
Has Donald Trump solved Iran from the air?
|5 min read
Was he always so lucky? Yes. Was wealth an aphrodisiac? No. In October 1980, Donald Trump, 34 years old, slender and soft-spoken, had answered a series of such questions from the gossip columnist Rona Barrett when he suddenly shifted the conversation onto a very different plane. When Ms Barrett asked about his destruction of some celebrated Art Deco reliefs as he made room for a new apartment building—he would name it Trump Tower—he praised himself for making a hard decision, and then went on to say the country could use such leadership. He said it would earn America the respect it lacked in the world.
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Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
US House committee subpoenas Harvard over tuition costs
June 26 (Reuters) - The U.S. House Judiciary Committee sent a subpoena to Harvard University on Thursday seeking documents and communications for its probe into tuition costs and financial aid for Ivy League students. A letter to Harvard President Alan Garber, signed by committee chairman Jim Jordan and U.S. Representative Scott Fitzgerald, both Republicans, described Harvard's response to previous requests for documents as inadequate and said the committee needs the documents "to fulfill its oversight and legislative responsibilities." A spokesperson for Harvard said in a statement: "We are disappointed that the Committee has chosen to issue a subpoena and believe it is unwarranted, unfair and unnecessary." It added: "There is no basis for an allegation of collusion in Harvard's setting of tuition and financial aid." The investigation into tuition is part of a larger fight between Harvard and the White House and Congress, including over cuts to federal funding and efforts to block foreign students from attending the university. President Donald Trump has said he is trying to force change at Harvard - and other top-level universities across the U.S. - because in his view they have been captured by leftist "woke" thought and become bastions of antisemitism. The subpoena comes as part of an investigation by the Republican-controlled U.S. House Judiciary Committee into whether Harvard and other Ivy League schools broke antitrust laws by raising tuition costs. "We are concerned that Ivy League member institutions appear to be collectively raising tuition prices while engaging in perfect price discrimination by offering selective financial aid packages to maximize profits," the letter to Harvard's Garber said. U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, called the investigation "plainly ridiculous" and "based on pathetically weak allegations." The Harvard spokesperson said the school has produced thousands of pages of documents on its tuition-setting process and financial aid. While the Judiciary Committee said it had received hundreds of requested documents, it added that some of them contained publicly available facts and lacked specific information that was desired.
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The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Gabbard no-show at Senate briefing leaves gaping hole in Trump's claim Iran's nuclear program is ‘obliterated'
Donald Trump 's national security team briefed the Senate on Thursday about the president's decision to strike Iran's nuclear facilities last Saturday, but one Cabinet member was conspicuously absent. Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine and CIA Director John Ratcliffe all spoke to senators in the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). But Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was missing from the briefing, which came after multiple news outlets reported on a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment, first reported by CNN, that questioned whether the strikes destroyed the core components of the Iran nuclear program. Sen. Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, excoriated the reports and the leaks and the characterization that the strikes may not have destroyed Iran's nuclear programs as Trump and Hegseth have maintained. 'Without any classified information whatsoever, I think it's safe to say that we have struck a major blow, alongside our friends in Israel, against Iran's nuclear program,' Cotton told reporters afterward. Cotton's words came after the White House furiously pushed back, especially against CNN and one of its reporters, Natasha Bertrand, over the story that Iran's nuclear program was not obliterated. Hegseth accused reporters on Thursday of trying to cast doubt on the strikes because of an underlying vendetta against the president. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt excoriated Bertrand, saying she should be 'ashamed of herself ' a day after Trump in a Truth Social post blasted her and called for her firing. But Gabbard's absence from the briefing left some senators casting doubt on the administration officials' assessment. 'I think she has a very different opinion than than the others,' Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told The Independent. 'I wonder what her conclusion is about. I assume that Director Gabbard does not agree with the assessment of the people in that room.' In the lead-up to the strikes on Iran, Trump significantly broke with Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman who endorsed him in 2024. In March, Gabbard had testified before Congress and said she 'continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.' 'I don't care what she said — I think they were very close to having one,' Trump said earlier this month. 'Obviously her prior disagreement was, was on the amount of time that it was going to take for Iran to get a nuclear weapon before the strikes happened,' Murphy told The Independent. Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a former CIA analyst, said she had more questions. 'I don't, I don't know what to think of that,' Slotkin told The Independent. 'Obviously there was a public spat, so I'm assuming there's a cat fight going on. But I have no other special knowledge.' Over the weekend, the United States conducted strikes on nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Ishfahan. In the case of Fordow, US forces dropped 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs. The strikes are said to have set back Iran's nuclear program at least six months. Hegseth and Caine's briefing did not provide adequate evidence about whether the United States knows the location of enriched uranium Iran had stored in Fordow. 'I guess for me, the most important thing is to actually get a better analysis, to actually make the termination,' Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona told The Independent.


Sky News
an hour ago
- Sky News
Trump-Iran live: Trump says Iranian nuclear sites 'obliterated' in strikes - but senator claims president 'deliberately misled public'
As debate continues in the US over the effectiveness of its strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, one senator has claimed Donald Trump "deliberately misled" the public over his assertion Tehran's nuclear programme was "obliterated". Follow live and listen to Trump 100 below.