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Gulf states fear an emboldened Iran after Trump’s cease-fire. ‘Iran is the only one that is happy with the outcome’

Gulf states fear an emboldened Iran after Trump’s cease-fire. ‘Iran is the only one that is happy with the outcome’

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Iranian government hailed the cease-fire with the U.S. by posting images on social media of President Trump waving the white flag and collapsing on his knees in defeat. America’s allies and partners in the Middle East fear that Tehran may have a point—and that they will end up paying the price for a war in which the overwhelming military might of the U.S. and Israel failed to secure political gains. Subjected to thousands of…

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A growing chorus of disaffected Trump supporters fume about Iran war on Truth Social

A growing chorus of disaffected Trump supporters fume about Iran war on Truth Social

The New York Times reports: The people logging into Truth Social each day tend to count themselves among the most ardent supporters of President Trump and his MAGA movement. In recent weeks, though, even some in the echo chamber have turned against his actions in Iran. Thousands of users on the social media platform, which Mr. Trump created in 2022, have responded to the president’s drumbeat of posts with a mix of frustration, disbelief and outrage. They have written that…

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Anthropic’s Claude Mythos finds thousands of zero-day flaws across major systems

Anthropic’s Claude Mythos finds thousands of zero-day flaws across major systems

The Hacker News reports: Artificial Intelligence (AI) company Anthropic announced a new cybersecurity initiative called Project Glasswing that will use a preview version of its new frontier model, Claude Mythos, to find and address security vulnerabilities. The model will be used by a small set of organizations, including Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan Chase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks, along with Anthropic, to secure critical software. The company said it’s forming this…

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Republican overlords view ballot initiatives as giving voters too much power

Republican overlords view ballot initiatives as giving voters too much power

The New York Times reports: Voters frustrated by one-party control in Republican states over the last decade have increasingly turned to citizen-sponsored initiatives to enact policies that their legislatures won’t. They expanded Medicaid, adopted paid sick leave, raised the minimum wage and safeguarded access to abortion. Now, the legislators are striking back. In North Dakota, Utah and South Dakota, legislatures are sponsoring measures on the November ballot that would raise the threshold for approving citizen amendments to 60 percent, not…

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Pesticides may wreak havoc on the gut microbiome

Pesticides may wreak havoc on the gut microbiome

Science reports: Eight years ago, Bhanudas More went for a routine blood test. More, a farmworker in this small village in Maharashtra state, was lean, worked long hours in the fields, and seemed healthy, so the result startled him. He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, a disease commonly associated with sedentary life in the city. Medication did little to bring his condition under control. He also began to experience persistent bloating and stomach discomfort. “I was taking the medicines,…

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How Netanyahu duped Trump

How Netanyahu duped Trump

The New York Times reports: Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal. Besides, Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and — with the impetus…

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Trump’s Iran threats look like self-incrimination for potential war crimes

Trump’s Iran threats look like self-incrimination for potential war crimes

The New York Times reports: President Trump’s threat on Tuesday to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization escalated days of bellicose rhetoric in which he has made what appear to be self-incriminating statements about an intent to commit war crimes if the Iranian government does not submit to his demands. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, adding: “We will…

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U.S. bombs craters in ‘restrikes’ on Kharg Island as rhetoric and reality sharply diverge

U.S. bombs craters in ‘restrikes’ on Kharg Island as rhetoric and reality sharply diverge

The New York Times reports: A stark disconnect between reality and rhetoric surfaced on Tuesday as U.S. forces continued their methodical strikes on military targets in Iran even as their commander in chief raised his steady stream of threats directed at Iran to apocalyptic levels. The United States launched a series of more than 90 strikes on Kharg Island, Iran’s oil export hub, early Tuesday. A U.S. military official characterized the Kharg strikes as “restrikes” — hitting targets that have…

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Trump has backed himself into a corner

Trump has backed himself into a corner

Hussein Banai writes: When President Donald Trump takes to the airwaves to threaten to bomb a nation of 90 million people “back to the Stone Ages” and follows that threat — in less than 48 hours — with strikes on civilian infrastructure, the destruction of a major bridge between two populous cities and a warning, in an expletive-laden post (on Easter Sunday, no less), that the assault on the targeted country’s power grid has “not even started,” it is worth…

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Hegseth’s claims about Iran war contradict reality, officials say

Hegseth’s claims about Iran war contradict reality, officials say

The Washington Post reports: President Donald Trump has continued to describe the war against Iran as an unqualified success, saying as recently as Monday that the United States was doing “unbelievably well,” while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tehran had been “embarrassed and humiliated” by U.S. forces. But Iran’s downing of an F-15E fighter jet and the high-risk rescue operation that ensued showed that Tehran retains the ability to threaten the United States’ military personnel and cast doubt on the…

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A new economic superpower could spark a global retreat from fossil fuels

A new economic superpower could spark a global retreat from fossil fuels

Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope write: The Iran war is also a climate war. Beyond its terrible human costs, the war’s disruptions of oil, gas, fertilizer and other shipments is another reminder of the risks inherent in basing the world economy on fossil fuels. The war’s jets, missiles and aircraft carriers, and the tankers, refineries and buildings they blow up, represent millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions that further imperil a climate system that is already “very close” to…

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If Viktor Orbán loses Hungary’s election, it will dispel the air of invincibility around strongmen

If Viktor Orbán loses Hungary’s election, it will dispel the air of invincibility around strongmen

Laszlo Gendler writes: There is an irony buried in Hungarian political history. Fidesz—the Viktor Orbán-led party that has ruled with a supermajority for the last 16 years, reshaping Hungary’s constitution, packing its courts, weakening its free press, and gradually hollowing out most institutions that might check its power—is an acronym in Hungarian for “the Alliance of Young Democrats.” Founded in 1988 by students who gathered in clandestine groups to resist a communist government, Fidesz was initially conceived as a direct…

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Bumble bees show a surprising knack for rhythm

Bumble bees show a surprising knack for rhythm

Science reports: Bumble bees are hardly nature’s most graceful creatures, and their name reflects it. But it turns out these bees show a surprising knack for rhythm. The fuzzy insects can not only recognize a rhythm but also identify the same pattern when scientists change the tempo, according to research published on 2 April in Science—the first time this ability has been documented outside of a few mammals and birds. “That’s an unexpected, beautiful finding,” says Henkjan Honing, a music…

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How unhinged and dangerous is Trump becoming?

How unhinged and dangerous is Trump becoming?

Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, discusses the increasing “desperation” of U.S. strategy, Iran’s long-term economic control over the Strait of Hormuz and growing “hawkishness,” and the dangerous possibility of nuclear warfare:   Garrett Graff writes: Are we really this inured to unhinged comments that “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell” doesn’t even warrant a full 24-hour news-cycle? In a sentence that would have surprised the…

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