The Dictatorship

U.S.-Iran ceasefire: What we know

Published

4 hours ago

April 9, 2026

Apr. 8, 2026, 6:06 PM EDT

When President Donald Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran shortly before his own deadline for Tehran to comply with U.S. demands or be wiped off the Earthhe didn’t simply say hostilities had halted.

He said the United States had favorably received a 10-point proposal from Iran and billed the two weeks not as a temporary end to fighting, but a chance to simply formalize a deal the countries had been negotiating since before the U.S. and Israel attacked at the end of February.

“Almost all of the various points of past contention have been agreed to between the United States and Iran,” Trump said in a Truth Social post Tuesday night.

Since then, the two sides seem to have agreed on very littleincluding whether the war has actually been paused. Iran has alleged it has faced attacks even after the ceasefire was announced; the U.S. military has said it was not them.

That 10-point plan — the one Trump called “a workable basis on which to negotiate” Tuesday night — was dismissed Wednesday by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt as “fundamentally unserious, unacceptable and completely discarded,” saying the president literally threw it in the garbage.

In fact, after thousands of deaths, more than a month of regional instability and a hit to the global economy, it’s unclear how much of what’s on the table even differs from the lead-up to the war.

Here’s a closer look at some of the points of contention that could determine whether the ceasefire holds:

The Strait of Hormuz

Trump called the ceasefire contingent on Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow trade route at the mouth of the Persian Gulf through which about 20% of the global oil and gas supply passes. He even floated the strange possibility of Washington and Tehran jointly collecting tolls on tankers that use the lane.

Iran said it would only reopen the strait once a series of conditions were met, including some that may be beyond Trump’s control, such as whether Israel withdraws from Lebanon.

Control of the strait is arguably Iran’s greatest strategic advantage. After it was attacked, Iran effectively closed the tightly curved passage by striking ships that tried to sail past, sending the price of oil and other goods skyrocketing. Trump’s threat to destroy an entire civilization was meant to force Tehran to allow tankers to once again pass through, even though he has insisted over the course of the conflict that he would leave other nations to cope with the closure since the U.S. sources relatively little energy from that route.

Nuclear enrichment

The U.S. has demanded Iran completely stop its uranium enrichment, and of the shifting reasons the Trump administration has provided for why it went to war alongside Israel, this one eventually became the most consistent.

Before the war, Iran was working toward enriching its nuclear fuel to the point that it could be considered weapons-grade, well beyond the level agreed upon by several countries in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement during his first term in 2018, calling it a bad deal. Tehran responded by ramping up enrichment despite international pressure to stop.

In its ceasefire proposal, Iran emphasized its right to enrichment. Without a return to something like the 2015 arrangement, this could be the single biggest sticking point.

Sanctions

Iran has been burdened with its own economic crisis even before the war started. Iran’s national currency, the rial, fell to a record low in December, leading shopkeepers in Tehran to take to the streets in protest. U.S. sanctionson Iran, some of which have existed since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, have further strained an already struggling economy. Iran has called on the U.S. to lift primary and secondary sanctionswhich not only directly affected Iran, but also prevent third parties from conducting trade with the country.

The most crippling U.S. sanctions are on Iranian oil.

“We are, and will be, talking Tariff and Sanctions relief with Iran,” Trump said Wednesday.

Lebanon

Iran has demanded the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the region, an unlikely scenario considering the positive relationship between the U.S. and Gulf Arab countries that host its military bases. More immediately pressing is the issue of Lebanon.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, who has emerged as a the primary diplomatic intermediary in the war, said all parties agreed to “an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.” Israel and the U.S disagreed.

Lebanon was dragged into the war after the Iran-backed militia Hezbollah mounted an attack against Israel in retaliation for assassination of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Smoke rises an Israeli airstrike on the Dahyieh district in the south of Beirut. — Smoke rises after an Israeli airstrike on the Dahyieh district in the south of Beirut on April 8, 2026. Murat Sengul / Anadolu via Getty Images

Not even 24 hours after the ceasefire was announced, Israel struck central Beirut in what Israel called the largest coordinated military strike in the war, with more than 100 Hezbollah targets hit within 10 minutes in Beirut, southern Lebanon and other areas.

Israel’s attack on Lebanon could jeopardize the fragile agreement, with Iran threatening to pull back. Following the attack, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said, “The U.S. must choose — ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both. The world sees the massacres in Lebanon,” adding that “the ball is in the U.S. court.”

What’s next?

Sharif proposed direct talks between the U.S. and Iran on Friday in Islamabad. Leavitt said Wednesday that Vice President JD Vance, special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, will represent the U.S. in negotiations, though Trump said it was possible Vance would not attend due to security concerns.

In the meantime, Sharif asked all warring countries to adhere to the ceasefire amid reports of attacks in the region. While Israel has continued to bombard Lebanon, countries such as Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait said they have continued to intercept missiles and drones coming from Iran.

Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.

The Dictatorship

The Supreme Court’s conversion therapy ruling opens a ‘dark avenue’

Published

4 hours ago

April 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Apr. 8, 2026, 5:46 PM EDT

ByHannah Holland

Garrard Conley begins his 2016 memoir “Boy Erased” in a semicircle of folding chairs under halogen lights. Conley, then 19, had only just arrived at Love in Action, a cruelly named so-called gay conversion center, in Memphis.

One of the practitioners stood in front of Conley and his cohorts, all dressed in uniform, and said: “The first thing you have to do is recognize how you’ve become dependent on sex, on things that are not from God.”

For people facing similar circumstances today, the Supreme Court just made it possible for things to get worse.

“We were learning Step One of Love in Action’s Twelve Step program,” Conley writes in his memoir, “a set of principles equating the sins of infidelity, bestiality, pedophilia, and homosexuality to addictive behavior such as alcoholism or gambling: a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for what counselors referred to as our ‘sexual deviance.’” It would only get worse.

For people facing similar circumstances today, the Supreme Court just made it possible for things to get worse for them, too. Last Tuesday, an 8-1 Supreme Court majority rejected a Colorado law that effectively banned gay conversion therapy for young people. Passed in 2019, Colorado’s Minor Conversion Therapy Law prohibits licensed mental health professionals from providing “any practice or treatment” with the express intent to change a minor’s “gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

The case challenging the law was initiated in 2022 when Kaley Chiles, an evangelical Christian and licensed talk therapist, sued the state, arguing that her First Amendment right to discuss her faith and beliefs on “biological sex” was being violated. Colorado is one of 23 states and Washington, D.C. with similar legislation in place.

Conley joined the Velshi Banned Book Club, the franchise on MS NOW I edit and produce, this past week, to discuss the Supreme Court ruling and share his thoughts as someone who has lived through the harrowing experiences of conversion therapy.

Using flashbacks, Conley’s book explores the moments that lead up to Conley’s “treatment” — his religious upbringing as the sole child of devout Missionary Baptists, how he grappled with his sexuality in secret for so many years and how he was brutally outed to his parents by the very person who raped and assaulted him (Conley refers to the perpetrator using a pseudonym in his book) — and then what happened behind closed doors at Love in Action.

In our pre-interview on Friday, an exploratory time before a guest joins the host on a live television show, Conley explained the enduring significance of conversion therapy: “To me conversion therapy is connected to so many other issues that really animate me, like free speech, freedom of thought, open-mindedness, fundamentalism and what it does to our country. You’re looking at the way this kind of fundamentalist thinking works on a large scale when you watch what is happening in this country right now.”

Also inherent to this ruling is an acute medical threat, which Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed to in her lone dissentwriting, “[The Court has] open[ed] a dangerous can of worms. It threatens to impair States’ ability to regulate the provision of medical care in any respect. It extends the Constitution into uncharted territory in an utterly irrational fashion. And it ultimately risks grave harm to Americans’ health and wellbeing.”

“It is opening the flood gates for dangerous quackery that I thought we were rid of.”

Garrard Conley

I asked Conley, what comes next? He echoed Jackson’s dissent, saying, “This ruling could open up really dark avenues of thought. If I go to a [licensed practitioner] I am expecting them to be more educated than I am and be up on the science. I hope that they would at least offer some scientific basis for what I’m talking about in a therapy session. It is opening the flood gates for dangerous quackery that I thought we were rid of.”

According to LGBTQ+ nonprofit suicide prevention organization the Trevor Project, there were more than 1,320 conversation therapy practitioners in 48 states and Washington, D.C., in 2023. Fifteen percent of LGBTQ+ youth report being threatened with or subjected to conversion therapy, the organization reports. Thirty-five percent of those exposed to conversion therapy over the past year reported suicide attempts. That is 1 in 8.

Suicide and suicidal ideation are a painful refrain in Conley’s memoir. Conley writes in stunning frankness about his own suicidal ideations after being outed to his parents and about how common, almost pedestrian, it was at Love in Action. Not 30 pages into “Boy Erased” we’re introduced to a person called only T: “T, an obese middle-aged man wearing several black cardigans, stood before our group to confess, stone-faced, that he had once again attempted suicide. This was T’s seventh suicide attempt since coming to the program.”

Conley told Ali Velshi, “What’s even more damaging for the LGBTQ+ community is this idea that we are subject to be debated, that our very existence is something that can be argued over and is open for interpretation based on free speech. Every major medical organization in the country knows that LGBTQ+ people exist. It feels like an attack.”

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling is just the latest in several decisions that appear to favor conservative Christians. In 2023, a web designer was allowed to refuse to design wedding websites for same-sex couples. In 2022, a football coach was allowed to pray at the 50-yard line. There are more examples.

Justice Neil Gorsuch centered freedom of speech in the majority opinion, which included liberal justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, writing, “Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety, but the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”

Here, in this Supreme Court case and behind the closed doors of conversion therapy, fundamentalism and freedom of thought are inexplicable from each other.

“I am not attacking religion when I talk about this,” said Conley, who is a religious Christian. “But fundamentalism doesn’t allow for any open discussion. It shuts people down, it takes cheap shots … there is only one meaning, there is only one right way.”

Despite the odds, “Boy Erased” is ultimately about wholeness: “[Love in Action] was telling me on a daily basis that a loss of self meant a gain in virtue, and a gain in virtue meant I was drawing closer to God and therefore closer to my true heavenly self. […] You became all telling with no showing: not the extraordinary extra, but the stock player in a harp-and-halo bit. I came to therapy thinking that my sexuality didn’t matter, but it turned out that every part of my personality was intimately connected. Cutting one piece damaged the rest. I had prayed for purification, but the minute I felt its icy baptismal waters burning away everything I’d ever loved, I’d begun to open myself up, instead, to a former possibility: unconditional love, the original flame that had drawn me closer to God and my family and the rest of the world.”

Conley is happy to tell you how he survived his time in Love in Action, the long road of healing after he left and where he finds the strength now to revisit a terrible time in his life day after day: his parents (despite their role in placing him in conversion therapy) and his stubbornness. “[My dad] taught me from a young age if you believe something then you should be willing to stand behind it for as long as it takes. And my mom’s compassion is the other part of that. The main thing is I am stubborn. There is a part of me that is like you’re not going to get away with what you’re doing to these people. Even now.”

What Conley endured and overcame should be relegated to the same dusty and dark place where other antiquated medical brutalities, like leeches and trepanation, exist. His story and his perspective, while inspiring and beautiful, should not exist. Not today and not ever. This ruling means more people suffering like “T,” more lives turned to statistics and more shame. Even if a young person’s journey with their sexual identity doesn’t include a stop at a place like “Love in Action,” just knowing these centers exist is tremendously harmful.

The message is clear from this ruling: You are not free to be who you are. I hope that the next generation of young people who find themselves sitting in a semicircle of folding chairs under halogen lights find the wholeness that Conley writes of. Sadly, there’s no guarantee of that.

If you are an LGBTQ young person in crisis, feeling suicidal or in need of a safe and judgment-free place to talk, call the TrevorLifeline now at 1-866-488-7386 or the Rainbow Youth Project at 1-317-643-4888.

Hannah Holland

Hannah Holland is a producer for MS NOW’s “Velshi” and editor for the “Velshi Banned Book Club.” She writes for MS NOW.

The Dictatorship

Wednesday’s Mini-Report, 4.8.26

Published

4 hours ago

April 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Today’s edition of quick hits.

* The new policy isn’t exactly on firm ground: “Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of the Parliament of Iran, said in a statement that ‘a bilateral ceasefire or negotiations is unreasonable,’ alleging that three clauses of its ‘workable’ proposal had been violated before peace talks had even begun.”

* A key point of contention: “White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at a briefing today that Iranian state media reports that the country closed the Strait of Hormuz over Israeli attacks on Lebanon are ‘false.’”

* On a related note, when a reporter asked Leavitt who currently controls the Strait of Hormuz, she refused to answer the question.

* Crisis conditions in Lebanon: “Israeli forces pounded Beirut on Wednesday, killing dozens of people in an aerial barrage that Israel described as the largest yet in its current offensive against Hezbollah, hours after the United States and Iran announced a two-week ceasefire.”

* I suspect we haven’t heard the last word on this one: “Former Attorney General Pam Bondi will not appear for her April 14 deposition in front of the House Oversight Committee as part of the panel’s investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, according to a spokeswoman for the committee. The Department of Justice told the Republican-led committee that she would not appear on that date, as she was subpoenaed in her capacity as attorney general and no longer serves in that role.”

* A burgeoning controversy: “The Trump administration has handed a $370 million windfall to one of the world’s largest exporters of natural gas by allowing the company to claim an ‘alternative fuels’ tax incentive for operating some of the planet’s most heavily polluting ships. Financial disclosures made Thursday by liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter Cheniere reveal that the IRS green-lit the payment earlier this year, ruling that the company’s tankers powered by liquefied natural gas that ship the fossil fuel worldwide qualified for the incentive.”

* A long-shot effort on Capitol Hill: “Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the House minority leader, said in a letter to his caucus that House Democrats would try to use a pro forma session — a brief, routine meeting the House holds when it is in recess — to try and unanimously pass a resolution halting the war against Iran and forcing President Trump to get authorization for further military action from Congress.”

See you tomorrow.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

The Dictatorship

DOJ investigating Biden-era prosecutions of anti-abortion protesters, draft report shows

Published

4 hours ago

April 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

DOJ investigating Biden-era prosecutions of anti-abortion protesters, draft report shows

The Trump Justice Department is expected to release a report as early as next week concluding that the prior administration politically targeted abortion opponents because of their religious beliefs when prosecuting them for blocking access to abortion clinics, according to three people familiar with the report and a draft reviewed by MS NOW.

The nearly 60-page draft seeks to justify President Donald Trump’s pardons of two dozen defendants who were convicted during the Biden administration of blockading abortion clinics, threatening violence and verbally assaulting patients and staff. The report argues those defendants’ convictions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act — a 1994 law that prohibits interfering with people trying to access reproductive health clinics — were unjustly motivated by what the report characterizes as the targeting of people “with traditional Christian views.”

“Upon assuming office, the Biden DOJ shattered the public’s trust by weaponizing the FACE Act to advance a pro-abortion agenda, and DOJ’s Civil Rights Division was at the forefront of this weaponization,” the draft states.

The report does not reconcile its claims of Biden-era weaponization with the fact that Trump’s DOJ has unsuccessfully sought to prosecute several of the president’s political enemies, and is currently trying to bring FACE Act charges against former BLN anchor and independent journalist Don Lemon and protesters who entered a church in Minneapolis earlier this year.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on reports or findings that are not yet public but pointed to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s remarks at a Tuesday news conference that the public should expect the results of DOJ weaponization investigations soon.

The draft criticizes the work of Sanjay Patel, a longtime Civil Rights Division attorney who has been a target of Republicans for prosecuting all but four of the 24 people Trump pardoned. The report alleges Patel prioritized prosecuting cases against anti-abortion protesters while comparatively ignoring violence against churches and anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers — an allegation two former DOJ employees who worked with Patel denied to MS NOW.

The draft also criticizes Patel for suggesting prosecutors bring additional charges against violators of the FACE Act to ensure longer jail sentences — though Trump’s DOJ is doing just that in its case against Lemon and the Minneapolis protesters.

Last month, the department put Patel on administrative leave, according to two people who have knowledge of the move but are not authorized to speak about sensitive matters.

Patel did not respond to a LinkedIn message and emails from MS NOW and could not be reached by phone.

Word of the report and Patel being placed on administrative leave comes as the DOJ has removed experts and installed loyalists who are committed to advancing Trump’s agenda. That has included emboldening anti-abortion protesters — even as abortion providers have faced hundreds of incidents of trespassing, obstructions and death threats in recent years — and pledging to combat what it describes as the previous administration’s anti-Christian bias.

Days after Trump pardoned the two dozen protesters last year, the Office of the Associate Attorney General released a memo announcing that the office would roll back abortion-related FACE prosecutions except in circumstances involving “death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage.”

The memo also demanded the immediate dismissal of three federal cases brought under FACE charges, in which defendants were accused of barricading themselves inside abortion clinics, refusing to leave and verbally harassing patients in Pennsylvania Florida and Ohio in 2021 and 2022. The draft report reviewed by MS NOW characterizes these dismissed cases as involving “peaceful, pro-life demonstrators.”

The FACE Act report also comes in the run-up to the midterm elections, and would mark a rare win for abortion opponents who have been upset with the Trump administration for not taking stronger action to restrict access nationwide.

The law was passed in 1994 to deter mounting violence — including murders — against abortion providers. Trump’s DOJ has focused on a lesser-used provision of the law that prohibits blockading or invading houses of worship, which prosecutors are using in both the Minneapolis case and against pro-Palestinian protesters who demonstrated at a New Jersey synagogue in November 2024. The report states that Patel previously argued that provision of the law was “unconstitutional because it lacks a jurisdictional hook.”

Patel worked as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division’s Criminal Section beginning in 2011, according to a short biography available online, and has prosecuted FACE Act cases against people charged with threatening to bomb abortion clinics assaulting a clinic escort and threatening to kill an abortion patient. Patel prosecuted all but one of those cases under Biden. He also prosecuted two FACE Act cases during the Biden administration against people who vandalized anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers.

Patel also served as the director of the DOJ’s National Task Force on Violence Against Reproductive Health Care Providers, a group that was formed in the wake of a murder of an abortion provider in the late 1990s to provide security tips to abortion providers and clinics and coordinate prosecutions of people who enact violence against them.

A former DOJ employee who prosecuted a FACE Act case with Patel described him to MS NOW as a “good guy” whose prosecutions were not politically motivated.

“He was by-the-book, in my experience with him,” the former DOJ employee said. “He followed the facts and the law.”

The defendants who Patel helped prosecute under the Biden administration — and who Trump later pardoned — include people who entered abortion clinics, blocked doorways and refused to leave; verbally harassed patients and staff; injured multiple clinic staffers; and livestreamed their actions on social media. But the report paints a largely sympathetic picture of them, characterizing them as “nonviolent, pro-life demonstrators, including a Catholic priest and elderly people.”

Although the report suggests that the DOJ previously only brought FACE prosecutions for “violent conduct [and] repeat blockaders,” it fails to mention that many of the people Trump pardoned were repeat offenders themselves. Several of the people Trump pardoned have since been rearrested multiple times for blockading abortion clinics, as MS NOW previously reported.

According to the draft, Biden’s DOJ charged more than 45 anti-abortion defendants in more than 20 cases with violating FACE, which it characterizes as “a significant increase … compared to prior administrations” that was motivated by the administration’s desire to preserve abortion access in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

The Biden DOJ prosecuted only five people for damaging anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers — which the report says saved “the lives of numerous unborn children” — and did not prosecute any cases for damages against churches, the report states. Testifying before Congress in 2023, former Attorney General Merrick Garland said the department “put full resources” into investigating vandalizations of crisis pregnancy centers, but that those centers were more often attacked at night, making them harder to prosecute than blockades of abortion clinics, which were more often done during the day.

Patel argued in 2022 that prosecutors should bring other charges against FACE Act violators that “may provide stronger penalties,” such as conspiracy against rights, a charge punishable by up to a decade in prison that was originally intended to prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan. The report critiques this argument, yet Trump’s DOJ is charging Lemon and the Minneapolis protesters under both the FACE Act and conspiracy against rights.

Laura-Kate Bernstein, a former DOJ prosecutor who also worked on FACE Act prosecutions, said claims that she and fellow prosecutors pursued these cases for political or religious reasons is “outrageous.” She called Patel a “stellar” prosecutor focused on facts, not politics. She pointed to the office’s prosecution of protesters who blocked one devout Christian woman from getting medical care at a clinic that provides abortions and other services — a case discussed in detail in the report.

The woman and her husband had been trying to have a baby, but when she had a miscarriage in her second trimester, the woman’s doctor urged her to undergo a medical procedure to remove the fetal tissue and staunch her bleeding for her own safety.

“She’s bleeding and crying in the back of her car,” Bernstein said. “People who blockaded doors and prevented this woman from getting access to the health care she needed were prosecuted and found guilty by a jury of their peers.”