The Dictatorship

Iran and Pakistan discuss ceasefire details in push for talks

Published

2 months ago

April 25, 2026

Iran and Pakistan discuss ceasefire details in push for talks

ISLAMABAD (AP) — President Donald Trump is sending his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Pakistan to meet with Iran’s foreign minister, the White House said Friday, as officials in the South Asian nation pushed to revive ceasefire talks between the U.S. and Iran.

The talks planned for Saturday come as much of the world is on edge over a war that has snarled crucial energy exports through the Strait of Hormuzclouded the global economic picture and left thousands dead across the Middle East.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrived in Islamabad late Friday. Earlier on social media, he wrote that he was traveling to Pakistan on a trip focused on “bilateral matters and regional developments.” He didn’t specify who he would meet.

Shortly after Araghchi touched down, the country’s government made it clear there would be no direct negotiations with American government representatives during this visit.

Foreign ministry spokesman Esmael Baqaei said on X that, “No meeting is planned to take place between Iran and the U.S.”

Instead, Baqaei said Pakistani officials would convey messages between the delegations. Baqaei thanked the Pakistani government for its “ongoing mediation & good offices for ending American imposed war of aggression.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had said in an interview on Fox News Channel that Witkoff and Kushner would meet with Araghchi.

“We’re hopeful that it will be a productive conversation and hopefully move the ball forward to a deal,” Leavitt said.

AP AUDIO: Top Iran diplomat traveling to Pakistan for talks on ceasefire with US

AP Washington correspondent Sagar Meghani reports Iran’s top diplomat is heading to Pakistan, which is hoping to get the U.S. on board for more ceasefire talks.

She said Vice President JD Vance would not travel but that he remains “deeply involved,” and would be willing to go to Pakistan “if we feel it’s a necessary use of his time.”

Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the president’s national security team are on “standby” to fly to Pakistan if needed, Leavitt said.

Araghchi and the two Trump envoys held hours of indirect talks in Geneva on Feb. 27 over Tehran’s nuclear program, but walked away without a deal. The next day, Israel and the United States started the war against Iran.

Leavitt said the president decided to send Witkoff and Kushner to Pakistan “to hear the Iranians out.”

“We’ve certainly seen some progress from the Iranian side in the last couple of days,” Leavitt said. She did not offer any details about what U.S. officials were hearing.

Islamabad has sought to reinject momentum into the negotiations between Iran and the United States, which did not resume this week as had been expected.

Trump extends the Jones Act waiver for 90 days

Separately Friday, the White House said Trump issued a 90-day extension to the Jones Act waivermaking it easier for non-American vessels to transport oil and natural gas.

He first announced a 60-day waiver in March in a move intended to stabilize energy prices and ease oil and gas shipments to the U.S. following the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

“New data compiled since the initial waiver was issued revealed that significantly more supply was able to reach U.S. ports faster,” the White House post on social media said.

The price of Brent crude oil, the international standard, retreated on the news, vacillating between $103 a barrel and more than $107 — still early 50% higher than where it was on Feb. 28, when the war began.

The squeeze on shipments through the strait has rippled through global maritime trade flows, including through the Panama Canal nearly halfway around the world.

Pakistan forges ahead with diplomatic efforts

Pakistan has been trying to get U.S. and Iranian officials back to the table after Trump this week announced an indefinite extension of the ceasefire with Iranhonoring Islamabad’s request for more time for diplomatic outreach.

That hasn’t lowered tensions in the straita strategic waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas is shipped during peacetime.

Iran has kept its stranglehold on traffic through the strait, attacking three ships earlier this week, while the U.S. is maintaining a blockade on Iranian ports and Trump has ordered the military to “shoot and kill” small boats that could be placing mines.

“Iran has an important choice, a chance to make a deal, a good deal, a wise deal,” U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters on Friday. He said a second U.S. aircraft carrier will join the blockade in a few days.

Washington already has three aircraft carriers in the region; the USS George H.W. Bush in the Indian Ocean; the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea; and the USS Gerald R. Ford in the Red Sea.

It is the first time since 2003 that three American carriers have been operating in the region simultaneously. The force includes 200 aircraft and 15,000 sailors and Marines, U.S. Central Command said.

A growing toll even as ceasefires hold

Since the war began, at least 3,375 people have been killed in Iran, and more than 2,490 people in Lebanon, where new fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah broke out two days after the war started, according to authorities.

Additionally, 23 people have died in Israel and more than a dozen in Gulf Arab states. Fifteen Israeli soldiers in Lebanon and 13 U.S. service members throughout the region have been killed.

The U.N. peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon has also sustained casualties. UNIFIL said Friday that an Indonesian peacekeeper died of wounds sustained in an attack on his base on March 29, raising to six — four Indonesians and two French — the number of force members killed since the war erupted.

Tensions linger in Lebanon despite extended truce

The situation in Lebanon remained tense a day after Trump announced Israel and Lebanon had agreed to extend a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah by three weeks. Hezbollah has not participated in the diplomacy brokered by Washington.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a video statement released by his office on Friday, hailed “a process to achieve a historic peace between Israel and Lebanon.”

Earlier, the Israeli army asked residents of the southern Lebanese village of Deir Aames to evacuate, saying Hezbollah was using the village to launch attacks against Israel.

Israel’s military said it downed a drone over Lebanon following the launch of a small surface-to-air missile by Hezbollah. The militant group, meanwhile, said it shot down an Israeli drone with a surface-to-air missile over the outskirts of the southern port city of Tyre.

___

Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Keaten from Geneva. Associated Press writers David Rising in Bangkok; Koral Saeed in Abu Snan, Israel; Bassem Mroue in Beirut; and Aamer Madhani, Josh Boak and Ashraf Khalil in Washington contributed.

The Dictatorship

Judge denies Kennedy Center request for pause in ruling ordering Trump’s name removed from building

Published

8 hours ago

June 14, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Judge denies Kennedy Center request for pause in ruling ordering Trump’s name removed from building

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Kennedy Center was running out of options Friday evening to keep President Donald Trump’s name on the facade of the iconic performing arts venue.

A judge earlier in the afternoon rejected a request to pause a court-ordered deadline of Friday to remove references to Trump from the building and other aspects of the Kennedy Center’s operations. The institution appealed that ruling, an effort that was also rebuffed Friday evening.

Scaffolding was erected around a section of the building that includes Trump’s name but the Kennedy Center sought a short extension to complete the work. Shortly after midnight, the Kennedy Center asked a judge to extend the deadline until noon Eastern Time on Saturday because of storms that had swept through the Washington area Friday, causing a delay. Some of the thunderstorms included lightning.

In the filing, the Kennedy Center offered assurance that the “removal work is presently ongoing” and would “conclude in the early hours of the morning.”

Dozens of people spent hours on the plaza in front of the Kennedy Center taking pictures and cheering occasionally as they broke into chants of “take it down.” Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, an ex-officio board member who sued to have Trump’s name removed from the building, was spotted at one point on the plaza as well.

After ignoring the Kennedy Center for much of his first term, Trump has wielded tremendous influence over the venue during his return to office. Just a month into his second term, he ousted the center’s previous leadership and replaced it with a board of trustees that named him chairman. Trump’s name was quickly added to the building.

In his ruling that only Congress could make changes to the Kennedy Center’s name, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper also blocked the administration from closing the cultural and arts venue for major renovations that had been planned to start in July and last for two years.

The Kennedy Center’s leadership argued in its appeal Friday that the renovation was badly needed and accused the lower court, in terms that seemed similar to Trump’s speech patterns, of interfering in the effort.

“The District Court is not allowing us to close in order to properly fix up and repair the Building, including potentially life threatening structural damage like beams and parking garage ceilings that are rusted, and in serious danger of falling onto people below,” according to the appeal. “Indeed, total collapse!”

Even as the Kennedy Center has fought efforts to remove Trump’s name from the building, it has taken steps to comply with Cooper’s initial ruling.

A June 4 memo to staff from the Kennedy Center’s Office of General Counsel said email signatures, letterhead and other documents must reflect the name as “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts” or “Kennedy Center.”

The Kennedy Center’s website has dropped Trump’s name. And an earlier email sent to members offering ticket packages for the June 28 Mark Twain Award for American Humor ceremony came from the Kennedy Center without including Trump’s name.

___

Associated Press journalists Anna Johnson, Mark Sherman and Emily Wang in Washington and Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.

The Dictatorship

Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch wanted an execution that a Trump judge deemed illegal

Published

24 hours ago

June 13, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch wanted an execution that a Trump judge deemed illegal

Welcome back, Deadline: Legal Newsletter readers. The Supreme Court these days is generally in the business of helping executions go forward. But on Thursday night, the court did something notable: It told Alabama no.

Even then, the court wasn’t unanimous. Justices Clarence Thomas Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the refusal to let the nitrogen gas execution of Jeffery Lee proceed.

What prompted the rare rejection? In line with the typical shadow docket practice, the court didn’t explain itself. Nor did the dissenters, who merely noted their disagreement.

But a deeper look at the case helps us understand why a majority of the court was unwilling to help the state this time.

A Trump-appointed judge had permanently blocked Alabama from killing Lee using the nitrogen method, due to the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In her ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Emily Marks made it clear that she wasn’t stopping officials from executing Lee for the 1998 murders of Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson. Rather, she was only barring the nitrogen method while leaving the state free to use others, such as a firing squad.

Yet the state still pressed to execute Lee with nitrogen on Thursday. The next roadblock it hit was a divided appellate panel, which declined to lift Marks’ injunction. Trump-appointed Judge Robert Luck dissented, stressing the high bar the justices have set for Eighth Amendment claims and accusing Lee of delaying his claim until the last minute. Luck noted that Lee’s victims didn’t get to choose how they died.

The appellate dissent reflects the Supreme Court majority’s view on capital punishment. So, when Alabama filed an emergency application to the justices on Thursday, it felt like the setting of a familiar scene: A lower court halts an execution, only for the high court majority to let it move forward. We have seen this movie before.

Plus, the court previously permitted nitrogen gas executions in Alabama. In the case of Anthony Boyd last yearJustice Sonia Sotomayor lamented the majority’s refusal to extend him what she called “the barest form of mercy,” which she said would have been letting him die by firing squad, which “would kill him in seconds, rather than by a torturous suffocation lasting up to 4 minutes.” She issued a similar dissent the year before in the case of Kenneth Smithwhich she concluded “with deep sadness, but commitment to the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.”

Lee’s case was different, as his lawyers and a key outside advocate explained to the justices. His lawyers said it was “unlike every previous method of execution challenge that this Court has considered.” They said that unlike prior cases where lower courts issued temporary stays for inmates, this one had a permanent injunction that followed “a full three-day bench trial on the merits — the first such trial anywhere on the constitutionality of nitrogen asphyxiation.”

That key outside advocate was Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck, a Supreme Court expert who filed an amicus brief. He said Alabama was trying to do something procedurally that it shouldn’t be allowed to do. “After all,” Vladeck wrote, “allowing Alabama to execute Mr. Lee through a grant of emergency relief would necessarily frustrate this Court’s ability to conduct plenary review of the district court’s final, permanent injunction.”

To be clear, the justices can still reverse Marks’ ruling in a future round of litigation. Or, as the judge noted, the state can execute him by other means. The question on Thursday night was whether the court would make the case moot by letting Alabama execute Lee before the state’s appeal could be fully vetted in an orderly fashion. With that in mind, it would almost be unremarkable that the court rejected the state’s emergency application, if it weren’t for the fact that the justices had previously intervened to help governments conduct executions over lower courts’ objections.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that three justices voted to let Lee’s execution go forward as planned, its unconstitutionality notwithstanding. Of course, while none of the justices explained their views, we can presume that the three dissenters are prepared to disagree with the lower courts’ constitutional analysis if and when the case comes back to the high court.

Next week, the justices are set to issue another round of opinions from cases argued this term, as we creep toward the end of June, when some of the court’s most contentious decisions have historically come.

Have any questions or comments for me? Pleasesubmit them through this formfor a chance to be featured in the Deadline: Legal Blog and newsletter.

Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.

The Dictatorship

Spencer Pratt concedes LA mayoral race with combative message

Published

24 hours ago

June 13, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Spencer Pratt concedes LA mayoral race with combative message

Jun. 12, 2026, 5:10 PM EDT

Ex-reality TV star and MAGA-backed Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt angrily conceded the race Friday in a combative video in which he derided, and appeared to threaten, the women who finished ahead of him.

Nearly four days after The Associated Press projected Councilmember Nithya Raman will advance to the November general election to face incumbent Mayor Karen BassPratt announced that “the campaign portion of my mission to save Los Angeles is coming to a close, and I’m moving on to the next, more interesting phase.”

With 99% of ballots counted as of Friday, the AP put Pratt in third place, with just more than a quarter of the vote — 3.5 percentage points behind Raman and nearly 9 points behind Bass.

Pratt initially stood in second as returns came in on primary night, but his lead over Raman steadily narrowed as mail-in ballots were counted. By Sunday, she had overtaken him by less than 1 percentage point.

President Donald Trump and other MAGA supporters suggested Pratt’s apparent reversal of fortune proved fraud, but elections experts say it is California’s voting systemcoupled with the city’s small Republican voter base, that explain his third-place finish.

What, exactly, Pratt’s next chapter in civic life will consist of is unclear. But if his Friday announcement is any indication — he called Bass and Raman “dumb and dumber” and “corrupt communists” — it will include continued attacks on his former opponents. And contrary to Pratt’s pledge that he would leave the city if he lost, he suggested he will instead stay put in LA.

“A lot of dim-witted jerks thought I was in this for a grift, that I was going to roll up and leave town if I didn’t get into City Hall,” Pratt said in the video. “Hey, morons, I didn’t get in this for political power. I got in this to expose this corrupt machine, and nothing has changed.”

Addressing Bass and Raman, Pratt added: “I will be lighting you up every single day, and now I don’t have to worry about offending BLN viewers. I don’t have campaign laws hamstringing me now. It’s war.”

Filled with expletives and images of fires, violence and homeless encampments, Pratt’s video channels the same angry populism he ran on. His Republican supporters —including Benny JohnsonTrump administration official Richard Grenell and the chair of the LA County GOP — cheered his final message as a candidate.

Best known for his role as Heidi Montag’s bad boyfriend on MTV’s “The Hills,” Pratt launched his surprise mayoral campaign in January, a year after his family home burned down in the Pacific Palisades fire. While his platform initially focused heavily on what he and his supporters characterized as the failures that led to the damage caused by the fires, Pratt expanded his campaign to focus on forcing homeless people off the streets, cleaning up alleged “fraud” in the city’s finances and saving abused dogs on Skid Row.

With his massive online following and social media savvy, Pratt catapulted himself from long-shot candidate to one who earned Trump’s support and managed to outraise both Bass and Raman.

In the video, Pratt also said he possesses “some recordings of one of your exalted candidates doing and saying something that would make her resign in shame.”

A spokesperson for Raman’s campaign declined to comment to MS NOW on Pratt’s message. Spokespeople for the Bass campaign did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.

Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.