York Post. While U.S. motorists grumble about gas topping $4.20 a gallon, the remnants of Iran’s regime are battling triple-digit inflation, mass unemployment, a currency in “free fall,” and a U.S. blockade that has them “bleeding cash.” Worse, said Amit Segal in The Free Press, Iran is now “drowning in its own oil.” Within a few weeks, Iran will run out of storage for the crude it pumps out of the ground, leaving the regime no option but to halt production and see extraction systems clog up, a “death sentence” for its oil industry.

Don’t underestimate “Iran’s pain threshold,” said Ben Geman in Axios. The country has alternate storage facilities, including a fleet of floating crude carriers, and continues to sneak tankers past the U.S. Navy. And experts say the regime has other revenue sources, including oil exported overland, “to keep its troops paid and its position in Iran secure.” Iran believes it can hold out for at least another two or three months, said Ali Vaez in The New Yorker, and that “the American timeline” is more like two to three weeks. With Trump’s approval rating hitting a record low of 34% in a new Reuters poll, the regime thinks cost-of-living pressures will force him to back down and save Republicans from a wipeout in the midterms. Trump also doesn’t want the war to dominate his mid-May visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, let alone for jet-fuel shortages to ruin this summer’s World Cup, which the U.S. is co-hosting with Mexico and Canada.

Trump might still be able to reach a deal with Iran, said Katrin Bennhold in The New York Times, but it won’t be as good as the Obama-era pact he ripped up in 2018. That deal barred Iran from enriching uranium above 3.67% purity; its current stockpile is at 60% and with further processing could be used to build 100 nuclear bombs. And Tehran now has better cards to play than during the negotiations for the 2015 deal, including control of the Strait of Hormuz. For future talks to have any chance, Trump will “have to abandon his ‘I win, you lose’ approach to diplomacy,” said Trudy Rubin in The Philadelphia Inquirer. As gas prices climb higher, perhaps he’ll accept a compromise that lets both Iran and the U.S. save face. But based on everything we’ve learned about our president, “this hope requires a suspension of disbelief.”

What happened

President Donald Trump said the U.S. was launching a new effort Monday to “guide” blockaded commercial ships “safely” through the Strait of Hormuz, which has effectively been closed to maritime traffic since Trump and Israel launched the Iran war Feb. 28. Trump offered few details in his social media announcement, but described “Project Freedom” as a “humanitarian gesture” on behalf of the U.S., Middle Eastern countries and “in particular” Iran. Iranian state-run media said the announcement was part of “Trump’s delirium.”

Who said what

U.S. Central Command said guided-missile destroyers, drones and more than 100 aircraft would support Trump’s new initiative. But the plan “doesn’t currently involve U.S. Navy warships escorting vessels through the strait,” The Wall Street Journal said, citing senior U.S. officials. Traders and shipowners “expressed skepticism” that the “arm’s-length effort to unblock the vital supply route” would be effective.

Trump’s announcement was “essentially a challenge to Iran, and a bet that it would not want to take the risk of firing the first shots — or laying mines” — to challenge the U.S., The New York Times said. Ebrahim Azizi, the head of Iran’s parliamentary National Security Committee, said on X that “any U.S. interference” in the strait “will be considered a violation of the ceasefire.”

What next?

Two months into the war, Trump’s “predictions of a relatively short-term conflict with minimal economic consequences appear to be crumbling around him,” the Times said. “Voter backlash is building” as average U.S. gas prices hit a “wartime high of $4.39,” The Washington Post said, and “inside the White House, the options to lower prices at the pump are dwindling.”

What happened

The White House is arguing that the War Powers Act deadline to either wind down the Iran war or get congressional authorization is not Friday, as Congress assumed, because the 60-day clock stopped when President Donald Trump ordered a ceasefire on April 7. “For War Powers Resolution purposes,” an official told reporters, the hostilities “have terminated.”

Who said what

“We are in a ceasefire right now, which our understanding means the 60-day clock pauses or stops,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a Senate hearing Thursday. His assertion was “met with outrage from Democrats and skepticism from Republicans,” The Wall Street Journal said. The U.S. military “continues to enforce a military blockade,” which is “considered an act of war under international law.”

“Nothing in the text or design of the War Powers Resolution suggests that the 60-day clock can be paused or terminated,” Katherine Yon Ebright, a war powers expert at the Brennan Center, told The Associated Press, and Congress needs to push back against this “sizeable extension of previous legal gamesmanship” over the law.

What next?

In the hearing, ostensibly about the Pentagon’s $1.45 trillion budget request, Hegseth “did not say how long the war with Iran could continue,” The New York Times said.

The U.S.-Israeli war in Iran has had a tangible effect on the economy in the Middle East, and the conflict is also making things more expensive for Americans at home. Increasing oil prices resulting from the war have cascading consequences, and while things like gasoline are most obviously affected, other products are also getting pricier.

Clothes

Supply chain issues with crude oil are raising the cost of the oil’s building blocks, called petrochemicals. Six of these petrochemicals are the “major foundations of plastics and synthetic materials like nylon and polyesters,” said The Associated Press. When petrochemicals become more expensive, it is often accompanied by a spike in clothing prices.

To make a button-down shirt, for example, the “materials account for 27%-30% of the cost a manufacturer incurs,” Andrew Walberer, a partner at the global strategy and management consultancy Kearney, told the AP. Experts are “warning consumers to budget for price increases of 10 to 15%” in clothing if the petrochemicals’ costs continue to rise, said the South China Morning Post.

Condoms

People may not assume safe sex would be impacted by the war, but the world’s largest condom manufacturer, Karex, is planning to “raise prices by 20% to 30% and possibly further if supply chain disruptions drag on due to the Iran war,” said The Guardian. Karex, a Malaysian company, supplies more than 5 billion condoms annually to global manufacturers, including major brands sold in the U.S. like Trojan and Durex.

Karex is being forced to raise its prices because the company “has seen a cost increase for synthetic rubber, nitrile, ‌aluminum foil and silicone oil,” said Inc. magazine. While still seeing high demand, the company is “currently faced with rising freight costs and shipping delays, leading to its customers carrying lower stockpiles” of Karex’s products.

Cosmetics

The war in Iran is even “seeping into the cosmetics supply chain, pushing up the cost of everything from plastic jars and ​lipstick tubes to transport, and reminding the beauty industry that even a tub of face cream depends on fragile ‌global trade routes,” said Reuters. The most notable sector being affected is the Korean beauty industry, which has a large following in the United States.

Due to the unstable cost and raw material prices of petrochemicals, the “unit prices of most products will inevitably be increased,” cosmetics company Luxepack Korea said in a press release, per The Washington Post. Many similar cosmetic brands “aren’t sure how much longer they can absorb rising production costs.”

Gasoline

This one is probably the most obvious: spiking oil prices are causing costs at the pump to skyrocket. On April 29, gas prices “hit a fresh record since the start of the war with Iran, rising to an average nationwide of $4.23 per gallon,” said NBC News, citing data from AAA. The price of Brent crude, the benchmark for international petroleum, also “stands at $114.60, up nearly 25% from the recent low seen April 17.”

It may be unlikely that gas prices will come down anytime soon. President Donald Trump has “told aides to prepare for a long blockade to throttle Iran’s economy by blocking Iranian oil shipments,” said The Guardian. The number of ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz is “now at its lowest level since the start of the war.”

Toys

Like clothes, many stuffed plush toys are “made with polyester and acrylic, synthetic fibers derived from petroleum,” said the AP, so rising prices could similarly impact the toy industry. Suppliers in China have notified Aleni Brands, the company behind popular plush lines like Bizzikins, that “getting the materials already was costing them 10% to 15% more.”

Notable production hurdles are also being experienced by a “cluster of manufacturers in Shantou, a city located 190 miles northeast of Hong Kong, which produces a third of the world’s toys,” said The New York Times. Other child-adjacent products, including crayons, are additionally facing shortages due to petrochemical supply chain issues.