First Thing: Trump officials cite ‘new intelligence' to back president's claims of successful Iran strikes
Good morning.
The Trump administration has ramped up its defense of the US strikes on Iran at the weekend, saying new intelligence supports its initial claim of total success – despite a leaked intelligence report that found the development of Tehran's nuclear program had been delayed by only a few months.
Donald Trump appeared to back away from his previous admission of doubts over the scale and severity of the damage inflicted by the US strikes, having called the intelligence 'inconclusive'. Within hours, he was depicting the attack very differently, saying: 'This was a devastating attack and it knocked them for a loop.'
The director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said on social media that 'new intelligence confirms' what Trump had stated, and claimed it would 'likely take years' for Iran to rebuild its nuclear program.
The CIA director, John Ratcliffe, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, will brief senators on the strikes shortly. Head to our liveblog for the latest.
Where has this information come from? All we know is that Ratcliffe said it came from a 'historically reliable' source.
How has the White House reacted to the leak of the classified assessment? It is reportedly trying to restrict the sharing of classified documents with Congress – and the administration is claiming the media are using it to politically damage Trump.
The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, has denied knowing that immigration officials have been concealing their faces while rounding up undocumented people, despite widespread video evidence.
Challenged on the issue at a Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing Wednesday by Gary Peters, a Democratic senator for Michigan, Bondi at first appeared to profess ignorance of the tactic, before suggesting it may be for self-protection. 'I do know they are being doxed … they're being threatened,' she said. 'Their families are being threatened.'
Peters acknowledged the point but said it could increase the risk to officers who may be attacked if people believe they are being kidnapped by an unknown assailant. The public is also at increased risk of being attacked by individuals pretending to be immigration enforcement, he said, adding that this 'has already happened'.
What other issues were raised? Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator for Alaska who has been critical of Donald Trump in the past, said immigration enforcement was being prioritized over fighting violent crime.
Plans to open a sprawling federal immigration detention center in a California desert community has been met with anger from advocacy groups.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) is contracting CoreCivic, a private company that runs several prisons in California, to convert a former 2,500-bed prison in California City into the state's largest immigrant detention center. The site was built by the company in 1999 as a federal prison and operated as a state prison from 2013 to March 2024.
How was the news received locally? There was concern voiced by some southern California residents and advocacy groups, with people packing a city council meeting this week to share their views. While most opposed the detention center, at least one local resident backed it in the name of job creation.
At least 16 people were killed and 400 injured in Kenya on Wednesday in a nationwide demonstration held to commemorate those killed during last year's anti-government protests.
Hundreds of people in the UK who use weight loss injections have reported pancreatic problems, leading health officials to investigate.
Israeli forces killed three Palestinians after dozens of Israeli settlers attacked a West Bank town on Wednesday, setting fire to property.
Chile will target fast fashion waste in a plan to regulate the importation of used clothing that has created a scourge of textile dumps in the Atacama desert.
Nearly one in three citizens of the Pacific nation of Tuvalu have entered a ballot for Australian visas being offered as rising sea levels threaten the island nation. The climate visa program, under which 280 visas will be offered to Tuvaluans annually, is the first of its kind globally – but has exacerbated fears that Tuvalu could be drained of young, talented people.
Growing numbers of scholars and lawyers fear that the system of international law and the institutions that are meant to uphold it hang in the balance. 'International law has always depended on the good faith of nation states,' an international lawyer and former justice minister in Pakistan said. 'And that good faith has eroded.' With institutions such as the UN human rights council damaged by the US's withdrawal from them, Linda Kinstler examines why experts are losing faith in the system, and whether it's the fault of the states that are meant to support it.
The European Union is increasingly backtracking on its environment policy, campaigners have warned, as a push for deregulation that began in 2023 picks up speed. This trend, which has included the protection status of the wolf being downgraded and a blunting of pollution targets for carmakers, appeared particularly clear this week after an anti-greenwashing law was apparently killed in the final stages of talks.
A quarter of American adults want to take a sex sabbatical – a kind of break from sex that supposedly enhances your appreciation of 'emotional closeness'. You might want to take these findings and any related claims with a pinch of salt, though, as the poll was commissioned by a 'sexual wellness' brand that mainly sells vibrators …
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Telegraph
20 minutes ago
- Telegraph
How $29 sandwiches pushed New York to socialism
As New York baked under a record-breaking heatwave this week, Wall Street was left sweating for an entirely different reason. 'It's officially a hot commie summer,' hedge fund billionaire Dan Loeb said on social media, sounding the alarm after Zohran Mamdani's unexpected triumph in the Democratic mayoral primary. Donald Trump, in typical fashion, went further. 'A 100pc Communist Lunatic … is on his way to becoming Mayor. We've had Radical Lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous,' he said. By defeating centrist Andrew Cuomo ahead of November's election, Mamdani is promising to shake up the city with a package of policies straight from the Jeremy Corbyn playbook. Whether it be rent freezes, tax hikes on companies and high earners, free childcare or a city-run chain of grocery stores, the firebrand young socialist's proposed policies have sent Wall Street financiers and Big Apple property developers scrambling. However, for many others in the city, the cricket-playing, first-generation Muslim-American has struck a chord. New Yorkers almost always return a Democrat mayor, but seldom have they strayed this far from the political mainstream. How did Mamdani coax voters away from the centre ground? 'New Yorkers are struggling' The answer lies in the queues of young people outside the door of every vacant flat to rent in central New York, and in the Reddit forums where New Yorkers moan about paying $20 plus (£15) for a sandwich. The cost of living has soared and wages aren't keeping up. And while the squeeze is universal, it's Gen Z who are feeling it the most. 'The New York City that I grew up in was a middle-class city, and it was also a manufacturing city,' says Steven Cohen, a public affairs professor at Columbia University. 'We don't do any of that now.' Young people come for the attractive jobs, but nowadays they move away to raise a family. Only in the outer boroughs, Cohen says, is New York still a conventional town of blue-collar and white-collar families. 'The economic changes to New York City over the last half-century have resulted in a different kind of city, and a different kind of politics. And it is extremely expensive to live here, even on a high income.' Eric Adams, the incumbent mayor – elected as a law-and-order Democrat but now, after a corruption scandal, running for re-election as an independent – issues a slew of stats suggesting New York is in a better place than before the pandemic. But the numbers that New Yorkers can see and feel around them tell a different story. Andrew Kimball, the chief executive of the city's Economic Development Corporation, admitted as much in a report earlier this year. 'We know that many New Yorkers are still struggling,' he said. 'We've added many jobs but not enough homes. Top earners in New York City are beating the rest of the country, but lower earners aren't doing much better here than they could elsewhere. 'If we can't blunt the sharpest disparities between soaring highs and stubborn lows, between communities of colour and white New Yorkers, we may lose what makes our city so magical: our people. 'We must make our economy work for everyone.' In an attempt to rescue the narrative, Kimball also pointed to the record highs that New York posted last year for the number of people in employment and the labour force participation rate. But jobs growth is slowing quickly. Mamdani, meanwhile, has zeroed in on the disparities lurking beneath the headline figures. The unemployment rate among Black New Yorkers was 8.5pc in the third quarter of last year, while for Hispanics it was 6.7pc. But among whites, the rate last year averaged 3.3pc. The inequalities aren't just between ethnic groups, but also between different parts of the labour market. The median shop assistant in New York earns almost 13pc more than the national median for retail, but the median lawyer makes 56pc more than lawyers nationwide. Price politics Prices in New York are climbing faster than in other big cities. The inflation rate in New York has been hovering around 4pc, almost double the 2pc recorded nationwide. By comparison, Miami and San Francisco have inflation rates of 2.2pc and 1.3pc, respectively. Figures show that pay packets aren't keeping pace with these prices. Inflation-adjusted wages in New York fell 3.7pc in 2023, compared with 0.9pc nationwide. This trend created a ready market for one of Mamdani's most eye-catching TikTok videos: his lament over 'halal-flation' – the price of a street-van doner kebab. After hanging out at the vans, he told followers that the vendors were being punished by the New York permit system, which he could sort out. Crucially, he said this would cut the cost of a kebab from $10 to $8. His other remedy was to suggest that the city could set up and run its own chain of lower-cost grocery stores. Retail billionaire John Catsimatidis has already told CNN that his Red Apple Group grocery chain would leave New York if this were the case. 'We don't want to do business with socialists,' he said. But the cost of a kebab is small change next to the biggest financial headache for New Yorkers: sky-high rents. In a city where two-thirds of people rent, the vacancy rate of 1.4pc is the lowest in decades. And it keeps getting worse: in the past decade, for every 5.7 new jobs created, only one new housing unit was built. And in a supply-demand crunch, rents rise faster than incomes. 'Households at the 40th percentile of the income distribution in New York City may have Chicago or Dallas incomes, but they are expected to pay New York City prices for market-rate units,' Kimball said. Mamdani's answer is to 'freeze the rent'. More than half of New York rents – mostly relating to blocks over 50 years old – are already subject to rental controls, known as 'rent stabilisation'. This limits rent increases to 3pc. But the proportion of units that are rent-stabilised has dropped from two thirds in 1999 to just above 50pc. The rest are at market rate. To afford a median asking rent, a household must earn $120,000 per year, well above what a typical 20-something would earn. Mamdani's people The people caught in this trap are, in theory, Mamdani's people. 'We have won because New Yorkers have stood up for a city they can afford,' he said in his victory speech. 'A city where they can do more than just struggle. One where those who toil in the night can enjoy the fruits of their labour in the day.' But although Mamdani has evidently won over the idealistic young, his appeal, like many socialists, does not necessarily extend to the working-class districts for which he claims to speak. Figures compiled by The New York Times showed that Mamdani's strongest support – where he captured 40pc or more of the vote – was in higher-income and middle-income neighbourhoods, and among college graduates. Although he also hit 48pc support in precincts with more Hispanic voters, that dropped to 38pc in lower-income districts and 34pc in heavily Black neighbourhoods. The other question mark over his broader appeal is that barely 10pc of New York voters participated in the Democratic primary, and they are likely to be the most ideologically motivated of electors. 'In the general election, this is why [independents] Bloomberg and Giuliani won,' Columbia's Cohen says. 'You've got a much different ideological composition. Even Trump did a lot better last election than he did the first time in New York City.' This has left those fearful of Mamdani with an avenue to beat him, particularly if they can coalesce around a single candidate. This is most likely to be Adams, the centrist Democrat, who can run again as an independent after Trump quashed his federal fraud indictments. But a couple of opinion polls, taken well before this week's result, suggest Mamdani is rating in the mid-30s – enough to win a first-past-the-post encounter. Mamdani's challenger will win the fundraising battle, and also perhaps the political argument. What remains unclear is whether they can match Mamdani in proposing punchy policies to assuage New Yorkers' cost of living concerns. 'The centrist candidate has to present himself as having some of the same authenticity that Mandami was able to present,' Cohen says. 'I think the Democrats nationally should learn from that freshness, youth and the direct communication. But the ideological content of it is probably not as attractive as Mandani might think it is.'
Reuters
23 minutes ago
- Reuters
'Shadow' Fed chief would not influence policy debate, Goolsbee tells CNBC
WASHINGTON, June 26 (Reuters) - Any move by U.S. President Donald Trump to name a replacement for Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell would have no influence on monetary policy while the nominee awaited confirmation, Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said on Thursday. "That would have no effect," Goolsbee told CNBC's "Squawk Box" program, referring to the possibility Trump may name an early nominee to replace the current U.S. central bank chief when his term ends in 11 months in hopes of influencing interest rates in the meantime. "We have a chair of the (Federal Open Market Committee) ... That's Jay Powell. What somebody who is not the chair thinks about monetary policy - they can have whatever opinion they want. We have to go every six weeks and have votes." Trump has become increasingly pointed in calling for the Fed to cut rates, even as most of its policymakers feel the central bank is sidelined until the administration makes final decisions on what level of tariffs it plans to impose, and they can study the impact of those rising import taxes on inflation. In hearings before Congress this week, Powell reiterated that the Fed is prepared to cut rates if the tariffs have no effect on inflation, but that economists broadly anticipate the steep levies imposed so far and still in the offing will raise prices over the course of the year. The effect on inflation "could be large or small. It is just something you want to approach carefully. If we make a mistake people will pay the cost for a long time," Powell said. Since the Fed held rates steady at its meeting last week, several central bank officials have said they agree it is best to wait on rate cuts; Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman and Fed Governor Christopher Waller, both Trump appointees, have said rates could be cut as soon as the July 29-30 meeting, given recent moderate inflation readings. Waller was mentioned in a recent Wall Street Journal article as a possible replacement for Powell, with the added benefit to Trump that he already has a vote on policy and relationships among his colleagues built since joining the Fed's Board of Governors in January 2020. Other possible nominees mentioned by the media include former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh, who has close ties to the Trump organization and was almost named central bank chief in the president's first term in the White House, as well as Kevin Hassett, who is the director of the White House's National Economic Council, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The debate is playing out amid both ambiguous data and increased political focus on Powell. Recent inflation readings have been better than expected, but many companies insist prices will rise. The unemployment rate remains low. But data released on Thursday showed the overall economy shrank more than initially estimated in the first quarter after consumer spending was revised lower, weakening a key economic prop cited by policymakers who feel there is little risk in delaying rate cuts. Meanwhile, the dollar has dropped amid talk of the "shadow" Fed chief idea and the possible implications for U.S. central bank independence. "Trump's desire to 'shadow' the Fed using a designated replacement for Chair Jay Powell isn't a good way to promote the perceptions of integrity and autonomy in U.S. policymaking and, by extension, that of the reserve currency status of the USD (U.S. dollar)," said Thierry Wizman, global FX and rates strategist at Macquarie Group. "Some of this narrative is seeping into perceptions of the USD and contributing to its sell-off this week." Trump recently said he would name Powell's replacement "soon." Speaking at a NATO summit in Europe on Wednesday, the president said his list of possible nominees was down to "three or four." Those comments have renewed speculation Trump might name a successor early and hope that a chair-in-waiting, or "shadow" Fed chief, could have an immediate impact on rates. Absent an unforeseen resignation and except for Waller, a sitting governor, Trump's nominee could not join the Fed's board until early next year when there is an expected vacancy. Powell's term as Fed chief does not end until next May, and a recent Supreme Court decision appeared to insulate him from being fired over a policy dispute - a fact that could limit Trump's ability to reshape the central bank before his second and final term ends in January 2029.
The Guardian
23 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Mamdani stood firm in his support for Gaza. The Democratic party could learn from him
As the ballots were counted on Wednesday in the Democratic primary election for mayor in New York City, a young candidate with little national name recognition, Zohran Mamdani, stood atop a slate of candidates including the runner-up, and favorite, Andrew Cuomo. There are several reasons why Mamdani was able to pull off this remarkable victory, putting him on track to compete favorably in the mayoral election in November, and many of them have implications for elections outside of New York City. But one area where the contrast between the candidates could not be clearer was on the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Mamdani, for his part, stood with protesters, demanded the release of Mahmoud Khalil, and called out Israel's war crimes. Mamdani even pledged he'd have the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, an indicated war criminal, arrested if he came to New York City while he was mayor. Cuomo, on the other hand, volunteered to be part of Netanyahu's legal defense team before the international criminal court. Israel's genocide in Gaza has tanked already waning support for Israel in the US, particularly among Democrats. Polls show that for the first time, fewer than 50% of Americans have a favorable view of Israel. And while there is some movement among Republicans in this direction, the biggest driver of this trend is among independents and, especially, Democrats. Democrats sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis by a 3 to 1 margin. That is a massive gap and it also speaks to one of the most important ways a candidate's politics on Gaza affects the way they are perceived by the electorate. Democrats increasingly feel their party leaders are old and out of touch with where Democratic voters are. About 62% of Democrats say their party needs new leaders. Few issues highlight how out of touch with their party leaders are than the issue of Palestine. While opinion polls are clear and consistent about Democratic voters' disgust with Israeli policies toward Palestinians, Democratic party leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are stalwart defenders of Israel. Increasingly, a candidate's politics on Gaza is a litmus test for authenticity and whether the candidate actually cares to represent the voters. Cuomo was not interested in representing voters on this issue, he was content instead to accept major contributions from billionaire backers of Donald Trump and Israel like Bill Ackman. Cuomo was the favorite in this race precisely because he had the name recognition and came from a New York political dynasty. His father, Mario, was the governor of New York for three terms from 1983-1994 and Andrew was governor himself for a decade before resigning in disgrace in 2021 after numerous credible sexual assault allegations. If you were of voting age in New York, you associated the name Cuomo with political office. Cuomo probably thought that name recognition alone was enough to overcome any votes he'd lose from people who were angered by his disastrous decisions during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic or his sexual assault scandals as governor. This showed the total lack of effort in his campaign which seemed more geared for coronation than contestation. He failed to raise enough individual contributions to gain public matching funds and relied instead on big money donors to fill his coffers through PAC contributions. Mamdani's campaign was, almost in every possible way, the inverse of Cuomo's. While Cuomo relied on billionaire backing, Mamdani raised the highest number of small dollar contributions. While Cuomo's campaign was barely noticeable in the streets of New York, Mamdani's campaign knocked on one million doors. While Cuomo's campaign message was muted and muddled, Mamdani's was clear, bold and consistent. Mamdani's projected primary election victory in New York also proved once again that voters will come out and vote in large numbers for candidates that they believe in even if their politics are characterized as well left of center. The conventional wisdom after Trump's victory in 2024, especially in New York, was that the electorate had shifted right. But that was never the case, mostly this was due to disaffected Democrats staying home because they were tired of what they saw as the same washed-up, inauthentic politics. Anyone can run for office financed by billionaire backers while spouting talking points produced by expensive consultants. But what Mamdani, Bernie Sanders and, yes, Trump figured out is that there is a huge and growing swath of the American electorate so disaffected by empty and corrupt politics that they are hungry for someone who feels authentic. Mamdani's apparent victory is just the latest proof that for Democrats especially, if there is ever any doubt about a candidate's authenticity, their politics on Palestine will be an easy way to separate the real ones from those just trying to fake it til they make it.
