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    After 47 years in the US, Ice took this Iranian mother from her yard. Her family just wants her home

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    Kaitlynn Milne says her mother is usually always up first thing in the morning, hours before the rest of the family. She enjoys being productive in the quiet hours around sunrise. It’s an especially optimal time to do yard work, when the rest of her New Orleans neighborhood still sleeps and she can count on peacefully completing chores.Gardening and rearranging the shed is how an average morning would go for Mandonna “Donna” Kashanian, a 64-year-old Iranian mother, wife, home cook, parent-teacher association (PTA) member and lifelong community service volunteer.“She always says: ‘I’ve already done most of my day before y’all even wake up,’ complaining at us,” said Kaitlynn, 32. It was always done with love, she says, as her mother adores taking care of others and would wake up every morning excited to do just that.But the morning of Sunday, 22 June, didn’t go like every other morning. In the early hours, while her husband, Russell Milne, slept inside the house, Kashanian was approached in her yard by plainclothes men who identified themselves as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents.She was quickly arrested without her family being told anything. They only found out after a neighbor who happened to be awake witnessed the arrest and notified them.According to the neighbor, Kashanian was handcuffed before being taken away by multiple agents, details Kashanian herself was later able to confirm to her family. Her arrest involved three unmarked cars, including one that appeared to be a lookout, which her neighbor and family believe had been watching for a moment when Kashanian was outside and alone.“Had the neighbors not walked out at the same time they were pushing her into the car, we would not have known she was taken,” said Russell.Kashanian was able to call her family about an hour later, when she relayed to them what had happened and where she was. Ice officers told her that she was being taken to a holding center in Mississippi, before eventually being transferred back to a detention center in Louisiana. After that Sunday morning call, her husband and daughter didn’t hear from her again until Tuesday.She remains in Ice custody in Basile, Louisiana, despite having no criminal record.The timing of Kashanian’s detention was just hours after US airstrikes in Iran, a move that has coincided with the ramping-up of deportations of Iranians by the Trump administration. It also comes amid a nationwide crackdown by Ice, which has seen tens of thousands of immigrants detained, often by masked agents, plunged many communities into fear and outraged civil liberties advocates.View image in fullscreenKashanian arrived in the US in 1978 on a student visa and has lived in the country ever since. She later applied for asylum, citing fears of persecution due to her father’s ties to the US-backed Shah of Iran.Her asylum request was ultimately denied, but she was granted a stay of removal on the condition she comply with immigration requirements, a condition her family says she always met. Kashanian was so careful about regularly attending her meetings with immigration officials that she once checked in from South Carolina during Hurricane Katrina.Despite having to juggle constant immigration checks, Kashanian remained devoted to community service work. She volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, helping rebuild homes after Katrina. She worked with Nola Tree Project, a local non-profit that replants trees after disasters. She served on a PTA, volunteering at her daughter’s elementary school, middle school and high school.“She was constantly around,” said Kaitlynn. “She was constantly helping with upkeep of the schools. She was always there, always helping the teachers and custodial staff, anything to be supportive. Everyone knew Kaitlynn’s mom.”She also found the time to become a skilled home cook. Her YouTube channel, titled Mandonna in the Kitchen, is dedicated to sharing her favorite Persian recipes with aspiring cooks.According to her daughter and husband, Kashanian is an optimist who is almost impossible to upset. But there is one thing that never fails to unsettle her, and that’s improperly cooked rice.Now that she has been moved to a facility in Louisiana, her family has been able to set up a line of communication, speaking to her once a day. But she is given a limited amount of time to call or message, so communication is restricted. She says she has still not been assigned a case worker.“She’s in pretty good spirits,” said Russell. “She’s more worried about us, and about the lack of communication she’s getting about her situation. They’re not really giving her any information, and that’s what’s scary.”Russell and Kaitlynn have been working tirelessly to find legal help, but it has been challenging due in part to the complexity of Donna’s case, with some of her documents seeming to have been lost over decades of changing hands in the immigration offices.View image in fullscreenBut the other big challenge is the limited availability of immigration lawyers. As the Trump administration has escalated the number of Ice arrests, there is a shortage of legal counsel for immigrants and their families to go to for help.“We have been on the phone nonstop from 8am to 10pm almost every day the last week trying to find help, and it’s proving difficult because all the immigration lawyers are all dealing with everyone else’s crises as well,” said Kaitlynn. “So far, we haven’t gotten a lot of optimistic responses.”Like her mother, Kaitlynn remains in good spirits despite the constant obstacles, staying focused on helping someone else who currently needs it. But there is one moment in her show of resilience when her voice falters, as she recalls a memory from her childhood when her mother created a French book section in her New Orleans elementary school library.“I had forgotten that until just now,” Kaitlynn said, through tears. “Because there were no French books in the library. She organized that and got it together and painted this little tiny nook.”Russell says the focus currently is just to get his wife out of detention. “We’re working on a grassroots campaign and a letter-writing campaign on her behalf, that will hopefully be able to at least gain her release from the detention center,” he said.“After that, we can move forward with next steps through the immigration offices,” he added. “But right now, just getting her home is the challenge.” More

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      America is over neoliberalism and neoconservatism. Trump is not | Samuel Moyn

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      The convergence of the US Senate’s passage of Donald Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill” in domestic policy with his strike on Iran in foreign policy has finally resolved the meaning of his presidency. His place in history is now clear. His rise, like that of a reawakened left, indicated that America was ready to move on from its long era of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. In office, Trump has blocked the exits by doubling down on both.The first of those slurs, neoliberalism, refers to the commitment across the political spectrum to use government to protect markets and their hierarchies, rather than to moderate or undo them. The second, neoconservatism, is epitomized by a belligerent and militaristic foreign policy. The domestic policy bill now making its way through Congress, with its payoff to the rich and punishment of the poor, is a monument to neoliberalism; the Iran strike a revival of neoconservatism.Up to now, uncertainty about Trump’s place in history has prevailed, in part because he has done little and dithered so much. From before he took office, apocalyptic premonition of the doom he might bring reigned supreme. Everyone assumed that the Trump era was going to be different, disagreeing only about the exact shape of the horror. On the right, some projected their hopes for transformation on the president, anticipating a different future, wishcasting without knowing whether (or when) their leader would side with them.Now, with his bill and his bombing, Trump has confirmed beyond any doubt that he is a man of a familiar past instead. Though the damage that neoliberalism and neoconservatism wrought helped make Trump’s charlatanry a credible choice for millions, the man himself stands for the eternal return of those very same policies. Trump’s appeal to the working class and more measured rhetoric about war from the start of his political career suggested that he might renege on these two dominant creeds from the beltway “swamp”. He renewed them both instead.This is where Trump’s ultimate significance so clearly lies: in continuity, not change. He busted a lot of norms from the first in 2017. Cries of abnormalcy and authoritarianism arose before there was evidence to back them – and evidence has accumulated through both terms. Charlottesville and January 6 in the first – intimations of deeper reservoirs of hate that could come out of American woodwork, with Trump coyly pandering to the mobs – were preludes to both mass and targeted immigration roundups in this term, reminiscent of classical fascism.Yet climactically, and when it mattered most, Trump has chosen to walk in lockstep with the dead consensus in domestic and foreign policy of the past half-century – not merely among conservatives, but among many liberals. Americans do best when the rich do best of all, with the poor punished for crime and sloth: that has long been our outlook. And the country must go it alone with military force, in order to back our interests or principles or both, Americans have long presumed.Neoliberalism and neoconservatism each has more complexity than this – but, leaning into both, Trump has shown in recent weeks they are not much more complicated either. And if so, Trump is far more a politician of American continuity with the past 50 years than many originally feared (or hoped).The “beautiful” domestic policy bill is one of the morally ugliest in American history. Making Trump’s signature tax cuts from his first term permanent requires both draconian cuts to programs (Medicaid for the poor, worst of all) and piling up even more debt for future generations to figure out. It turns out that Ronald Reagan and the Democrats who followed him in lowering taxation and “reforming” welfare (including by imposing work requirements, as this bill does) were not in another world from Trump. He is in theirs. Revealingly, the main trouble that Trump faced in getting the obscenity of a bill passed – and that he still faces in the House – is convincing Republicans who claim to hate deficit spending so much to rationalize even greater cuts to welfare.On the world stage, Trump has longed for the recognition of a Nobel peace prize. But the deals he thinks will deserve it have proved elusive. In Israel/Palestine, the ceasefire he helped force has broken down and the civilian toll has worsened. In Ukraine, the considerable distance between the warring parties has meant that Trump has not managed to either antagonize or lure either to come to terms. Unlike during his first four years, his Iran intervention means that, rather than bringing peace, exacerbating war is his foreign policy legacy for now.Squandering the inclinations of his base and outraging many more lukewarm supporters sick of foreign entanglements, it was a surprise that he acted with the reckless militarism that was once American common sense. He is no doubt open to any deals that come his way – apparently thinking that Canada or Greenland should clamor to be annexed. But it was foolish in response to the early rhetoric of his second term to expect Trump to revert to expansionist war by sending troops. But in sending B-2 bombers on so escalatory a mission to Iran, he clarified his support for war – incurring risks like no other presidents have taken. If the peace he wants to brag about doesn’t materialize, he is not above a dose of coercive violence.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIronically, Trump’s warlike turn meant that a long list of his neoconservative “never Trump” scourges became “sometimes Trump” supporters overnight. Where populist Republicans have had to grit their teeth and support a neoliberal bill – so much for the working-class party they promised – it was even more spectacular that neoconservatives overcame the hatred for Trump that had helped them launder their former reputations for catastrophic warmongering.With neocon scion Bill Kristol in the lead, after the Iran strike they fawned over the man whom they had spent years castigating as irresponsible, or malignant, or both. No wonder: Trump, far from acting as an isolationist or realist, was executing one of the longest-held and longest-denied neoconservative fantasies: that bombing Iran’s nuclear program off the map would work, and might have the fringe benefit of causing the regime to fall. It remains a fantasy. But Trump’s place in history is now defined by that fantasy more than by any other foreign policy choice he has made so far.Like in his first term, when he ordered the assassination in Iraq of Iranian general and terror master Qassem Suleimani in 2020, Trump’s strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities was illegal. But as the saying goes, Trump’s escalatory and risky use of bunker-busting munitions to wipe Fordow and other sites off the map was worse than a crime; it was a mistake. At best, it elicited a face-saving attack from Iran so that it could come to the negotiating table with a nuclear program to continue in the future; at worst, it will prompt Iran to intensify its efforts to achieve the weapon. And while Israel has certainly set back Iran’s regional designs and capacity for sponsoring terror, there are no signs the regime will relent in its policies.With hopes that he might stand for restraint shredded, it is likelier that a lackey will find a place on Mount Rushmore than that Trump will get the call from Oslo he badly wants. But like the politicians whose faces are already carved in the granite of South Dakota, Trump is a man of the past – and never more clearly than in recent weeks, as America continues to look for someone to liberate it from the zombie neoliberalism and neoconservatism that still define their disastrous present and president.

      Samuel Moyn is the Kent professor of law and history at Yale University, where he also serves as head of Grace Hopper College More

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      Trump signs executive order to lift some financial sanctions on Syria

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      Donald Trump has signed an executive order to lift some financial sanctions on Syria in a move that the White House says will help stabilise the country after the ousting of Bashar al-Assad.The order was designed to “terminate the United States’ sanctions programme on Syria”, a White House spokesperson said, cancelling a 2004 declaration that froze Syrian government property and limited exports to Syria over Damascus’s chemical weapons programme.Some sanctions will remain on Syria, including those mandated through Congress under the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 that targeted funds for reconstruction and natural gas development, as well as the US declaration of Syria as a state sponsor of terrorism.Trump’s order would mainly direct other members of the administration to consider broader sanctions relief for Syria – and could possibly provide leverage with Syria in talks on normalising ties with Israel and foreign investment in the country’s reconstruction.The order included a direction to secretary of state Marco Rubio to evaluate suspending sanctions under the Caesar Act, permit the relaxation of control on the export of “certain goods”, and lift restrictions on some foreign aid. It also directs Rubio to review Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa’s designation as a terrorist leader and Syria’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, and to consider measures for sanctions relief through the United Nations.“We welcome the cancellation of the majority of the sanctions program imposed on the Syrian Arab Republic, pursuant to the historic executive order issued by President Trump,” said Syrian foreign minister Asaad Hassan al-Shaibani. “By removing this major obstacle to economic recovery, the doors to long-awaited reconstruction and development are opened, along with the rehabilitation of vital infrastructure, providing the necessary conditions for the dignified and safe return of displaced Syrians to their homeland.”The White House sought to portray the decision as one that would protect US interests, noting Trump’s efforts to “address foreign terrorists”, promote the normalisation of ties with Israel, and prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State.“President Trump wants Syria to succeed – but not at the expense of US interests,” the White House said in a statement.White House officials said that the executive order would maintain pressure on the former leader Assad and his entourage.“The order will remove sanctions on Syria while maintaining sanctions on the former president, Assad, his associates, human rights abusers, drug traffickers, persons linked to chemical weapons activities, Islamic State and their affiliates, and Iranian proxies,” said the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, during a briefing on Monday.The move was widely anticipated after Donald Trump briefly met with Syria’s new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, who led forces that overthrew Assad in December. Sharaa has complained that the sanctions against Syria had made it difficult to stabilise his fragile transition government, citing issues with paying civil servant wages and funding reconstruction. Trump pledged in May to lift all sanctions on Syria following Assad’s removal from power.The executive order would “end the country’s isolation from the international financial system, setting the stage for global commerce, and galvanizing investments from its neighbors in the region as well as from the US”, said acting under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence Brad Smith in a briefing with reporters.Asked about the Abraham accords, the Trump administration’s negotiations for Arab states to normalise diplomatic ties with Israel, a senior administration official suggested that the White House would not push for the recognition of specific territorial claims between Syria and Israel.“We’re going to come to a mutuality of understanding, and you’re going to get there slowly, and there’s going to be metrics and milestones and objectives, and you’re going to start trusting each other,” the official said. “And over this trust, those lines become illusory.” More

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      Zohran Mamdani won by being himself – and his victory has revealed the Islamophobic ugliness of others | Nesrine Malik

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      Zohran Mamdani’s stunning win in New York’s mayoral primary has been a tale of two cities, and two Americas. In one, a young man with hopeful, progressive politics went up against the decaying gods of the establishment, with their giant funding and networks and endorsements from Democratic scions, and won. In another, in an appalling paroxysm of racism and Islamophobia, a Muslim antisemite has taken over the most important city in the US, with an aim to impose some socialist/Islamist regime. Like effluent, pungent and smearing, anti-Muslim hate spread unchecked and unchallenged after Mamdani’s win. It takes a lot from the US to shock these days, but Mamdani has managed to stir, or expose, an obscene degree of mainstreamed prejudice.Politicians, public figures, members of Donald Trump’s administration and the cesspit of social media clout-chasers all combined to produce what can only be described as a collective self-induced hallucination; an image of a burqa swathed over the Statue of Liberty; the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, stating that Mamdani’s win is what happens when a country fails to control immigration. Republican congressman Andy Ogles has decided to call Mamdani “little muhammad” and is petitioning to have him denaturalised and deported. He has been called a “Hamas terrorist sympathiser”, and a “jihadist terrorist”.It is a measure of how racist the reaction has been that Donald Trump calling Mamdani a “communist lunatic” seems restrained in comparison. Some of the responses have been so hysterical that I often couldn’t tell what was real and what was parody. Because the idea that Mamdani, whose style is, above anything else, wide-grinned earnestness, was some sinister Islamist sleeper agent is so clearly a joke.But it’s not a joke, and if it is then it’s on me for still, after all these years, underestimating what Muslims in the public sphere do to people’s brains. And how utterly comfortable many are with anti-Muslim hate. And why shouldn’t they be? To date, the most senior figures in Mamdani’s own party, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, have not called out this onslaught, and those politicians and public figures who made them will suffer no censure or consequence. Because, fundamentally, anti-Muslim hate, like all racism when it becomes normalised, thrives when there is a systemic blessing of it through not even registering its offensiveness.But the apathy towards assaults against Mamdani is because he is an outsider in more meaningful ways, not just in his religious background. His crime is not one of daring to be Muslim and a politician – he might have “passed” if he was a conventional Democratic apparatchik – but of having strong opinions about economics and politics that mark him out as a challenger of mainstream orthodoxies regarding capitalism and Israel.Given his leftwing opinions on taxation and rent control, and objections to the slaughter of Palestinians on the US’s dime, a backlash to Mamdani was always likely. But he has done much to counter it. He has made thorough explanations of his abhorrence of antisemitism, of his pledge to combat all hate crime, and of the fact that his economic agenda is based on making the city, from its food to its childcare, more affordable.His offence has been in his unwillingness to water down his principles, not toeing the line on Israel, and not making frankly embarrassing assertions, like those running against him did, that Israel would be his first foreign trip. He has refrained from debasing himself through serial condemnations of phrases that have arbitrarily been erected as litmus tests of a Muslim’s acceptability in the public domain.Mamdani’s refusal to reject the phrase “globalise the intifada”, on the grounds that it expresses “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights” has been seized upon as an indication that he supports some kind of violent jihad – a reading that ignores his frequent assertions that Israel has the right to exist and condemnations of any violence against Jews. What are we doing here?There is no degree to which Mamdani could have become acceptably Muslim while holding these opinions – even though they are clearly universal enough for him to receive emphatic support from New Yorkers, including from Jews who voted for him, and the Jewish candidate Brad Lander, who endorsed him. He cannot be secular enough, American enough, or elite enough, as the son of a film-maker and a professor, to hold politics that will not be reducible to his inherently suspect identity.Even in demeanour, he has spoken of how he constantly has to measure his tone, lest he be smeared as a “beast”. And in this, he mirrors a broader, exasperating reality – one where Muslims and pro-Palestinians are condemned as threatening, while there is a colossal attack on their rights and safety across the world, simply for opposing an incontrovertible crime being perpetrated in Gaza. From detention and deportation proceedings against activists such as Mahmoud Khalil in the US, to the vilification and securitisation of pro-Palestinian speech and activism in the UK and Europe, the messenger is shot, and then framed as the aggressor.But smears and diversions and outrageous extrapolations will not change the facts on the ground, which are that the Israeli state is occupying the West Bank, starving and killing Palestinians in Gaza, and accused of war crimes and genocide, all with the sponsorship of the US and support of western regimes. In that sense, Mamdani’s victory is a threat, because it reveals how finally, all attempts to maintain an indefensible and intolerable situation have lost their grip on the growing number of people who are thinking for themselves.Mamdani isn’t even mayor yet, and he will probably face an escalating campaign using his identity as a way of discrediting his beliefs, both economic and political. And here is where the response to his win is both alarming and potentially propulsive, like the clammy buildup to the final breaking of a fever. Mamdani is where he is because he is not alone. Not by a long shot. And in drawing out such naked and explicit anti-Muslim hate, Mamdani has inadvertently revealed the ugliness and weakness not just of his opponents, but of the wider political establishment, as well as their anti-democratic impulses.In drawing them out, Mamdani has shown how prejudice is rarely about individuals, but the fear that marginalised minority views could ever become powerful majority ones. In this mayoral race, from Palestine to local policing, anti-Muslim hate is not just a repellent phenomenon confined to Mamdani, it is a barricade against the desires of the voting public. Once people start making that connection, it really is over.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

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      Iran’s nuclear enrichment ‘will never stop’, nation’s UN ambassador says

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      Amir-Saeid Iravani, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, said on Sunday that the Islamic republic’s nuclear enrichment “will never stop” because it is permitted for “peaceful energy” purposes under the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.“The enrichment is our right, an inalienable right, and we want to implement this right,” Iravani told CBS News, adding that Iran was ready for negotiations but “unconditional surrender is not negotiation. It is dictating the policy toward us.”But Iravani said Tehran is “ready for the negotiation, but after this aggression, it is not proper condition for a new round of the negotiation, and there is no request for negotiation and meeting with the president”.The Iranian UN envoy also denied that there are any threats from his government to the safety of Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or against the agency’s inspectors, who are accused by some Iranian officials of helping Israel justify its attacks. IAEA inspectors are currently in Iran but do not have access to Iran’s nuclear facilities.Pressed by the CBS News anchor Margaret Brennan on whether he would condemn calls for the arrest and execution of the IAEA head, which Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state said a newspaper close to Iran’s leader had made, Iravani said that he would.“There is no any threat,” Irvani said, but acknowledged that Iran’s parliament had suspended cooperation with IAEA. The inspectors, he said, “are in Iran, they are in safe conditions, but the activity has been suspended. They cannot have access to our site … our assessment is that they have not done their jobs.”Iravani also responded to questions on why Tehran has not accepted proposals for a diplomatic solution. Referring to Trump’s “unconditional surrender” demand, Irvani said that the US “is dictating the policy towards us. If they are ready for negotiation, they will find us ready for that. But if they want to dictate us, it is impossible for any negotiation with them.”Iravani said on Saturday that Iran could transfer its stocks of enriched uranium to another country in the event of an agreement with the United States on Tehran’s nuclear program, according to news site Al-Monitor.The transfer of 20% and 60% enriched uranium would not be a red line for Tehran, Iravani said, adding that the material could alternatively remain in Iran under IAEA supervision.But as he said again on Sunday, Iravani stressed that Iran would not renounce its right to domestic uranium production, a condition the US rejects.Irvani’s comments comes as western nations, including the US, are pushing for Iran to resume negotiations over its nuclear program a week after the US launched strikes on three facilities, setting off days of heated dispute over whether the facilities has been “totally obliterated”, as Donald Trump initially claimed, or if they had delayed but not destroyed the program.Grossi told CBS that there is “agreement in describing this as a very serious level of damage” but went on to say that Iran will likely will be able to begin to produce enriched uranium within months.“The capacities they have are there,” he said. “They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that. But as I said, frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there.”On Sunday, President Trump again dismissed reports that Iran had moved 400kg (880lb) on 60% enriched uranium ahead of the strikes on Fordow, regarded as the center of Iran’s enrichment program.“It’s very hard to do, dangerous to do, it’s very heavy, plus we didn’t give them much notice because they didn’t know they we were coming,” Trump told the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo.Trump speculated that vehicles seen near the entrances to Fordow before the strikes were likely masons brought in to seal up the facility. “There are thousands of tons of rock in that room right now,” Trump said. “They whole place was just destroyed.”However, the Washington Post reported on Sunday that the US obtained intercepted Iranian communications in which senior Iran officials remarked that damage from the attack was not as destructive and extensive as they anticipated.The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, scoffed at the Iranian claims in a comment to the Post in which she did not dispute that such communications had been intercepted.“The notion that unnamed Iranian officials know what happened under hundreds of feet of rubble is nonsense,” Leavitt said.Separately on Sunday, Abdolrahim Mousavi, Iran’s armed forces chief of staff, reportedly told the Saudi defense minister during a call that Tehran is not convinced Israel will honour the ceasefire that ended their 12-day war announced by Trump.“Since we are completely doubtful about the enemy honoring its commitments, including the ceasefire, we are prepared to give it a tough response in case of recurrence of an act of aggression”, Mousavi said, according to Turkey’s state-run news agency Anadolu.Israel and the US, “have shown that they do not adhere to any international rules and norms” the Iranian general added. “We did not initiate war, but we responded with all our power to the aggressor.” More

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      Trump considers forcing journalists to reveal sources who leaked Iran report

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      Donald Trump said he is weighing forcing journalists who published leaked details from a US intelligence report assessing the impact of the recent American military strikes on Iran to reveal their sources – and the president also claimed his administration may prosecute those reporters and sources if they don’t comply.In an interview Sunday with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, Trump doubled down on his claim that the 21 June airstrikes aimed at certain Iranian facilities successfully crippled Iran’s nuclear program. He insisted the attacks destroyed key enriched uranium stockpiles, despite Iranian assertions that the material had been relocated before the strikes.Trump dismissed the leaked intelligence assessment in question – which suggested the strikes only temporarily disrupted Iran’s nuclear development – as incomplete and biased. The report, circulated among US lawmakers and intelligence officials, concluded that the damage inflicted was significantly less than what Trump’s administration had publicly claimed.The president has attacked both Democratic lawmakers and members of the media for sharing portions of the classified analysis. He then threatened legal consequences for those responsible.During the interview, Bartiromo referenced a post Trump had shared on social media days earlier, in which he wrote: “The Democrats are the ones who leaked the information on the PERFECT FLIGHT to the Nuclear Sites in Iran. They should be prosecuted!”Trump then reiterated on-air that “they should be prosecuted”.“Who specifically?” Bartiromo asked.Trump replied: “You can find out – if they wanted, they could find out easily.”In recent days, Trump has targeted CNN and The New York Times for their reporting on the strikes. He has condemned the coverage as “unpatriotic” and even floated the possibility of legal action.The two outlets, along with several others, reported that preliminary findings from the US’s Defense Intelligence Agency indicated the strikes had only limited success. The bombings delayed Iran’s nuclear ambitions by several months but stopped short of destroying the program outright, according to the assessment.On Sunday, a social media account belonging to the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, accused Trump of needing to “exaggerate to cover up the truth and keep it secret” after the recent US military strikes “could not do anything”.Trump, in contrast, has repeatedly insisted that three nuclear facilities were “obliterated”.He elaborated on how his administration might pursue the sources of the leak.“You go up and tell the reporter, ‘national security – who gave it?’” Trump said. “You have to do that. And I suspect we’ll be doing things like that.”In the US, the constitution generally protects journalists from being compelled to reveal their sources – but there are limits to that reporter’s privilege, as it is colloquially known.The president had threatened to sue CNN and the New York Times for publishing articles about the preliminary intelligence report ahead of his comments to Bartiromo.In a letter to the Times, a lawyer for Trump said the article had damaged the president’s reputation and demanded that the outlet “retract and apologize for” the piece, which the letter described as “false,” “defamatory” and “unpatriotic”. More

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      US Senate votes down resolution to restrict Trump from escalating Iran war

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      Senate Democrats failed on Friday to get a war-powers resolution passed to limit Donald Trump’s ability to single-handedly escalate the war with Iran. The resolution, “to direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran”, was voted down 53-47.The vote on the resolution, introduced by the Democratic senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, split along mainly partisan lines. One Republican, Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted for it; one Democrat, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, voted against it.“Congress declares war,” Kaine said in a speech on the Senate floor. He stressed that the framers of the US constitution in 1787 were so wary of giving the power to start wars to one person that they did not even entrust it to George Washington, the first commander-in-chief.“They decided that war was too big a decision for one person,” Kaine said. “And so they wrote a constitution that said the United States should not be at war without a vote of Congress.”The measure would have compelled Trump to seek authorization from Congress before taking any further military action.Trump ordered airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities on 22 June. This directly followed Israel launching attacks on Iran, and Iran retaliating. Trump said that the US bombardment “totally obliterated” key nuclear enrichment facilities and deemed the mission a success, although some initial reports said the damage was minimal. Iran condemned the attacks.Trump claimed on Friday that Iran had halted its nuclear ambitions after the bombings. But, he said, he would “absolutely” continue to attack the country’s nuclear sites if he believed it was once again enriching uranium.“Time will tell,” Trump said at the White House. “But I don’t believe that they’re going to go back into nuclear anytime soon.”Later on Friday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, rebuked Trump on social media. “If President Trump is genuine about wanting a deal, he should put aside the disrespectful and unacceptable tone towards Iran’s Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, and stop hurting his millions of heartfelt followers”, Araghchi wrote on X.“The Great and Powerful Iranian People, who showed the world that the Israeli regime had NO CHOICE but to RUN to ‘Daddy’ to avoid being flattened by our Missiles, do not take kindly to Threats and Insults”, Iran’s top diplomat added, in something approximating Trump’s own social media style. “If Illusions lead to worse mistakes, Iran will not hesitate to unveil its Real Capabilities, which will certainly END any Delusion about the Power of Iran.” More

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      Trump officials cite ‘new intelligence’ to back president’s claims of success in strikes on Iran

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      Donald Trump’s administration ratcheted up its defence of the US’s weekend attacks on Iran, citing “new intelligence” to support its initial claim of complete success and criticising a leaked intelligence assessment that suggested Tehran’s nuclear programme had been set back by only a few months.The growing row came amid reports that the White House will to try to limit the sharing of classified documents with Congress, according to the Washington Post and the Associated Press.“This was a devastating attack, and it knocked them for a loop,” Trump said on Wednesday, apparently backing away from comments he’d made earlier in the day, that the intelligence was “inconclusive”.Senior Trump officials publicly rejected the leaked initial assessment of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) which concluded key components of the nuclear programme were capable of being restarted within months. Director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a post on X that “new intelligence confirms” what Trump has stated.“Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed. If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities (Natanz, Fordow, Esfahan) entirely, which would likely take years to do,” she said.CIA director John Ratcliffe in a statement said that new intelligence from a “historically reliable” source indicated that “several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”During a news conference at the Nato summit, Trump briefly ceded the stage to defence secretary Pete Hegseth, who lashed out at the media and claimed reporters were using the leaked intelligence assessment to politically damage Trump. “They want to spin it to try to make him look bad,” he said.In the wake of the leaked DIA report, the White House will reportedly to try to limit the sharing of classified documents with Congress, a senior official told the Associated Press.Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer criticised the reported decision to limit information sharing, saying “senators deserve information, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening right now abroad”.Classified briefings for lawmakers had been scheduled to take place on Tuesday, but were postponed, prompting outrage from members of Congress. The briefings are now expected to take place on Thursday and Friday.The leaked DIA assessment also found that much of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which would provide the fuel for making any future nuclear warhead, had been moved before the strikes and may have been moved to other secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran. That claim was backed up by the UN nuclear watchdog – the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – which said it lost “visibility” of the material when “hostilities began”.However, in an interview with French television, IAEA director-general Rafael Grossi said: “I don’t want to give the impression that it’s been lost or hidden.”View image in fullscreenOn Wednesday, the White House pushed back on those claims, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt telling Fox News the US had “no indication that that enriched uranium was moved prior to the strikes, as I also saw falsely reported”.“As for what’s on the ground right now, it’s buried under miles and miles of rubble because of the success of these strikes on Saturday evening,” she said.The US military said it dropped 14 GBU-57 bunker-buster bombs – powerful 13,600kg (30,000lb) weapons – on three Iranian nuclear sites. Since the attacks, Trump has repeatedly claimed that the sites were “obliterated”.The White House highlighted an Israeli statement that Iran’s nuclear efforts were delayed by years, while a spokesperson for the Iranian foreign ministry also said the facilities have suffered significant damage.On Wednesday evening, Trump said that Hegseth – whom he dubbed “war” secretary – would hold a news conference at 8am EST on Thursday to “fight for the dignity of our great American pilots”, referring to the pilots of the B2 bombers that carried out the strikes. He said that “these patriots were very upset” by “fake news” reports about the limited impact of the strikes.As the row grew over how much the strikes set back Tehran’s nuclear programme, diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran from rebuilding the programme also gathered pace.Trump said US and Iranian officials would meet soon, resuming a dialogue that was interrupted by the nearly two week war, even as he suggested that negotiations were no longer necessary.
      “I don’t care if I have an agreement or not,” Trump said, because Iran was too badly damaged to even consider rebuilding its programme. “They’re not going to be doing it anyway. They’ve had it.”View image in fullscreenThe IAEA has rejected an “hourglass approach” involving different assessments of how many months or years it would take Iran to rebuild, saying it distracts from finding a long-term solution to an issue that had not been resolved.“In any case, the technological knowledge is there and the industrial capacity is there. That, no one can deny. So we need to work together with them,” Grossi said, adding that his priority was the return of IAEA inspectors to the nuclear sites, the only way he said they could be properly assessed.Meanwhile, Iranian authorities are pivoting from their ceasefire with Israel to intensifying an internal security crackdown across the country with mass arrests, executions and military deployments, according to officials and activists.Iran’s intelligence services have arrested 26 people, accusing them of collaborating with Israel, state media Fars news agency reported.Some in Israel and exiled opposition groups had hoped the 12-day military campaign, which targeted Revolutionary Guards and internal security forces as well as nuclear sites, would spark a mass uprising and the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.While numerous Iranians expressed anger at the government, there has been no sign yet of any significant protests against the authorities.With the Associated Press and Reuters More

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      Trump is angry with a world that won’t give him easy deals | Rafael Behr

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      It was as close as Donald Trump might get to a lucid statement of his governing doctrine. “I may do it. I may not do it,” the president said to reporters on the White House lawn. “Nobody knows what I’m going to do.”The question was about joining Israeli air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Days later, US bombers were on their way. Some expected it to happen. Others, including Keir Starmer, had gone on record to say they didn’t. No one had known. The unpredictability doctrine wouldn’t have been violated either way.It applies also in economic and domestic policy. Trump’s boast of inscrutability could have been made about tariff rates, or a decision to deploy marines against US citizens who defy his immigration agency.Volatile inconsistency is a trait of the presidential personality, but also a learned management technique. Keeping everyone around you guessing, lurching from charm to menaces, swapping and dropping favourites on a whim – these are methods of coercive control. They generate disorientation and vulnerability. People who are braced for sudden mood swings must hang on the leader’s every word, looking for cues, awaiting instruction. Individual agency is lost, dependency is induced. It is something cult leaders do.A method that works with a quasi-monarchical entourage is poorly suited to international affairs. Foreign leaders are not White House courtiers. They might seek the US president’s favour in trade or fear his military wrath, but always with competing national interests in the background. On the world stage, Trump will never feel the unalloyed devotion he gets from worshippers at a Maga rally, which is one reason why he hates to travel.That tension is palpable at this week’s Nato summit in The Hague. Trump makes no secret of his disdain for European democracies. He resents their reliance on the Pentagon for security. He is unconvinced that defending their continent, especially the corner of it under violent assault from Russia, is the US’s problem. The threat he briefly made in his first term to pull out of Nato if other members didn’t start paying their way still hangs over the alliance. European leaders must strive to keep Trump onside while contingency planning for the day he decides to abandon them.Matthew Whitaker, the US’s permanent representative at Nato, tried to be reassuring on that point at the summit, declaring that it “has never been more engaged”. But he also conceded ignorance of what Trump might actually do. “I don’t want … to claim to be able to read his mind and know what he’s going to say.”That is the doctrine: nobody knows. This forces Nato members into an awkward dance, performing for Trump’s benefit while also working around him. They want to impress him with their financial ambition, pledging to spend 5% of their national GDP on defence by 2035. But they know also not to expect any reciprocal commitment, or none that can be trusted.War in the Middle East ramps the uncertainty up to new heights. European leaders need to stay focused on Ukraine and the prospect of Russia turning its territorial aggression on some other portion of Nato’s eastern flank. Vladimir Putin sees no legitimacy in borders that were drawn by the collapse of the Soviet Union. He has also geared Russia’s economy, political apparatus and propaganda machinery to assume perpetual war with the west. One lesson from Ukraine’s plight is to assume that when Putin says he is going to fight, he means it. Another is that, while deterrence is expensive, it is cheaper than the war that comes when the Kremlin feels confidently undeterred.These calculations keep Europeans up at night, but not Trump. He doesn’t recognise Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine and would happily see the war end on terms that leave Nato humiliated and Putin emboldened, and signal an epoch-defining shift in the balance of global power away from democracy.But framing the choice in grand geostrategic terms obscures pettier motives, which are often the salient ones with Trump. He doesn’t want to take Kyiv’s side because that is what Joe Biden did. It isn’t his cause and so he thinks it is dumb.This is not the case with Iran. US allies are required, in public at least, to judge Trump’s military intervention as though it were made according to a conventional diplomatic and strategic calculus: the prospect of Tehran wielding powers of nuclear apocalypse is truly abhorrent; negotiation was not bearing fruit. Maybe there was reason to dispute US intelligence assessments that said the threshold of weapons-readiness was not imminent. Maybe the time to act really was at hand.But those are rationalising arguments, retrofitted to a choice that Trump made as much from vanity as any more sophisticated motive. He was bounced into war by Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister appears to have gamed the US president’s aversion to looking weak and his limitless appetite for glory. Early Israeli success – an extraordinary feat of military intelligence that took out senior Iranian commanders and assets – offered Trump the prospect of climbing aboard a winning operation and grabbing credit for victory.Hints that regime change was on the agenda may have prodded Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, towards a ceasefire on the basis that early capitulation with some power retained, while unpalatable, is preferable to assassination. Senior White House officials insisted the war aims were limited to containment of the nuclear threat, but since they hadn’t even known a war was coming their authority on the matter is questionable.Trump’s supporters say this is proof that his volatile style works. In strategic studies it is known as the “madman theory”. Discarding guardrails, looking ready to do something irrational, forces an enemy to choose caution. The obvious risk is that it also teaches the rest of the world the merit of madness. Iran’s rulers will be more convinced than ever that only nuclear weapons can guarantee their sovereignty. (That view would persist through regime change, since none of the viable scenarios result in a flowering of pro-western democracy in the region. Tehran’s atomic ambitions may be set back by years, but the cause of negotiated, multilateral non-proliferation is also in tatters.)That doesn’t interest Trump. He thinks in terms of easy wins, not complex consequences. Hence his palpable irritation with Israel and Iran for violating the ceasefire and generally not knowing “what the fuck they’re doing”. He is aware that he looks played by Netanyahu, much as he once showed a flicker of frustration with Putin for “tapping” him along in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. He promised US voters deals. He gets cross when the world withholds them from him.This is a natural function of the unpredictability doctrine. Telling other countries they can never know what you’ll do makes them less responsive to diplomacy; less biddable to the whim of a US president. A vicious cycle then begins. Trump relies on his volatile persona to assert control in situations that he doesn’t understand, generating chaos that exposes his impotence, which in turn provokes him to tug in more arbitrary fury at his levers of power.For European democracies this is debilitating. It is hard to coordinate defence against external threats when the paramount power in your alliance is the origin of so much instability. But Nato leaders will get no respite from the uncertainty as long as Trump sits in the White House. The thing they most need from him – reliability – is the one thing he is destined by personality and doctrine never to provide.

      Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist More