U.S., Qatar days away from final agreement on Air Force One gift
According to official communication reviewed by The Washington Post, Qatar will send the Boeing 747-8 aircraft as an unconditional 'donation' to the Department of Defense, which will then be responsible for its maintenance.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Times
5 minutes ago
- New York Times
What Iranians Lost When Israel Bombed Its Most Notorious Prison
The clock in Evin Prison stopped just before noon on June 23. That was the hour Israeli bombs tore through the compound, heavily damaging the health clinic, visitation center, administrative buildings and multiple wards — including the infamous Ward 209, where Evin's many political prisoners were held. The attack took place amid 12 days of Israeli airstrikes, an unlawful war targeting Iran's military and nuclear facilities. But Evin is no military site: It is known for holding the regime's dissenters and critics. Israeli authorities called the strike on Evin 'symbolic'— an attack on a prison that represented 'oppression for the Iranian people.' In a social media post, Israel's foreign minister Gideon Saar suggested it was a strike aimed at liberation. That symbolism did not ring true for the many Iranians killed in the blasts: visiting family members, social workers, medical staffers, teenage conscripts tasked with escorting prisoners and inmates, among them transgender prisoners whose ward was reduced to rubble. Anguished families were left scrambling for news of their loved ones. Prisoners who were already at risk were pushed into deeper peril — relocated to distant prisons, cut off from support and left to endure even harsher conditions under the unrelenting grip of a regime that punishes survival itself. If there's anything symbolic in Israel's bombing of Evin Prison, it is the false and dangerous narrative that wars help those fighting to bring democracy to Iran. Far from weakening the Islamic Republic's apparatus of repression, Israel's war has emboldened it, rolling back the fragile gains won through years of homegrown civil defiance. It has sabotaged decades of grass-roots organizing and collective labor by Iran's civil society, tearing through the very scaffolding of democratic resistance and undermining the only force capable of changing Iran from within: the Iranian people. I come from a long lineage of resistance to repression and tyranny. I was born in Evin Prison in 1983. My parents were secular leftist activists who fought to overthrow the Shah, and after the 1979 revolution continued their activism against the newly established Islamic Republic. In 1983, when my mother was pregnant with me, she and my father were arrested along with thousands of other political activists. After I was born, I stayed with her for a month before I was taken from her arms and given to my grandparents, who raised me while my parents remained behind bars. They were eventually released after serving yearslong sentences. My parents' arrest came during a wave of mass detentions and intimidation targeting the regime's political opponents. By 1983, as the Iran-Iraq war raged on, the regime used the conflict to justify a sweeping crackdown, framing dissent as treason in times of national crisis. My mother and father's imprisonment took place amid a ruthless campaign of repression that would culminate in 1988 in the bloodiest political purge in Iran's post-revolutionary history. Few things are more dangerous than a dictatorship in panic. The deeper the fear, the more ruthlessly it strikes back. That summer, weakened by eight years of war with Iraq and determined to consolidate power, the Iranian regime launched a campaign of executions against political prisoners it deemed unrepentant. Thousands were killed, their bodies dumped into unmarked mass graves. My uncle Mohsen was among them. The 1988 massacre remains seared into the collective memory of Iranians, an open wound in the nation's conscience. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
32 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump hits Scottish golf course as protesters set to rally
US President Donald Trump played golf on the first full day of his visit to Scotland Saturday, as protesters prepared to take to the streets across the country. Trump emerged from his Turnberry resort with son Eric and waved to photographers following his arrival in Scotland on Friday evening. His presence has turned the picturesque and normally quiet area of southwest Scotland into a virtual fortress, with roads closed and police checkpoints in place. Officers on quad bikes or horses, others on foot with sniffer dogs, patrolled the famous course -- which has hosted four men's British Opens -- and the sandy beaches and grass dunes that hug the course. The 79-year-old touched down Friday at nearby Prestwick Airport, as hundreds of onlookers came out to see Air Force One and try to catch a glimpse of its famous passenger. The president has professed a love of Scotland, where his mother was born, but his controversial politics and business investments in the country have made for an uneasy relationship. Speaking to reporters on the tarmac, Trump immediately waded into the debate surrounding high levels of irregular migration. "You better get your act together or you're not going to have Europe anymore," he said, adding that it was "killing" the continent. Trump's five-day visit has divided the local community. "A lot of people don't trust Trump and I'm one of them. I think the man is a megalomaniac," retiree Graham Hodgson told AFP. "He's so full of himself. I think he's doing a lot of damage worldwide with his tariffs. And I think it's all for the sake of America, but at the moment I think America is paying the price as well for his policies." But at Prestwick Airport a boy held a sign that read "Welcome Trump" while a man waved a flag emblazoned with Trump's most famous slogan -- "Make America Great Again". "I think the best thing about Trump is he's not actually a politician yet he's the most powerful man in the world and I think he's looking at the best interests of his own country," said 46-year-old Lee McLean, who had travelled from nearby Kilmarnock. "Most politicians should really be looking at the best interests of their own country first before looking overseas," he told AFP. As the police rolled out a massive security operation, the Stop Trump Coalition announced demonstrations on Saturday near the US consulate in Edinburgh and another in Aberdeen, where Trump owns another golf resort. Police are also monitoring any other protests that might spring up near Turnberry. Trump has no public meetings in the diary for Saturday, but he is due to discuss trade with EU chief Ursula von der Leyen on Sunday and meet UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. pdh/har/ach/jxb
New York Times
32 minutes ago
- New York Times
How Israel's War Became Unjust
Israel's war in Gaza is not a genocide. It is a war for a just cause, the elimination of a cruel, fanatical, itself potentially genocidal terrorist organization that oppresses its own people, holds innocent hostages and will pose a severe danger to the state of Israel so long as it holds power. The war's heartbreaking civilian toll is inextricably linked to that terrorist government's refusal to obey the laws of war, its unwillingness to surrender no matter how much its own people suffer, its willingness to accept famine rather than give up control of humanitarian aid, its inclination to let cease-fire negotiations spin endlessly in the apparent hope that international pressure will save it from defeat. But despite all these realities, despite the fundamental responsibility that Hamas bears for all the horrors of the conflict it initiated on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel's warmaking at this moment is unjust. One can have a righteous cause, one's foe can be wicked and brutal and primarily responsible for the conflict's toll, and still — under any coherent theory of just war — there is an obligation to refrain from certain tactics if they create too much collateral damage, to mitigate certain predictable forms of civilian suffering and to have a strategy that makes the war's outcome worth the cost. These are tests that Israel is failing. The first one is the hardest to assess, because every protracted war yields inevitable civilian suffering, and an urban war against an entrenched enemy especially will have cruelties that can't be refined away. Such a war cannot be fought exclusively with precision strikes, the soldiers fighting it cannot be prevented from making terrible mistakes, and war crimes are inevitably committed even in righteous conflicts. So there is no way to look at the rubble in Gaza and the death-toll estimates and offer a mathematical proof that Israel is failing to exercise adequate restraint. I just think it's true. Deaths from famine are a clearer matter, which is why the threat of starvation is leading even some of Israel's strongest supporters to warn its government that something must be changed. Here, Israel has made a strategic choice, trying to separate food distribution from a system that it argues Hamas was exploiting for its own purposes. But if your strategic choice leads to children dying of starvation when the food is available to feed them, then a civilized nation has to make a different choice — even if that makes things easier for its enemies to some degree. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
