Putin Holds First Call With Syria’s Jolani As Fate Of Russian Bases Uncertain
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has spoken to Syria’s self-declared President Ahmad al-Sharaa (whose AQ name is Abu Mohammad al-Jolani), the first such contact since the fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who fled the country on the weekend of December 8 of last year.
“The Russian side emphasized its principled position in support of the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Syrian state,” a Kremlin readout said. Moscow has been trying to secure and maintain its two military bases on the Syrian coast as their fate is uncertain.
The Russians have been packing up the bases of heavy equipment ever since al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) stormed Damascus as Assad left power.
A statement from Sharaa emphasized “the strong strategic ties between the two countries and Syria’s openness to all parties” in a way that serves “the interests of the Syrian people and strengthens Syria’s stability and security.”
Surprisingly the statement also confirmed “an official invitation to Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani to visit Russia.” No doubt, the question of Russia’s bases in Syria will be high on the agenda.
The irony is that Russia had for years assisted the Syrian Army in bombarding HTS-held Idlib province. Russia and HTS have been longtime enemies, but it looks like each side is ready for pragmatism and a way forward at this point.
There have been unverified reports that the new rulers in Damascus are demanding that Moscow hand over Assad, and in return Russia can keep its bases.
The former Syrian leader hasn’t been heard from since being granted asylum in Moscow. Sources say the Assad family is keeping a low profile, and adjusting to life in Russia.
Meanwhile, Washington has yet to lift sanctions on Damascus, and its anyone’s guess what Trump will do. He has indicated that he’d like to see the US occupation end in Syria, and to bring the troops home, but there hasn’t been much movement on this amid a bigger focus on the Gaza and Ukraine war issues.
Al Jolani encouraging his followers to commit suicide bombings
HTS is still a designated terror organization, but the prior Biden administration had dropped the long-time $10 million bounty on Jolani/Sharaa’s head. Biden had also dispatched a diplomatic delegation to Damascus weeks after Jolani took power.
The largest foreign aid agency on earth has, courts willing, abruptly closed its doors in the past week and sent most of its staff home. Finding their virtue has no place to strut its worth, the response of many has been indignation and assurances of retaliation. Many of them had been working from home for years, but now must rouse themselves to show such indignation for being sent (i.e. remaining) home on full pay. Like being told to continue as normal, perhaps, but in a way that exposes uncomfortable realities to those in the community who are actually paying them.
Such cynicism is not the greatest of human traits, and when applied to an entire organization it is unfairly generalizing, but it also has its place. The new government elected by the people of the United States was, specifically, elected to dig into the accounts of large government bureaucracies and address a perception of profligate use of taxpayers’ money. Taxpayers who, mostly, get paid far less than the bureaucrats they are funding. Perhaps unusually, the elected government rapidly set about keeping some of its promises, co-opting a prominent private person (as they had also promised) as an agent to help drive the inquiries. Much of the current surprise, perhaps, arises from an elected President keeping some promises. Annoying as this can be, it is also how democracy is supposed to work.
Much is being made of evidence that USAID had been pushing ideology over need, such as stoking coups in democratic nations or supporting children’s programs that encourage ‘non-traditional beliefs on gender in conservative cultures. Concern is also correctly levelled over apparently reckless funding of bio labs in poorly controlled environments. People will argue on whether such cultural colonialism and risk enhancement are in US taxpayers’ interests (it depends on how you perceive humanity).
However, it is also important to reflect on how USAID addressed its supposed core function of supporting development and healthcare for the benefit of those in less fortunate countries.
This can be considered in America’s interests because a more stable and prosperous world is good for trade, and/or because Americans are humans and there is a moral imperative to care for those less fortunate.
Though some have contrary or isolationist views on this, Americans as a nation are generous givers, and this is roughly why most thought USAID was supposed to exist.
For the past 5 years, the staff of USAID has, as a team, supported policies that they knew would impoverish over a hundred million people, push up to 10 million more girls into child marriage, and drive up child deaths from malaria and malnutrition.
Rather than support education, they largely ignored the removal of formal education from hundreds of millions of children around the world, many for over a year. They knew that this would cement intergenerational poverty and increase mortality globally – undoing everything USAID is supposed to be working for. If they did not know this, then how did they get a job in a development agency?
While we now see USAID employees standing in the street protesting for being told to stay home on full pay, we did not see such protests a few years back when average American workers were told to stay home and lost pay or businesses. There were no protests in DC in support of hundreds of millions of day laborers in poor countries who lost all income and savings for a virus that posed minimal risk to them. For apparently ideological reasons that required considerable callousness or cowardice, many actually promoted this approach to Covid-19 whilst continuing to take their own salaries.
USAID does a lot of good.
Abruptly stopping all disbursement of funds will kill people, particularly children. Because of the nature of diseases, supply lines, and the state of health systems in low-income countries, a sudden interruption to HIV testing and distribution of antiretroviral therapies through PEPFAR, significantly managed by USAID, will result in increased transmission and death from HIV/AIDS.
Mothballing the Presidents’ Malaria Initiative (PMI) will increase the shortfall in bed nets, diagnostics, and treatment that directly stop children from dying of malaria. Child malaria deaths are quite likely to increase by tens of thousands because PMI plays a crucial role in plugging gaps in the availability of these commodities.
Cutting funding for tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment will also increase deaths, increase transmission (new infections), and increase the spread of resistant parasites (which will increasingly reach the US). Voluntary donations to charities, despite what many want to believe, do not replace this.
So, the people stopping USAID from working in these areas also need to decide how many dead children will be acceptable. They may decide that it’s not their problem, but that is a philosophical approach that has implications that are not pleasant. It is also one that is probably not shared by most US taxpayers. Put those tens of thousands of dead kids in Texas and it starts to seem more real.
However, the people auditing and trying to understand its USAID disbursements, unravelling the tangle of good and harm, are doing important work. They are responsible to US taxpayers who had assumed their hard-earned funds were well used. Many can barely pay rent or address the needs of their own children, children who now face an unprecedented national debt because so much federal money, wisely or not, has been spent.
A government has a direct responsibility to avoid wasting its citizens’ money on the pet projects of people on far more comfortable salaries. These taxpayers are the ones with the greater right to show indignation, not those who abrogated their responsibility to the world’s disadvantaged.
Those who took USAID to a place where such radical reform is deemed necessary could devote time to introspection and examine why those funding them are asking where the money went, and why.
Their world is recovering from the mess of Covid-19, originating from a virus almost certainly arising from government-funded research, likely including funds dispersed by USAID itself.
While working from home after the virus’s inevitable escape, they supported a response that ignored risk and good public health practice, wrecking the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions.
The real harms accruing from USAID shutdowns are very much its own doing.
US taxpayers generally care about others, but many are struggling, as are the victims of the callousness of the last few years of global health malpractice. USAID has been an integral part of this problem.
We can hope that those tasked with sorting out the mess this institution created have the wisdom and compassion to rapidly sift the wheat from the chaff and minimize further harm.
* * *
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.
2,400 New JFK Assassination Records Found, FBI Says
It’s amazing what new leadership atop the FBI helps unearth…
The FBI announced Tuesday it has uncovered 2,400 new records related to President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, part of efforts to comply with a recent executive order from former President Donald Trump mandating the release of thousands of files, according to AP.
These documents will be transferred to the National Archives for declassification.
While over 5 million pages of JFK-related records have been made public, around 3,000 files remain partially or fully unreleased. The FBI did not disclose the contents of the newly found documents but credited its 2020 launch of the Central Records Complex and improved inventory technology for accelerating the discovery process.
The disclosure was praised as “refreshingly candid” by Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation and editor of the JFK Facts blog. “It shows that the FBI is serious about being transparent,” Morley added, noting it sets a precedent for other agencies to release undisclosed documents.
This development follows former President Donald Trump’s recent executive order directing the national intelligence director and attorney general to devise a plan for declassifying related files. A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed a plan has been submitted but provided no details or timeline.
The AP report says that although all assassination records were supposed to be public by 2017, presidential exemptions delayed full disclosure. Trump initially vowed to release all records but withheld some over national security concerns. The Biden administration has continued incremental releases, though some files remain classified.
Decades of conspiracy theories have surrounded Kennedy’s 1963 assassination in Dallas, where Lee Harvey Oswald shot the president from the Texas School Book Depository. Two days later, nightclub owner Jack Ruby killed Oswald during a jail transfer. The Warren Commission concluded Oswald acted alone, but skepticism has persisted.
Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed, which supports the lone gunman theory, suggested the new files might be duplicates. “If they are really new assassination documents, then it raises a whole bunch of questions about how they were missed for all of these years,” he said, adding, “the ‘wow’ would be if they are related to Oswald or the investigation.”
Previous document releases have detailed intelligence operations of the era, including CIA memos about Oswald’s visits to Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City weeks before the assassination. Morley highlighted that the CIA’s surveillance of Oswald has been the “emerging story over the last five to 10 years,” speculating that the new files could shed more light on this.
Two years ago, when Michael and I first testified before your Weaponization of Government Subcommittee, Democratic members called us “so-called journalists,” suggested we were bought-off “scribes,” and questioned our ethics and loyalties. When we tried to answer, we were told to shut up, take off our tinfoil hats, and remember two things: one, there is no digital censorship, two, if there is digital censorship, it’s for our own good.
I was shocked. I thought the whole thing had to be a mistake. No way the party I gave votes to all my life was now pro-censorship. Then last year I listened to John Kerry, whom I voted for, talk to the World Economic Forum. Speaking about disinformation, he said “our First Amendment stands as a major block” to our ability to “hammer it out of existence.”
He complained that “it’s really hard to govern” because “people self-select where they go for their news,” which makes it “much harder to build consensus…”
I defended Kerry when people said he “looks French,” but Marie Antoinette would have been embarrassed by this speech. He was essentially complaining that the peasants are “self-selecting” their own media. What’s next, letting them make up up their own minds?
Lastly, “building consensus” may be a politician’s job, but it’s not mine as a citizen or as a journalist. In fact, making it hard to govern is exactly the media’s job. The failure to understand this is why we have a censorship problem.
This is an Alamo moment for the First Amendment. Most of America’s closest allies have already adopted draconian speech laws. We’re surrounded. The EU’s new Digital Services Act is the most comprehensive censorship law ever instituted in a democratic society.
Ranking member Raskin, you don’t have to as far as Russiaor China to find people jailed for speech. Our allies in England now have an Online Safety Act which empowers the government to jail people for nebulous offenses like “false communication” or causing “psychological harm.” Germany, France, Australia, Canada, and other nations have implemented similar ideas.
These laws are totally incompatible with our system. Our own citizens have been arrested in some of these countries, but our government hasn’t stood up for them. Why? Because many of our bureaucrats believe in these laws.
Take USAID. Many Americans are in an uproar now because they learned about over $400 million going to an organization called Internews, whose chief Jeanne Bourgault boasted to Congress about training “hundreds of thousands of people” in journalism. Her views are almost identical to Kerry’s.
She gave a talk about “building trust and combatting misinformation” in India during the pandemic. She said that after months of a “really beautifully unified Covid-19 message,” vaccine enthusiasm rose to 87%, but when “mixed information on vaccine efficacy” got out, hesitancy ensued.
We’re paying this person to train journalists, and she doesn’t know the press doesn’t exist to promote “unity” or political goals like vaccine enthusiasm. That’s propaganda, not journalism.
Again, you don’t know the fastest way to erode “trust” in media is by having government sponsor “exclusion lists,” you shouldn’t be getting a dollar in taxpayer money, let alone $476 million. And USAID is just a tiny piece of a censorship machine Michael and I saw across a long list of agencies. Collectively they’ve bought up every part of the news production line: sources, think-tanks, research, “fact-checking,” “anti-disinformation,” commercial media scoring, and when all else fails, censorship.
It’s a giant closed messaging loop, whose purpose is to transform the free press into a consensus machine. There’s no way to remove the rot surgically. The whole mechanism has to go.
Is there “right-wing misinformation”? Hell yes. It exists in every direction. But I grew up a Democrat and don’t remember being afraid of it. At the time, we didn’t need censorship because we figured we had the better argument.
Obviously, some of you lack that same confidence. You took billions from taxpayers and blew it on programs whose entire purpose was to tell them they’re wrong about things they can see with their own eyes.
You sold us out, and until these “rather tiresome” questions are answered, this problem is not fixed. Thank you.
US Intelligence Suggests Israel Is Trying To Drag Trump Into Preemptive Attack On Iran
A fresh report Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal has reviewed a US intelligence assessment which concludes Israel currently sees an opening for strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, sensing Tehran’s weakness after Hezbollah’s leadership was decimated, Assad fell in Syria, and following tit-for-tat major strikes between Israel and the Islamic Republic last year.
The key line in the report is that “The intelligence analysis concluded Israel would push the Trump administration to back the strikes, viewing him as more likely to join an attack than now-former President Joe Biden and fearing the window for halting Tehran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon was closing, two of the people familiar with the intelligence said.”
The assessment, produced by multiple intelligence agencies, was issued within weeks of Trump taking office, but a similar follow-up conclusion was forwarded to President Trump upon his entering the Oval Office.
“The U.S. intelligence community produced a second report delivered during the early days of President Trump’s administration reiterating that Israel is considering such strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, according to one of the U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence,” the WSJ continues.
But it also says that Israel would likely have to rely on Pentagon help. The WSJ cites US military officials who conclude that American “military support and munitions would likely be needed for an Israeli attack on Iran’s heavily fortified nuclear sites given their complexity.”
While Trump has taken a hard pro-Israel line on the Gaza crisis, just this week telling Hamas it must release all remaining Israeli captives by noon Saturday or else there will be “hell” to pay, he has also long vowed to end ‘wars of choice’ and needless foreign military adventurism abroad.
A major joint US-Israel attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities certainly fits the definition of a ‘war of choice’ from the American public’s perspective, given war weariness has also long set in regarding the Ukraine war, and Washington’s costly role in it. But during his first term he showed a willingness to shoot from the hip, ordering the risky drone strike which took out IRGC Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani at the Baghdad airport in January 2020 (risky, that is, in terms of blowback and the potential of starting a regional war).
But certainly the new WSJ reporting signals that Israeli officials are trying to drag the Trump administration into a heightened conflict with Iran.
“Iran is more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced in November. “We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel.”
Trump on Monday warned no option is off the table to prevent the Iranians from achieving nuclear weapons status. But he also seems to be in the mood for a more peaceful negotiated solution.
Trump told Fox that thwarting Iran’s development of nuclear weapons could be achieved either “with bombs or with a written piece of paper.” The warning came the week following his restoring ‘maximum pressure’ and new oil-targeted sanctions with an executive order.
Crucially, he concluded, “I think Iran would love to make a deal and I would love to make a deal with them without bombing them.”
There are plenty of Iran hawks in the Trump administration, but the question will be whether the non-interventionist leaning officials win out – such as newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. After all US, intelligence, including the CIA, still has not assessed that Iran is bent on building a bomb. Time will tell.
On Tuesday, it was reported that the Walt Disney Company is preparing to significantly reduce the scale of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and initiatives in response to President Donald Trump’s efforts to crack down on such practices.
As reported by the Daily Caller, Disney’s Chief Human Resources Officer Sonia Coleman made the announcement in an internal memo, which was later reported on by Axios.
Among other changes, the company will replace its “Diversity and Inclusion” performance factor with a “Talent Strategy” metric that focuses less on identity and more on business success.
Disney will also abandon its “Reimagine Tomorrow” campaign, which had touted efforts to increase “diverse representation” in media produced by Disney.
The program aimed to see at least 50% of Disney’s characters would consist of “underrepresented groups.”
The company will also revisit disclaimer messages and content advisories that have been added onto older films.
Films such as “Peter Pan” and “Dumbo” would see such warnings appear on-screen before the start of the movie, often referring to “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of peoples or cultures.”
Now, such messages will be moved to the summary section below the media player, and will not play in the movie itself.
Back in 2023, CEO Bob Iger addressed possible changes to the company’s DEI policies, telling shareholders during an annual meeting that “our primary mission needs to be to entertain, and then through our entertainment to continue to have a positive impact on the world.”
“I’m very serious about that,” Iger emphasized. “It should not be agenda-driven, it should be entertainment-driven.”
President Trump has called for the elimination of DEI practices, pointing out that they often ignore merit in favor of arbitrary factors such as racial, gender, and sexual identity. Other companies that have reduced or eliminated DEI efforts in recent weeks include Google, Facebook, John Deere, and American Airlines.
President Donald Trump recently put the wealthiest U.S. colleges and universities on notice: If your endowment exceeds $1 billion, prepare for an investigation.
The president said he plans to shut down what he called “illegal and immoral discrimination” conducted under the umbrella of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that involve racial or gender preferential treatment in student admission, financial aid, employment, and curricula at elite institutions.
Under a Jan. 21 executive order that cites long-standing civil rights laws, identity-based functions such as so-called antiracism training or minority hiring initiatives are prohibited. Those who don’t scrap DEI face costly repercussions.
More than 120 U.S. colleges and universities have $1 billion-plus endowments, including all Ivy League institutions and the most selective flagship state universities, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Trump advised that up to nine schools in that category will be audited in the coming months, though any American higher education institution found in violation could lose federal money for research, student financial aid, and other programs under the executive order.
“They are really worried about it—and they should be,” Steven McGuire, a senior fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, told The Epoch Times. “The federal government can do some things that are financially debilitating.”
On Jan. 30, Boston University announced that its Center for Antiracist Research, which employs 13 people, will close at the end of this academic year.
Many other schools across the country, in anticipation or response to Trump’s order or previous anti-DEI laws at the state level, have already rebranded their DEI offices with new descriptions such as “access,” “community engagement,” or “civil rights” to avoid scrutiny. Northeastern University in Boston, for example, now has an office of “Belonging.”
“Our reimagined approach centers on embracing the experiences of individuals across the global university system to maximize impact at the institutional level,” the school’s new Belonging web page states.
Louis Galarowicz, a research fellow at the National Association of Scholars, estimates that large flagship public universities in more populated states spend tens of millions on DEI departments that include investigators who investigate harassment, bias, and “microaggression” complaints.
He said schools have been quick to rebrand themselves to avoid lawsuits, let alone layoffs or program cuts.
“A faculty diversity action plan could be renamed: critical needs hiring program,” Galarowicz told The Epoch Times. “It’s just a disguise, but their purpose hasn’t changed.”
Several institutions removed official DEI statements for faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions last year, but that doesn’t mean they scrapped all race-based initiatives.
The University of Michigan, for example, still follows a five-year plan, DEI 2.0, according to its website. It details how more than a dozen major campus programs are embedded in DEI initiatives and that school leaders are advancing DEI-related ideas through “hundreds of activities.”
The University of Michigan’s Museum of Art, for five years, will dedicate itself to anti-racism efforts and prioritize exhibits that expose colonial histories. The Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning will de-emphasize singular Western historical narratives and center on the global south and historically marginalized populations. The Center for Academic Innovation is responsible for identifying academic performance disparities by race and recommending curriculum changes for “fostering equitable outcomes,” according to the DEI 2.0 plan.
The University of Michigan, with an undergraduate acceptance rate of about 17 percent and an endowment of $19 billion, is a leading academic research institution. The federal government is its primary sponsor for research and provided more than $1.4 billion last year, according to the school’s 2024 financial report. Under Trump’s executive order, the school stands to lose that amount if it doesn’t discontinue DEI 2.0.
The University of Michigan did not reply to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
Harvard University eliminated its DEI pledge for hiring last year, but it still maintains a well-staffed Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging and has a diversity administrator for each of its 12 schools. It also maintains a Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Academy with workshops on Understanding Unconscious Bias, Power and Privilege, Microaggressions, and Anti-Black Racism, according to its website.
Harvard, with a $50 billion endowment and a 3.5 percent undergraduate acceptance rate, received $686 million for research last year from the federal government, according to its 2024 financial report.
Harvard did not reply to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
The University of Colorado Boulder’s Critical Needs Hiring Program, though it no longer has diversity in the title, is still centered around recruiting “BIPOC” (black, indigenous, and people of color), according to hundreds of memos from that office obtained and publicized by the National Association of Scholars. That school, with an endowment of about $2 billion, received more than $1 billion in federal grants last year, according to its 2024 financial report.
Liberal Hangout Reddit Craters After Google Algo Change Cripples User Growth
For much of the past few months we had watched in stunned amazement as the world’s most overvalued and censored website, not to mentioned favorite haunt of woke and recently laid off deep state communists and various other radical liberals, saw its price rise by a multiple of 2025 revenue every single day (rising as high as 31 turns of 2025 revenue)…
… and not all the stupid explanations – it will be used by chatGPT scanners for its content, it is growing faster than X, it should be valued at a multiple of 2026 EBITDA… and we actually aren’t even joking about that, Deutsche Bank really said the stock was cheap because it was trading at only 60x 2026 EBITDA…
… made a shred of sense to explain what was clearly a bubble.
Well, that bubble just popped after hours when the company reported results that were slightly better than estimates, but missed on the all important daily active users, which promptly imploded the unlimited growth story that the narrative has been pushing here.
Here is what the company just reported for Q4:
Revenue $427.7 million, estimate $405.5 million
Advertising rev. $394.5 million, estimate $367.3 million
Other revenue $33.2 million, estimate $36.1 million
Adjusted Ebitda $154.3 million, estimate $128.7 million
Net income $71 million, estimate $46.9 million
Average rev. per user $4.21, estimate $3.91
US average rev. per user $7.04, estimate $6.35
International average rev. per user $1.67, estimate $1.50
Free cash flow $89.2 million.
That was the good part, here is the bad: it took a lot of spending to push up the company’s revenues to the desired range
R&D expenses $188.6 million, estimate $174 million
And here is the ugly: the company missed badly on the number of daily users.
Daily active users 101.7 million, missing the estimate 103.81 million
US daily active users 48 million, missing the estimate 51.52 million
International daily active users 53.7 million, beating estimates of 51.84 million
Worse, while low-ARPU international users continued to grow in Q4 – because the company used its “huge investments” in AI to add a translator…
… US users actually declined in Q4 from 48.2 million to 48.0 million. So much for the growth case(and that’s even with millions of deep staters laid off thanks to DOGE).
Reddit said user growth slowed after Google made a change to its algorithm that impacted search traffic. The forum-based site had benefited from deals that surface Reddit results in search engines, including Google and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. According to Bloomberg, over the past few years, Google has accounted for as much as 50% of Reddit’s traffic in a single day, making the social media site susceptible to changes in Google’s search engine.
And sure enough, realizing that it had helped blow a huge Reddit bubble, Google changed its algo, Reddit user growth not only slumped, but in the case of the US, it posted its first decline in over a decade.
Commenting on the results, Bloomberg said that RDDT plunged after the slow down in Q4 user growth was seen as “a sign the newly public company is struggling to keep up with larger digital advertising peers Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.”
And sure enough, RDDT shares cratered as much as 20% after hours, but it has a long way to drop as the stock has increased more than sixfold since it went public last March, and had already jumped more than 30% this year, significantly outpacing the broader market. It’s been one of the best performing stocks to go public since the market for IPOs began to slow in 2022. Unfortunately, now that US growth has peaked and is declining, the growth case is over and there will be a lof of pain as the company find its new fair value some 70% lower…
Ayatollah Responds To Trump’s Big Stick Threats: ‘Go Forward’ With Military Growth
President Trump kicked off the week saying in a Fox interview that “Iran is very concerned. Iran is very frightened, to be honest with you, because their defense is pretty much gone.” He had provocatively laid out that “I think Iran would love to make a deal and I would love to make a deal with them without bombing them.”
How is Tehran’s top leadership responding to the “big stick” threat? On Wednesday Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged his country to go forward with bolstering military development.
Khamenei said “progress should not be stopped” in the defense sector, amid ongoing threats from Israel and the US. “We cannot be satisfied,” Khamenei stressed. “Say that we previously set a limit for the accuracy of our missiles, but we now feel this limit is no longer enough. We have to go forward.”
“Today, our defensive power is well known, our enemies are afraid of this. This is very important for our country,” he added, at a moment Trump is warning no option is off the table to prevent the Iranians from achieving nuclear weapons status.
Trump had further said in that Fox interview that thwarting Iran’s development of nuclear weapons could be achieved either “with bombs or with a written piece of paper.” The warning came the week following his restoring ‘maximum pressure’ and new oil-targeted sanctions with an executive order.
Iran has meanwhile protested Trump’s threatening remarks, saying in a letter submitted to the UN Security Council, “These reckless and inflammatory statements flagrantly violate international law and the UN Charter, particularly Article 2(4), which prohibits threats or use of force against sovereign states.”
On Monday Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian had charged that the US is not “sincere” about negotiations with Iran following last week’s new sanctions.
“If the US were sincere about negotiations, why did they sanction us?” Pezeshkian posed in a speech in Tehran commemorating the 46th anniversary of Iran’s Islamic revolution.
When Trump signed the maximum pressure order, he actually said something which will be welcomed by Tehran, and could be an opening for legitimate restored negotiations:
While signing a new presidential memorandum calling for maximum pressure sanctions on Iran, Trump poured cold water on it and openly expressed his dissatisfaction with the policy.
“So this is one that I am torn about,” he said during Tuesday’s signing ceremony. “I am signing this, but I am unhappy to do it.”
Yet, this was the least stunning moment of his comments about Iran during a gaggle with journalists in the Oval Office. Even more remarkable was what he said about the intent — or lack thereof — of decision-makers in Iran.
“There are many people at the top ranks of Iran that do not want to have a nuclear weapon,” he declared.
Trump is of course fully aware of recent CIA findings stating its belief Iran has not yet decided to pursue nukes. The Islamic Republic has long claimed its program is merely for peaceful energy development for domestic consumption.
But things in the Middle East have drastically changed and realigned – and not in Iran’s favor – given Assad has fallen and Hezbollah’s leadership was decimated by Israel. There are fears Iran could ramp up its Uranium enrichment to weapons grade. Hawks have maintained that this trajectory is assured at this point.
NASA said Tuesday they have revised their strategy in order to expedite the homecoming of two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station (ISS), the space agency said on Feb. 11.
Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been aboard the space station for eight months, are now slated to return to Earth in mid-March—two weeks earlier than the previously anticipated late March or April timeframe, according to NASA.
The change in plans involves SpaceX altering its capsule assignments for upcoming missions.
“Human spaceflight is full of unexpected challenges,” Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said in a statement released by the agency.
The extended stay of Williams and Wilmore stems from a series of setbacks that began in June 2024. Initially, the pair was scheduled to return after a brief June 5 test flight aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule.
However, the Starliner experienced major issues during the flight, including helium leaks and problems with its reaction control thrusters, as it approached the ISS.
The issues led to NASA’s decision to return the Starliner to Earth without crew members, leaving Williams and Wilmore safe but stranded on the ISS.
“Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest and most routine. A test flight, by nature, is neither safe, nor routine,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson stated at the time.
The situation was further complicated when SpaceX and NASA said they would delay the launch of the replacement astronaut crew to late March 2025 due to necessary preparations for flight of a new capsule, which would have extended Williams and Wilmore’s mission even further without the revisions now in place.
With additional work still needed on the new capsule, NASA has now opted for an older SpaceX capsule for the next crew launch, to bring Williams and Wilmore home earlier, weather permitting on March 12. This capsule had previously been assigned to a private mission organized by Axiom Space, featuring astronauts from Poland, Hungary, and India. As a result of NASA’s decision, the Axiom mission has been postponed to a later date, potentially still within the spring season.
Returning with Williams and Wilmore are NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who were selected to join the pair on the ISS in September 2024, where they have been preparing for their return mission together.
The replacement crew to take over duties at the ISS after a week-long handover period will include two NASA astronauts, as well as one astronaut from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and one Roscosmos cosmonaut.
This latest adjustment comes just two weeks after NASA announced it was working “expeditiously” to bring Williams and Wilmore back as soon as possible. The announcement followed a request by President Donald Trump for SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to speed up the astronauts’ return.
