The senior official indicated that the United States is willing to allow Iran to use nuclear in a civilian capacity.
“We’re not bothered at all by the idea of civilian power plants in Iran. What we’re bothered by is the type of infrastructure that would allow them to jump from civilian power generation to nuclear weapons development, and that’s what they’ve had for a very long time,” they said.
Since a ceasefire went into place in early April, Trump has been pursuing a diplomatic deal with Iran to end the war Israel and the U.S. launched on Feb. 28. Israel has publicly expressed skepticism that Iran would abide by any negotiated deal. Netanyahu has pushed for a resumption of bombing raids against Iran and disagreed with Trump, who has pressed him to scale back attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon, according to Western officials.
Israel is keenly interested in whether Trump decides to resume major combat operations against Iran or to end the conflict, the current and former U.S. officials and outside experts said.
The DIA reportedly posted an internal message raising the espionage threat level regarding Israel to “critical.” It also identified a series of specific incidents that heightened US concerns, one of the officials said.
The Pentagon is particularly concerned that Israel is surveilling top US officials to obtain information about internal deliberations among President Donald Trump‘s close advisors regarding decision-making on the conflicts in West Asia.
Meanwhile, state officials warn that it might take weeks to know the actual outcome. „I would call on all Californians to be patient,“ Secretary of State Shirley Weber said in a June 2 news release. At nearly $316 million, it‘s already the most expensive governor‘s race on record and the fifth-most expensive non-presidential race on record for ad spending, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.
“I said what I said.”
That was Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Paulina Mangubat’s statement Thursday evening after her response to White House adviser Stephen Miller’s smear against Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico of Texas went viral earlier this week.
After Miller posted a picture on Wednesday of Talarico with the comment that Democrats in Texas had nominated “their first transgender Senate candidate,” Mangubat, who serves as the DNC’s content and creative director and is behind many of the committee’s social media posts, had a concise response.
He was later pushed on who had ordered him to look into getting Doyle a position, and who had ordered him not to tell the foreign secretary (which at the time was David Lammy).
Robbins said: “I don‘t know what the origin of the suggestion was, and I don‘t know who exactly was behind it or how serious it was.
“It was serious enough for the No 10 private office to ring up the head of the diplomatic service and ask for a forward look of available head of mission jobs, and that‘s the point at which I thought that I needed to lay down some markers.”
Testifying to MPs at parliament’s foreign affairs select committee on Tuesday, Olly Robbins said he had several conversations with No 10 about finding a role for Matthew Doyle, who was later suspended as a Labour peer after it emerged he had campaigned for a friend charged with possessing indecent images of children.
Robbins said he had been asked not to mention the idea to David Lammy, who was foreign secretary at the time.
Robbins described the conversations as part of more general pressure from people at the top of the government to place senior political figures in senior diplomatic posts.
(February 8, 2026)
With Morgan McSweeney’s enforced departure over the Mandelson scandal, his former deputies Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson have both been promoted to replace him as joints chiefs of staff
Asked who in No 10 had applied pressure, he said it was mainly the prime minister’s private office, which is staffed by civil servants. But he added: “I think that the private office would only have been [putting on] this pressure themselves if they were under pressure.”
The former top civil servant in Britain’s foreign office, who was fired by Prime Minister Keir Starmer last week, said on Tuesday that Mr. Starmer’s office had a “dismissive attitude” about the security vetting of Peter Mandelson, an associate of Jeffrey Epstein who became ambassador to the United States despite concerns raised during the vetting process.
The former civil servant, Olly Robbins, testified in Parliament that he and other officials in charge of deciding whether to grant Mr. Mandelson a high-level security clearance were working in “an atmosphere of pressure” to ensure that nothing got in the way of Mr. Mandelson’s appointment.
During the session, President Trump not only held detailed consultations with top US political and military leadership but also made direct telephone contact with Pakistan’s Army Chief Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir and Iranian officials, discussing the current volatile situation and possible future developments.
ISLAMABAD – Officials from Pakistan and Iran said US and Iranian negotiating teams could return to Islamabad within the next few days, or possibly early next week, to continue efforts aimed at easing tensions and preventing further escalation in the Gulf while the exact timing has not yet been finalized.
Ahead of the high-profile visit, there were rumours about Trump leading delegation coming to Pakistan. Pakistani officials, including Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar have denied rumors that Trump would travel to Pakistan in connection with the talks.
Israel has conducted strikes at the entire southern part of Lebanon, the western Bekaa Valley all the way into Nabatieh, where a strike killed more than a dozen Lebanese state security personnel.
We understand that Lebanese civil defence personnel are still looking for survivors and digging through the rubble.
There have also been strikes throughout the southwestern front where we are, and controlled demolitions carried out by Israeli forces.
Lebanon‘s Directorate General of State Security said 13 of its personnel were killed following Israeli strikes on a government building in the southern city of Nabatieh.
In a statement issued by its media and public relations department, the agency said that on April 10, Israeli airstrikes targeted the Nabatieh government Serail building, which houses the regional office of State Security.
Israeli drones and fire from a military vehicle killed at least 10 people in an area close to the Maghazi camp in Gaza, according to reports by Al Jazeera from a source in Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
A UN staff member was also shot and killed by Israeli forces and injured three others.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) employees were travelling in a vehicle in southern Gaza when Israeli soldiers opened fire on them.
(35 min ago)
Russian news agencies cited Rosatom chief Alexei Likhachev as saying that developments near the plant were unfolding in line with the worst-case scenario.
Likhachev said that the killed staff member was an Iranian national.
Rosatom said it had informed Russian President Vladimir Putin on the situation surrounding the plant, the TASS news agency cited Likhachev as saying.
(March 3, 2026)
Iranian air defence sites have been subjected to aggressive electromagnetic spectrum operations but in tandem, its defences have also been targeted kinetically.
(…)
For long-range defence, Iran has developed the Bavar-373 which has comparable capabilities to the Russian S-300. For short range air defence, the country has reverse engineered the Chinese HQ-7 as the Ya Zahr, and in 2021 the Zoubin system was unveiled.
Besides these copy cat systems, the country also leans on ageing Russian air defences, most notably the S-300PMU-2 battery.
The statement said the Assembly of Experts moved quickly to select a successor despite acute wartime conditions, direct threats against the institution and the bombing of the Assembly’s secretariat offices, which it said resulted in the deaths of several staff members and security personnel.
According to the statement, the body began preparations for an extraordinary session immediately after news of the Leader’s martyrdom. It said arrangements were made to gather its members from across the country in order to ensure that the Islamic Republic would not face a leadership vacuum.
Under Iran’s constitution, the Assembly of Experts — an 88-member clerical body elected by popular vote — is responsible for selecting and overseeing the country’s Leader.
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will resign from teaching at Harvard University amid a campus review of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the university announced Wednesday.
Summers, who has been on leave since November and whose name appeared hundreds of times in newly released Epstein files, will leave at the end of the school year, according to a statement from Harvard spokesperson Jason Newton.
The director of communications for Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain resigned on Monday, adding to a sense of crisis for the government and growing questions about Mr. Starmer’s leadership.
The communications director, Tim Allan, a veteran political operative who only joined Mr. Starmer’s government about five months ago, quit less than 24 hours after Morgan McSweeney stepped down as the prime minister’s chief of staff over ties between Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender, and Britain’s former ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson.
(January 9, 2026)
In this case, media consultant Tzachi Lieber is accused of acting as an intermediary for bribes between Michael Ganor, who was the representative of the German industrial engineering company ThyssenKrupp in Israel, and David Sharan, who was chief of staff to Prime Minister Netanyahu.
(…)
The dilemma facing the system is now complex. On the one hand, allowing a new judge to render a verdict based solely on transcripts and submitted evidence is problematic, as a criminal verdict should be based on the judge‘s direct impression of the witnesses and the accused, and on their credibility.
On the other hand, having the witnesses, or some of them, re-tested by another judge is also problematic and would mean the case would drag on for years. As mentioned, this would also delay Lieber‘s required testimony in the main case against Sharan and Ganor.
Minneapolis Public Schools on Wednesday canceled classes district-wide for the remainder of the week “due to safety concerns,” following the killing of a woman Wednesday by an ICE agent. The district said it was acting “out of an abundance of caution.”
The move came after officials at Roosevelt High School said armed U.S. Border Patrol officers came on school property during dismissal Wednesday and began tackling people, handcuffed two staff members and released chemical weapons on bystanders.
The school official also told MPR News that the agents handcuffed two staff members at the school, and they described getting into a physical confrontation with an agent as they were trying to tell them to leave school property.
“The guy, I’m telling him like, ‘Please step off the school grounds,’ and this dude comes up and bumps into me and then tells me that I pushed him, and he’s trying to push me, and he knocked me down,” the official said. “They don’t care. They’re just animals. I’ve never seen people behave like this.”
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The reasons for the raid on the high school were unclear, and the US Department of Homeland Security did not respond to KSTP Eyewitness 5 News’ or MPR News’ requests for comment.