Jun. 7, 2026, 11:54 PM EDT

The tenuous ceasefire in the Middle East seemed to be holding on by a thread on Sunday as Israel and Iran exchanged missile fire for the first time since an agreement to end hostilities was reached in April.

Meanwhile, Israel said early Monday that it detected a missile launched from Yemen targeting the country, according to the Associated Press. Yemen is home to the Iran-backed Houthi rebels. And Saudi Arabia sounded air warning sirens in an area close to an air base housing U.S. forces, the AP also reported, though that country said shortly afterwards that the danger had passed.

The escalation amounted to the most significant exchange of fire since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran was put on pause in April. The renewed fighting also threatened to undermine President Donald Trump’s negotiations with Iran as the U.S. president appears to be seeking a way out of a war that is unpopular with Americans and has sent gas prices soaring.

The fighting began Sunday when Israel launched airstrikes on Lebanon, which has been a sore point in the negotiations between the U.S. and Iran as Israel continues to pursue that conflict. Tehran retaliated by firing missiles at Israel, the first missiles launched at Israel in two months as the war reached its 100th day.

Earlier Monday, Israel responded by launching airstrikes targeting central and western Iran. Officials did not give details on exactly what had been struck.

“A short while ago, the Israeli Air Force struck military targets belonging to the Iranian terror regime in western and central Iran,” said the Israeli military.

The White House did not respond to messages about the Israel-launched strikes or whether they were done in coordination with the U.S. However, Trump, according to Axiossaid he was going to call Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “tell him not to strike back.”

If the two talked, Netanyahu apparently did not listen.

And Trump, in a series of interviews with the media on Sunday before the Israeli strikes on Iran, gave conflicting signals about whether peace negotiations were in trouble.

Fox News’ Trey Yingst said Trump told the news outlet regarding the Iranian missiles launched Sunday, “It’s certainly not going to help negotiations,” and he urged Iran to reach a deal.

But an Iranian official linked to the talks between the U.S. and Iran said that “a deal with President Trump is no longer feasible at this stage”

The official blamed Trump for the current situation, and the escalation of hostilities in Lebanon.

Before the Israeli attacks, Trump told the Financial Times on Sunday evening that Netanyahu “won’t have any choice” but to accept the deal the U.S. negotiates with Iran.

“I call the shots. I call all the shots. He [Netanyahu] doesn’t call the shots,” he said, adding the Iranian strikes on Israel were “not going to have any impact on the deal.”

“The deal may make it on its own merit, or not, but this will not have any effect on it,” Trump explained.

However, if a deal fails, Trump told the Financial Times the U.S. would consider further military action and would continue the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports.

“Number one, it would mean that possibly we would go in and take care of the rest of the place that we didn’t take care of militarily,” he said. “Or it would just mean that we would keep the blockade on Iran because the blockade has been probably more powerful than any attack that was ever made on that country.”

But a White House official granted anonymity to speak candidly told MS NOW Trump has underestimated the willingness of Iran to resume conflict.

“The recent negotiations with Iran in many ways have exposed a fundamental miscalculation” by the president and the White House, the official said, adding that Iran’s “erratic behavior” has heightened the situation with no imminent off ramp.

Earlier Sunday, the Israeli military, which launched the war against Iran jointly with the U.S. on Feb. 28, said sirens were sounded in several areas of the country and Iran confirmed it launched the missiles. “Tonight’s operation was solely intended as a warning. Should these acts of aggression continue, future responses will be broader in scope and will encompass all American and Israeli targets throughout the region,” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said in a statement posted on Telegram.

In addition to Sunday’s fresh strikes, military clashes continued across the region and talks between the two sides have stalled, four Middle East officials and diplomats told MS NOW.

‘I think we’re very close’

Until Sunday, Trump had continued to say a deal is close. “I think we’re very close. We have a couple of points,” he told NBC News in an interview that aired Sunday. “They don’t even seem like big points.”

Over the weekend, U.S. commandos seized an Iranian oil tanker and shot down multiple Iranian drones. Clashes between Israeli forces and Hezbollah in Lebanon also intensified.

Four Middle East officials and diplomats told MS NOW that significant disagreements remain. All of them spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the talks.

A senior official in the region told MS NOW on Friday that three issues remain unresolved: The sequencing of the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, American demands regarding Iran’s nuclear program and Iranian demands to receive relief funds up front as part of the agreement.

A senior Middle East diplomat also said Friday that negotiations have regressed.

“This is grossly inaccurate, as MS NOW always is when they rely on mysterious ‘Middle Eastern diplomats’ who have no idea what they are talking about,” said Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson.

A Pakistani foreign ministry source with knowledge of the talks expressed optimism as well. They told MS NOW that this weekend’s visit of Pakistan’s interior minister to Iran was “extremely positive” and “Iran showed signs of progress towards agreeing on a framework.”

Nicole Grajewski, an assistant professor at Sciences Po in Paris and an associate at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, told MS NOW that the continued military clashes between the two sides are not aiding negotiations.

“The persistent strikes between the U.S. and Iran across the region [are] hardly helping the situation,” she said. “If anything, it’s making it harder to separate the negotiations from a pending resumption of war.”

In Trump’s interview with NBC News, he threatened to bomb Iran’s enriched uranium if Tehran will not hand it over to the U.S. Experts have warned that bombing enriched uranium sends small radioactive particles into the air. The particles do not spread far but anyone entering the nearby area faces health risks.

Military experts have warned that a U.S. commando raid to seize the uranium by force could last for days and potentially require American forces to build a landing strip. U.S. forces could be exposed to attacks from Iranian forces and could suffer high casualties.

Trump told NBC News that Iran has agreed to not seek a nuclear weapon, but he wanted an additional provision added to the agreement to ensure Iran cannot purchase one.

Trump said the Iranians pushed back “a little bit” on his demand. “And then they didn’t.”

Experts have warned that Iranian leaders have publicly promised for years to not obtain a nuclear weapon. They say such a pledge from Iranian officials cannot be trusted.

Iranian officials have continued to demand the return of up to $24 billion in frozen Iranian assets held overseas as part of the memorandum of understanding. Trump told NBC News he opposed any release of frozen Iranian funds until after the second round of negotiations had been completed.

Gregory Brew, a senior Iran and oil analyst at the Eurasia Group, told MS NOW that he was not surprised that two sides are digging in at this point in the negotiations. But he thinks a deal remains possible.

“I think what that means is after a week of fairly rapid progress, movements have now slowed, as both sides dig into their respective positions,” Brew said. “My personal feeling is that this deadlock won’t last forever, there’s still a mutual incentive to reach a deal and that will keep negotiations moving.”

Jake Traylor contributed to this report.

Jun. 7, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

ByChristina Wyman

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education recently announced it would freeze enrollment in Dolly Parton’s Imagination Librarya literacy initiative that offers one free book per month for children from birth until five years old. More than 20 states provide full or partial funding for the program, which claims to have donated over 300 million books to kids in the U.S. and elsewhere. The beneficiaries includes 170,000 Missouri childrenbut the state’s Republican-dominated legislature decided to cut the program’s funding from $6 million to $2 million.

As a teacher and author for children, I know the consequences of these cuts are all too clear. I have witnessed firsthand what it looks like when children do not have access to books. Such a drastic cut to such an important service is more of the same as far as this country’s continued acts of political and economic violence against its own citizens.

From literacy advocates to the American Association of Pediatrics to even the current U.S. governmenteveryone agrees that early childhood literacy is critical. According to Take Action For Libraries, a nonprofit political action committee, early access to books paves the way for a lifetime of learningwith more books in the home potentially leading to higher educational attainment.

The impact of access to books is also a symbolic one. I grew up in a working-class household and could feel, at a young age, that my family’s socioeconomic status did not measure up to that of many of my peers. We lived in a small walk-up apartment in Brooklyn; we spent most weeks surviving paycheck to paycheck. While many of my classmates and friends were in similar (or worse) positions, others enjoyed vacation homes, their parents’ new cars, and all manner of resources not available to the rest of us. Those kids could afford educational and enrichment opportunities. We had to hope and pray for many of the same chances — or settle for free alternative, if there were any.

But while my family did not have much, we did have books. Though my parents read little, they made sure the bedroom I shared with my sister was stocked with stories. We often devoured several books a week, having to resort to rereading them if we finished them before our next trip to bookstores or libraries (another institution currently under attack). Had Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library been available in the 1980s, there is no doubt my parents would have taken advantage of this program. And while families of any income can participate in Parton’s initiative, as with any universal social program those with the least will suffer from cuts the most.

It is a certain kind of person who sees early and easy access to books as a bad thing. Part of my role in schools involves visiting classrooms for teaching observations. I will never forget one school I was assigned to observe in rural Wisconsin. I sat at the teacher’s desk as he picked up the autobiography of Pakastani activist Malala Yousafzai. I expected each student to grab their own class copy so that that they could read along with him—so that they could huddle over the book at their desks, feeling its pages and connecting with the words in ways that every reader understands.

Some children had their own copies, likely furnished by their parents. But most did not. Instead, the teacher read his one copy aloud, while those without a book stared at each other, kicked each other under their desks, doodled in their notebooks, picked at their fingers, and participated in any other distraction they could think of – all because they simply could not see the words on the page.

To be clear, that teacher was one of the most effective and engaging teachers I have ever known; he did the best he could with what he had available. I later learned that his school district did not offer its schools a budget for class sets of books. But to this day, I wonder what sort of opportunities those kids were given to develop a love of reading (if any).

Teachers (and our wallets) can only do so much – we are not magicians. To read books, children need access to them – the same type of access that Missouri is poised to take away from its own communities, and the effects can be observed in all corners of schooling.

The state’s decision comes at a perilous time for children’s literacy. According to the National Assessment for Educational Progress, also known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” reading scores for high school seniors fell to their lowest since 1992. Surveys have found that high school students are assigned fewer and fewer books to read. Children are reading, and especially for funless than ever. And schools’ overreliance on technology is likely to be exacerbated by the looming disaster that is AI.

Through no fault of their own, our children, our books, are in crisis. Free book programs should be considered a necessary component to all communities – like clean water and sanitation. Instead, Missouri’s decision to cut a beloved free book program, and any other state that follows suit, is only contributing to the challenges we currently face.

As a writer for children, I often visit schools to talk with kids about the importance of reading: “No one can take away your ability to read books,” I often say. What I don’t tell them is that there are so many groups, from politicians to legislators to self-proclaimed “parents’ rights” groups who are trying to do exactly that. If students become readers, they will know exactly what these people are trying to take away from them: Their ability to navigate the world as socially literate, informed, and empathetic citizens. Books, and access to them, is one of the few aspects of childhood that holds the potential to feel fair and equal. Is it any wonder that those currently in power wish to do away with it?

Jun. 7, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Going into November’s midterm electionsDemocrats have put together a strong message that the prices of food, gas, healthcare, housing and utilities are too high and that Americans need to elect members of the party who take their financial struggles seriously. And that message has been working. Since President Donald Trump was elected in 2024 and embarked upon a term that has unsettled even those of us who were expecting the worst, Democrats have consistently overperformed in special and off-year elections.

Just ask Mikie Sherill and Abigail Spanbergerthe recently elected Democratic governors of New Jersey and Virginia, respectively. An April Fox News poll showed Democrats edging Republicans 52% to 48% on which party would better handle the economy. That was the first time Democrats have had an advantage on that question in 16 years.

Given the party’s edge on this important metric, unless Democrats suffer a significant reversal in public opinion over the next five months, they should be considered likely to take control of the House after nearly four years in the minority. But preserving the party’s momentum rests on persuading voters that Democrats will take seriously the issue of affordability for everyday Americans. Our future success, including our hopes to reclaim the White House in 2028, will depend on us showing that we won’t just promise, but we will deliver.

But on one important issue, I fear Democrats may be walking blindly into a buzzsaw and risking giving away the advantage they have established over Republicans on who cares more about working Americans. The issue is the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which guarantees Americans that their bank accounts are insured up to $250,000. Some Democrats have bought into the idea that there needs to be a dramatic expansion of those federal banking insurance subsidies, and they are joining Republican supporters of the industry’s push. The legislation was introduced by Sens. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., and Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md.and currently it is being debated in the Senate Banking Committee. The bill, which would expand federally-backed deposit insurance guarantees for business transaction accounts from the $250,000 cap to as much as $5 million, is being sold as protection for “Main Street.”

But that’s far from the truth. More than 99% of Americans’ bank accounts are already fully covered by the FDIC’s $250,000 cap. It’s been quite some time since a good survey was done, but in 2016, JPMorgan Chase reported that the median small business held an average daily cash balance of just $12,100. There is little in the legislation, then, for most small business owners.

Indeed, the biggest beneficiaries of this legislation would be large corporations with treasury departments that are staffed to manage cash positions of this size. Those corporations already have plenty of options today to insure their accounts and to pay for those options themselves. Under this bill, they would instead get coverage backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.

That is to say, those corporations would get coverage backed by you, by me and by every other American taxpayer. The legislation was also written to benefit all but a handful of the largest banks in the country, including more than a dozen with more than $100 billion in assets each.

By guaranteeing deposits at such a scale, the federal government would be stripping banks and large depositors of any incentive to manage risk, thus recreating the “moral hazard” that helped drive the savings and loan crisis that cost taxpayers more than $120 billion. That crisis followed the 1980 deposit insurance coverage hike. This bill would subsidize wealthy depositors and banks by socializing the risk of the next bailout onto every American taxpayer.

The above is the economic argument against this bill. Now let me give you the political argument. Democrats win when we deliver our economic and affordability message. We lose when the party is seen as too cozy with Wall Street and other wealthy supporters. That perception of doing the bidding of the banks and not Americans struggling to make ends meet should make Democrats think twice about this legislation.

After all, voters never forget a bank bailout. The political damage of 2008 still reverberates today. The view that Democrats, who controlled Congress, were willing to rescue Wall Street while Main Street drowned was a generational wound.  The Democrats’ perception as being most concerned  about corporations helped fuel the tea party, the shellacking that was the 2010 midterms and a decade of lost ground on economic credibility.

We see from the elections Democrats have won since 2024 that middle-class Americans are trusting us to make their lives more affordable. Voting to put those same Americans on the hook for the next bank bailout would be a horrible way to repay that trust.

Democrats must not risk hurting their winning message on the economy by passing a giveaway for banking lobbyists and their wealthy clients.

Cedric Richmond is a former U.S. representative from Louisiana and a former senior advisor to President Joe Biden.