Morning Report

TODAY’S IRAN WAR story

Trump says he wants to help pick Iran’s next leader

What happened
President Donald Trump yesterday said he needed to be involved in picking the next leader of Iran after Israel assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the opening strikes of the U.S.-Israeli war. Mojtaba Khamenei (pictured above), the slain leader’s 56-year-old son, is widely viewed as the frontrunner as a panel of Iranian clerics votes on a successor. Trump told Axios the younger Khamenei was a “lightweight” and “unacceptable to me.”

Who said what
“I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela,” Trump told Axios. “We’re going to have to choose that person along with Iran,” he said to Reuters. Trump told reporters on Tuesday that “most of the people we had in mind” to become supreme leader were killed in airstrikes.

Trump’s comments “represent an extraordinary claim of American power over Iran’s political future, further muddying the objectives of the massive U.S. military campaign he launched,” Axios said. Iran has “delayed the naming of a successor” due to “security concerns following American and Israeli comments that the new leader could also be targeted,” The New York Times said. U.S. and Israel have “decimated the highest ranks of political and military leadership,” The Washington Post said, but six days of airstrikes have “not threatened the Iranian regime’s grip on power.”

What next?
Mojtaba Khamenei would represent the “continuity of hard-line conservative rule,” the Times said. But it isn’t clear that “the Revolutionary Guards, who are the real power in Iran,” will “defer” to the 88 elderly clerics choosing the next supreme leader, Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told NPR. “And I think that the next supreme leader of Iran is not going to be the incredibly powerful figure that Ayatollah Khamenei came to be.”

TODAY’S GLOBAL TRADE Story

States sue Trump over new global tariffs

What happened
A coalition of two dozen Democratic-led states yesterday sued President Donald Trump at the U.S. Court of International Trade, arguing that the 10% global tariffs he imposed after the Supreme Court struck down his earlier sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs are similarly illegal. The lawsuit was filed a day after a judge on the trade court ordered the Trump administration to start refunding the more than $130 billion collected under the nullified tariffs.

Who said what
Trump imposed his new tariffs, which he plans to raise to 15%, using the never-before-invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. “The president has once again exercised tariff authority that he does not have — involving a statute that does not authorize the tariffs he has imposed — to upend the constitutional order and bring chaos to the global economy,” the lawsuit said.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai said Trump was using his legal authority to address America’s ”large and serious“ trade deficit, and the administration ”will vigorously defend” the tariffs in court. The legal question is whether Section 122’s reference to “fundamental international payments problems” — originally meant to address a 1960s crisis tied to gold-backed dollars — applies to modern trade deficits. “They are not the same thing at all,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said. “The president either doesn’t know the difference or he doesn’t care,” but “he is breaking the law” either way.

What next?
The states want the trade court to “declare the new tariffs illegal” and “refund states the cost of the new tariffs while they were in effect,” Politico said. “The focus right now should be on paying people back,” said Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield (pictured above right, with Mayes).

It’s not all bad

In the Maldives, 305 participants gathered to shatter the world record for most people snorkeling simultaneously. That wasn’t the event’s only goal, however. Organizers from Freedive Maldives and Siyam World Maldives also taught participants about safe reef habits, like keeping away from marine life and careful finning. The day “combined fun, community and conservation,” said Freedive Maldives founder Fahd Faiz, but it also reminded people that “every small action in the ocean can make a big difference.”

Under the radar

The rise of Asian ‘scam states’

Prosecutors in Taiwan indicted 62 people this week for their alleged links to the Prince Group, a multinational network accused of running a vast system of scam centers out of Cambodia. Scam centers across Southeast Asia have become so powerful and entrenched that they are now developing into scam states.

Scam states are similar to narco states. In both, an “illicit industry has dug its tentacles deep into legitimate institutions, reshaping the economy, corrupting governments and establishing state reliance on an illegal network,” said The Guardian. Narco states, where the illicit industry is illegal drugs, have been entrenched for decades, but scam states are growing in number because the “multibillion-dollar global scam industry” has become “so monolithic.”

After beginning as small online fraud rings, scamming has transformed into a sprawling, industrial-scale criminal economy in parts of Southeast Asia. The scam centers employ — or often traffic or coerce — workers to defraud victims globally through scams involving romance, fake investments or other lures. The U.S. and U.K. have launched joint efforts, like the Scam Center Strike Force, to take on the illegal networks and infrastructure supporting them. But dismantling scam states is a complex task involving battling sophisticated technology and tolerant or complicit governments.

Analysts warn that without targeting the leadership and financial core of these networks, law enforcement may merely displace the problem rather than eliminate it. The rise of scam states highlights a new frontier of organized crime, one that intertwines digital innovation, exploitation and corruption on a vast scale.

On this day

March 6, 1981

Walter Cronkite signed off as the anchor of “CBS Evening News” for the last time. He hosted the show for 19 years, during which he was considered the “most trusted man in America.” Cronkite’s successor, Dan Rather, anchored CBS’s flagship nightly news program until 2005. Since then, it’s had a stream of anchors, the current one being Tony Dokoupil.

TODAY’S newspaperS

‘No place for Noem’

“Pentagon races to secure cash for Iran operations, munitions,” The Wall Street Journal says on Friday’s front page. “War in Middle East could affect your utility bills,” says The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “War with Iran widens” as “Israel attacks Beirut area,” the Los Angeles Times says. “Trump tries to seed Iran uprising” and “pledges U.S. help for Kurds,” The Washington Post says. “Trump fires Noem as chief of DHS after rocky term,” The New York Times says. “There’s no place for Noem,” the New York Daily News says. “‘Nazi heaven’: Inside Miami campus Republicans’ racist group chat,” says the Miami Herald. “Tariffs hit Chinese New Year Parade,” the San Francisco Chronicle says. “Sea rise is worse than thought,” says The Minnesota Star Tribune.

► See the newspaper front pages

Tall tale

Claw enforcement

Police in Bangkok recently went undercover at a Lunar New Year event, donning a multiperson lion costume to surreptitiously tail a suspected burglar. Video of the sting shows the lion dancing through the crowd, then stopping in front of the 33-year-old suspect as the officer wearing the lion’s head jumped and pinned him down. The suspect is accused of breaking into a police commander’s Bangkok home three separate times and stealing $63,700 worth of items.

Morning Report was written and edited by Nadia Croes, Catherine Garcia, Scott Hocker, Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, Justin Klawans, Chas Newkey-Burden, Rafi Schwartz, Peter Weber and Kari Wilkin, with illustrations by Stephen Kelly and Julia Wytrazek.