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  • Clive Davis, recording executive and star-maker, dies at 94

    Clive Davis, recording executive and star-maker, dies at 94

    When Clive Davis showed up at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, he was a 35-year-old New York corporate lawyer and the newly appointed head of Columbia Records. Knowing “nothing about music,” he said, had not disqualified him from running the staid record company best known for classical recordings, Mitch Miller sing-along pop novelties, and Broadway cast albums.

    Grainy film footage from the festival shows him in the crowd, with his black glasses, receding hairline, and a white V-neck tennis sweater. Amid the long-haired, tie-dyed “Summer of Love” hippies, “I was the one who looked weird,” Mr. Davis said in a 2017 Netflix documentary about his life. “I was blown away.”

    The second act on the stage that day was Big Brother and the Holding Company, a San Francisco rock band fronted by Janis Joplin. “She was hypnotic,” Mr. Davis recalled of the then little-known singer. “I felt my spine tingle, my arms vibrate. I was overcome with emotion. This wasn’t just a social revolution, this was a musical revolution.”

    Mr. Davis persuaded Joplin to sign a contract with Columbia, then politely declined her offer for a celebratory sexual encounter, he wrote in an autobiography. She became the first of a legion of artists he would launch or rejuvenate into superstardom over a five-decade career in entertainment. The roster included Barry Manilow, Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Aretha Franklin, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Aerosmith, Barbra Streisand, Miles Davis, the Grateful Dead, Patti Smith, Whitney Houston, Alicia Keys, and Carlos Santana.

    Mr. Davis, 94, an unlikely tastemaker who stoked the star-making machinery longer and more successfully than most of his rivals and became one of the most powerful executives in the recording industry, died June 22, his family posted on social media.

    “To the world, our father was the iconic music legend whose vision, instincts, and relentless pursuit of excellence shaped the soundtrack of countless lives,” Mr. Davis’ family wrote on Facebook. “He discovered, mentored, and championed the greatest artists in modern music history, leaving an indelible mark on culture that will endure for generations.”

    A winner of multiple Grammy Awards and inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Mr. Davis ran Columbia Records and later Arista Records, the latter a small label he built into an industry powerhouse. During his 25 years at Arista, he guided 200 singles to No. 1 on the Billboard charts. In 2000, his final year at Arista before being pushed aside, the company had more than $1 billion in revenue.

    Eye for musical talent

    Mr. Davis had an uncanny knack for spotting and adopting musical trends and embracing emerging young talent. “He has the mind of a banker and the ears of a teenager,” Manilow once said.

    Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine, said in an interview for this obituary that Mr. Davis “was instrumental in bringing modern white rock of my generation to the forefront” and developed a remarkable ear for music.

    “Clive once told me that he would take all the records in the top 100 home every weekend, and he listened to every single one of them,” Wenner said. “I never heard of anybody doing that so methodically. He kept abreast of everything commercial that was going on. He just loved it.”

    Music was decidedly not in his blood, Mr. Davis readily admitted in his 2013 autobiography, The Soundtrack of My Life, co-authored with Anthony DeCurtis. His taste in high school ran toward Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, and rock and roll had no appeal at all. He credited his visit to the Monterey Pop Festival as a turning point. Going there, he wrote, “I didn’t realize at all that I possessed skills that might ultimately distinguish me: the ability to recognize and nurture new artists; to help those artists create their best work; to bring that work to the marketplace and have it make a powerful impact.”

    He was instrumental in turning 19-year-old Houston into an international star after signing her in 1983, and he shepherded her career until her accidental drowning in a hotel bathtub, in 2012, on the day of Mr. Davis’ annual pre-Grammy party in Los Angeles. She had been a close friend — and was his most successful protégé, even though drug addiction and the pressures of fame undermined her career — and her death affected Mr. Davis deeply.

    Mr. Davis’ detractors criticized his obsession with hits and chart-topping singles, which they said he sometimes pursued at the cost of artistic considerations.

    “His energy, his testosterone, all his hormones were ignited by having the biggest No. 1 records,” singer-songwriter Carly Simon, an Arista artist who generally lauded Mr. Davis’s talents, told the New York Times in 2017. “He is on the side of the winner at all costs, and the cost can be very high.”

    At Columbia, Mr. Davis turned the company into a premier rock label and brought millions of dollars in revenue to CBS, the parent company. He was stunned when, in 1973, he was called into the office of Arthur R. Taylor, then CBS president, and fired for allegedly using $94,000 in corporate money to renovate his Central Park West apartment and for his son’s bar mitzvah.

    Mr. Davis denied the allegations. He accused a personal assistant of forging signatures, falsifying invoices, and committing other misdeeds involving his corporate account without his knowledge. His ouster coincided with housecleaning at CBS amid a larger grand-jury probe of payola and drugs — “drugola” — in the record business.

    In 1976, Mr. Davis pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Manhattan to one count of tax evasion for having failed to report $8,800 that the record company had paid for non-business-related trips. Other charges were dismissed, and he received a suspended sentence and paid a $10,000 fine. He later called the experience “the most humiliating moment of my life.”

    Mr. Davis staged a comeback by writing (with journalist James Willwerth) Clive: Inside the Record Business (1974), a best-selling account of his time in the music industry. That same year, he was lured to the failing Bell Records division of Columbia Pictures (no relation to Columbia Records).

    He rechristened the company Arista, the name of his Brooklyn high school honor society, and set out to build a top-notch team of industry veterans to grow the label. He signed artists such as Gil Scott-Heron, Lou Rawls, and Melanie, holding on to only two entertainers in Bell’s lineup — Melissa Manchester and the talented but still largely undiscovered Manilow.

    Mr. Davis embarked on an ultimately successful effort to remake Manilow into a defining pop star of the 1970s. This undertaking involved persuading Manilow to record songs that he hadn’t written but that could be propelled into hit singles. Among them was “Brandy” — soon renamed “Mandy” — that charted in 1975.

    In a key moment in their sometimes contentious relationship, Mr. Davis handed Manilow a number called “I Write the Songs.” Manilow, who considered it ludicrous to record a song with such a title when he had not written it, initially refused. His resentment festered and eventually led to an argument that ended with Mr. Davis declaring, “Well, if you were Irving Berlin, we would know it by now!”

    Even Manilow conceded Mr. Davis’s inerrant judgment when it came to matching a voice to music. “Clive believed it would be a number one record for me, that it would be a signature song,” he told Newsday in 1990. “And he was right.”

    Profound loss

    Clive Jay Davis was born in Brooklyn on April 4, 1932. His father was an electrician and, later, a traveling tie salesperson. His mother, with whom Mr. Davis was extremely close, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at 47 when Mr. Davis was 18 and a scholarship student at New York University.

    “It was the most profound loss of my life,” he wrote in his memoir. Eleven months later, his father died at 56 after a heart attack. Mr. Davis later said that losing both parents at such a young age left him with the sense that anything he loved and embraced in life could be taken away in an instant. But those losses also served to propel Mr. Davis’s career, leaving him with a resilient survivor’s instinct to push forward.

    After graduating from NYU in 1953, Mr. Davis received a scholarship that enabled him to attend Harvard Law School. He completed his law degree in 1956 and briefly worked at a New York law firm whose clients included CBS and its then-chairperson, William S. Paley. Mr. Davis joined Columbia Records in 1960 as an in-house counsel.

    In his autobiography, Mr. Davis revealed that he was bisexual and, later in life, had been in a long monogamous relationships with male partners.

    In an industry replete with ego and massive financial rewards, Mr. Davis’ longevity was remarkable. At Arista, he reinvigorated R&B singer Franklin’s stalled career, branched into rap and hip-hop, and launched Patti Smith when she was a young poet. He also survived the uproar that ensued when it was discovered that the German R&B duo Milli Vanilli hadn’t done the singing on its debut album and had lip-synced songs during TV and concert appearances.

    “Clive just seems to be ever-growing,” said Franklin in a 1996 Los Angeles Times interview. “He loves the music and appreciates his artists. He’s not just kicking back somewhere counting his money. He is a consummate record man who is constantly involved.”

    But in 2000, Mr. Davis was unexpectedly replaced by the head of BMG Music, Arista’s parent company, to make room for a younger leader. Mr. Davis refused to take a secondary role and threatened to leave. Startled at the thought of losing him, the head of BMG’s North American operations immediately offered to let Mr. Davis launch his own label with an initial investment from BMG of $150 million.

    Mr. Davis would get 50% of the profits, and he could take five major Arista artists with him. He founded J Records (after his middle name). In 2008, Mr. Davis became chief creative officer for Sony Music Entertainment.

    He liked to point out that he hadn’t dreamed of a career in music, especially one with such an extraordinary outcome. A 2001 Washington Post profile noted that he never stopped feeling “ravenous” for winning singles. “It’s always like the first day,” he said, “and it’s always like the first year. It’s not a chore, it’s just a particular mental attitude. I take none of this for granted.”

  • Israel holds to Lebanon truce, with troops kept on defense

    Israel holds to Lebanon truce, with troops kept on defense

    JERUSALEM — Israel and Hezbollah appeared to maintain a tense ceasefire in Lebanon for a second day on Monday, as mediators in the U.S.-Iran talks announced a mechanism aimed at ensuring the truce holds, and Israeli troops operated under new orders designed to lower the risk of flare-ups.

    Israel’s top diplomat, however, warned that the country would not withdraw its forces from the self-declared “security zone” it has established in Lebanon up to about 6 miles north of the border.

    “Israel will respect the ceasefire in Lebanon as long as it won’t be breached by Hezbollah,” Foreign Minister Gideon Saar wrote in a social media post on Monday. “We don’t have territorial ambitions in Lebanon, but we will not withdraw from the security zone and expose our citizens to Hezbollah’s attacks and possible invasion.”

    Saar’s post came hours after Pakistan and Qatar, the mediators in the U.S.-Iran talks, announced an agreement to create a “deconfliction cell” to ensure the “adherence of the termination of military operations in Lebanon.” It would include representatives from Iran, the United States, and Lebanon.

    The quiet on the Lebanon front was still settling in after a furious round of hostilities on Friday and Saturday that began when four Israeli soldiers, including a battalion commander, were killed when their tank exploded.

    A fifth soldier was killed in the same area Saturday, setting off waves of Israeli retaliatory strikes. The military said Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, had launched more than 50 rockets targeting its soldiers operating in southern Lebanon.

    The fighting centered around the area of Kfar Tebnit and nearby Ali Taher, a strategic ridgeline overlooking the large city of Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military recently issued an updated map of its security zone that placed Kfar Tebnit and Ali Taher just within the area under Israeli control.

    That appeared to be more than coincidental.

    The Israeli military said that Ali Taher was the location of a fortified underground Hezbollah stronghold that has long served as the militia’s southern headquarters from which it directed fire against Israeli forces and communities in northern Israel.

    Should the militants inside try to leave that stronghold without surrendering, it could pose a threat to the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire.

    Ceasefires in Lebanon have been declared, broken, and reinstated numerous times in recent weeks, but the fighting has persisted amid disagreements over what constitutes defensive actions by Israeli forces.

    An Israeli military statement Monday said that it had gained control of the area of the Hezbollah compound and encircled it, adding that “dozens of Hezbollah operatives are currently trapped with no ability to exit.”

    Hezbollah said Saturday that it had attacked Israeli forces advancing toward Ali Taher.

    Later on Saturday, the Israeli military said it had received “updated directives” from the country’s political leaders and would no longer be “conducting proactive strikes” in Lebanon. The military reserved the right to respond if Hezbollah did not abide by the ceasefire and targeted Israeli troops or civilians.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted in a video statement Monday that his directive to the military, and that of the defense minister, remained clear and unchanged: “Our fighters in southern Lebanon have full operational freedom to thwart any direct or emergent threat against them or residents of the north.”

    He did not address whether the military had been ordered to refrain from offensive action, and a spokesperson would not elaborate.

    Israeli commanders received new orders Saturday restricting them to defensive actions in Lebanon, stating that troops may only fire to counter an immediate threat unless authorized by the military’s chief of staff.

    The new orders specifically bar Israeli soldiers from firing warning shots at civilians attempting to return to southern Lebanon unless they get too close to the soldiers, according to two Israeli officials who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

    The orders also bar Israeli soldiers from blowing up homes and other infrastructure inside the security zone without the approval of senior officers, the officials said.

    Spokespeople for the military did not respond to repeated requests for comment Monday.

    Sarit Zehavi, president of the Alma Research and Education Center, which focuses on Israel’s northern border, said she feared that the ban on offensive operations would put Israeli soldiers in the position of having to be responsive rather than proactive.

    “On the ground, it takes time till you understand what’s a threat,” she said. “This will eventually cost the lives of soldiers.”

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

  • Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman, dies at 100

    Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chairman, dies at 100

    WASHINGTON — Alan Greenspan, the jazz-playing U.S. Federal Reserve chair who was celebrated for engineering a decade of prosperity but later shared the blame for a devastating financial crisis, died Monday. He was 100.

    Mr. Greenspan died from complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife of 29 years, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell.

    “To me he was my husband, who shaped my life from our very first date in 1984,” Mitchell wrote. ”He had ‘irrational exuberance’ for baseball, the Washington Commanders, tennis, golf, and music, especially jazz. He will be remembered for his brilliance and his kindness. Being his life partner was the joy of my life.”

    The Fed said Mr. Greenspan helped to cement trust in the Fed during a time of economic uncertainty.

    “Under his leadership, the Federal Reserve achieved a sustained era of price stability that supported economic growth and helped anchor the public’s confidence in the institution,” the central bank said in a statement Monday.

    Greenspan was hailed as “Maestro’’ — before crisis hit

    In 18½ years at the Fed, Mr. Greenspan presided over a breathtaking surge in stock prices and a 10-year economic boom that started in March 1991. He was celebrated as “Maestro’’ and “Oracle’’ — an economic virtuoso whose every utterance was dissected for clues on where interest rates and the economy were headed.

    The intense scrutiny of Mr. Greenspan’s intentions gave birth to new Fed folklore: the “Briefcase Indicator.” A stuffed briefcase carried into Fed meetings implied changes might be afoot because Mr. Greenspan carried with him charts and research to make his point.

    But his reputation began to suffer almost as soon as he left the Fed in 2006. American housing prices tumbled rapidly, causing huge losses for banks that had repackaged mortgage loans into a dizzying array of complex securities. The growing financial crisis pushed the U.S. economy into the Great Recession of 2007-2009 — the deepest downturn since the 1930s.

    Critics blamed the devastation on Mr. Greenspan’s easy money policies and his support for deregulated financial markets. Mr. Greenspan himself later acknowledged “I made a mistake’’ in assuming that banks could essentially regulate themselves.

    The authoritative voice on the U.S. economy

    For almost two decades, it seemed that Mr. Greenspan could do no wrong. Not only in the United States but across the world, he was regarded with a mixture of reverence and awe. Many openly dreaded the day when he would leave the Fed.

    Investors hung on his sometimes inscrutable observations. In the most well-known such remark, Mr. Greenspan sent financial markets reeling on Dec. 5, 1996, when he suggested with just two words — “irrational exuberance” — that stock prices were too high.

    Mindful of his power to move markets, Mr. Greenspan typically resorted to obfuscation. At times, he even joked about his habit of doing so. “I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant,” Mr. Greenspan once told a befuddled congressional committee.

    Mr. Greenspan was one of the few Fed chairs that Kevin Warsh, chosen by Trump to lead the Fed, praised at his swearing-in last month. Warsh has said one of his goals is to dial back the Fed’s communications, particularly the guidance it gives financial markets, an approach closer to Mr. Greenspan’s than to Warsh’s immediate predecessors as chair.

    Yet for all his circumspect comments, Mr. Greenspan did make the Fed more transparent. He was the first chair to issue a statement explaining the Fed’s interest-rate decisions. Before Mr. Greenspan, investors had to divine the Fed’s intentions from market changes. Mr. Greenspan also began to release minutes and even full transcripts of meetings, though those changes were in response to pressure from Congress.

    A protégé is born

    Born in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, the young Mr. Greenspan was a math whiz who was trotted out by his mother to show off for visitors.

    “I was a prop at parties,’’ he said in a 2007 interview with PBS NewsHour. A Julliard School dropout, he worked as a professional musician in his teens, playing clarinet and saxophone alongside the future jazz great Stan Getz. It was a humbling experience that persuaded the young Mr. Greenspan to seek another line of work.

    He pursued undergraduate and graduate study in economics at New York University, eventually earning a doctorate there. For most of three decades, he ran an economic consulting firm. During the 1950s, he became a disciple of the libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand, who stuck him with the nickname the “Undertaker’’ for his dark clothes and quiet bearing. When Mr. Greenspan was sworn in as President Gerald Ford’s chief economic adviser in 1974, Rand stood beside him.

    An early trial for a new Fed chair

    President Ronald Reagan tapped Mr. Greenspan to run the Fed in 1987. He was tested almost immediately. On Oct. 19, 1987, which came to be known as “Black Monday,” the stock market suffered the worst one-day percentage loss in American history just two months into his term. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 22.6% for reasons that remain opaque to this day.

    Mr. Greenspan was credited for helping restore stability. He assured Wall Street that the Fed would supply as much money to the financial system as was needed to restore calm. Stocks recovered, and the American economy emerged unscathed by the market crash.

    During his tenure at the Fed, Mr. Greenspan drew praise for presiding over what was at the time the longest economic expansion in American history. (It was later surpassed by a 128-month expansion that ran from June 2009 through February 2020.) During Mr. Greenspan’s tenure at the Fed, the nation’s unemployment rate briefly dropped below 4% for the first time since 1970.

    And inflation, which had bedeviled the United States and much of the global economy during the 1970s, was remarkably dormant during Mr. Greenspan’s chairmanship, something many economists thought impossible for so long a period.

    During the long boom, Mr. Greenspan argued that improvements in technology had made the economy so efficient that it could run faster and at lower rates of unemployment, without unleashing inflation. As a consequence, the theory went, the Fed could keep interest rates low even when the economy was roaring.

    The economy soared in the late 1990s, expanding by 4% or more for four straight years, and Mr. Greenspan was credited with holding off on rate hikes and allowing the boom to run.

    Warsh has said that AI could reproduce the 1990s experience of high growth with low inflation, though economists are skeptical it will play out the same way.

    A passion for numbers and life

    As Fed chair, Mr. Greenspan relished poring over obscure economic data, from monthly boxcar loadings to steel production, all in a bid to assess where the economy was going. He would often phone economists at other government agencies to discuss details. He would rise early each morning for a two-hour soak in his bathtub, time that he used to review statistics and Fed staff memos.

    Improbably, Mr. Greenspan also made the gossip pages as an unlikely ladies’ man. He dated the television journalist Barbara Walters and later married Mitchell after a 12-year courtship. They had no children. Mitchell graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and worked for KWY radio and TV. She founded the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy in 2017.

    Mr. Greenspan dated Walters while working as an adviser to President Gerald Ford. According to a biography of Mr. Greenspan, The Man Who Knew by Sebastian Mallaby, when Ford read a newspaper item about the pair, he cut it out and sent it to his chief of staff, Dick Cheney, with a note that said, “I don’t believe it.”

    Faith in self-regulating markets is challenged

    All along, Mr. Greenspan held fast to the belief that financial markets could largely regulate themselves. With officials from President Bill Clinton’s White House, he helped block efforts by Brooksley Born, the nation’s top commodities regulator, to bring federal oversight in the late 1990s to the shadowy market in over-the-counter derivatives. The derivatives allowed speculators to make bets on everything from the price of oil to high-risk mortgages.

    Eventually, history would vindicate Born, not the Maestro.

    The low interest rates Mr. Greenspan had engineered helped swell housing prices into a dangerous bubble. And the financial deregulation he supported allowed banks and other financial firms to pile up huge risks, often hidden from government supervision. Bad derivatives bets helped sink insurance giant American International Group, which required a $180 billion taxpayer bailout. Vaunted investment firms Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers failed and U.S. financial markets nearly collapsed.

    The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which was assigned to investigate the debacle by Congress, concluded:

    “More than 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation by financial institutions, championed by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others … had stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe.”

    Life after the Fed

    In the years after stepping down as Fed chairman in 2006 just shy of his 80th birthday, Mr. Greenspan kept busy doing what he loved to do most — following the economic data. He ran his own consulting firm, Greenspan Associates, through which he dispensed advice to Wall Street clients and collected handsome speaking fees.

    He kept up a busy schedule well into his 90s, writing his memoir and two other books on the economy, as well as opining on the latest economic developments on television news shows.

    He also signed onto opinion articles and statements defending the Federal Reserve’s political independence from President Donald Trump’s ongoing attacks. In January 2026 he signed a statement criticizing the Trump administration’s investigation of Fed Chair Jerome Powell. The statement, which was also signed by two other former Fed chairs and five former Treasury secretaries, called the investigation “an unprecedented attempt to use prosecutorial attacks to undermine” the Fed’s independence and warned it would have “highly negative consequences for inflation.”

    In his 2013 book The Map and the Territory, Mr. Greenspan defended himself against critics who assigned him significant blame for the 2008 financial meltdown. He argued that traditional economic forecasting was no match for the irrational risk-taking that can feed catastrophic price bubbles.

    “Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds,” Mr. Greenspan said in a 2013 interview with the Associated Press. “Then fear hits, and it comes down very sharply. When I started to look at that, I was sort of intellectually shocked.”

  • First round of U.S.-Iran talks ends with high hopes and big challenges

    First round of U.S.-Iran talks ends with high hopes and big challenges

    ZURICH — The morning after the first overnight session of renewed talks between the United States and Iran, aimed at turning an incomplete truce into a lasting peace deal, the vibes were as warm as the heat wave currently washing over Switzerland.

    Mediators from Pakistan and Qatar said early Monday that Vice President JD Vance and his Iranian counterparts had made “encouraging progress” toward the goal of cementing a final peace agreement within 60 days. Swiss officials called the outcome “constructive.”

    “Yesterday was a very, very good day,” Vance told reporters Monday afternoon. “We made a lot of good progress. We did exactly what we wanted to do.”

    He added that Iran had promised to readmit nuclear inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. watchdog, though Iran did not immediately confirm that.

    But other details that emerged from the luxury Bürgenstock Resort Lake Lucerne suggested that the discussions over the next two months could still prove difficult and that efforts to reach a deal could proceed in fits and starts.

    Iran’s delegation, headed by the speaker of parliament, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, walked away from the table Sunday to protest a social media post from President Donald Trump that threatened to resume U.S. attacks on Iran if a deal did not come together. They eventually returned.

    Perhaps more important were the still-unresolved topics that appear to have dominated much of the conversation.

    The 60-day window, which was established by the initial memorandum of understanding that Trump and Iran’s president signed last week, was meant to be a period for Iran and the United States to solve crucial issues left out of that first-step deal. Most notably, that includes Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The memorandum says that Iran will dilute its existing stockpile of near-weapons-grade nuclear material but does not clarify how that will happen or whether the country will be barred from producing such material in the future.

    Those issues were not center stage, aside from Vance’s mention of the IAEA inspectors, whose return would still be far from a solution to the nuclear question.

    Instead, the first talks focused largely on two topics that were supposed to be settled: How to enforce a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and how to ensure shipping traffic, including oil tankers, flows freely again through the Strait of Hormuz.

    Israel launched the war on Iran alongside the United States in February and was not party to last week’s initial deal. Despite the deal’s call for a ceasefire, both Israel and Hezbollah have continued to carry out attacks on each other. Iran protested Israel’s attacks over the weekend by saying that it had closed the Strait of Hormuz — which has been clogged throughout the war, sending global oil prices skyward — though U.S. officials said that ships were still passing through.

    Mediators from Qatar and Pakistan, who joined Iranian and U.S. officials at Lake Lucerne, said Monday morning that discussions would continue through this week.

    Some analysts warned Monday against an overly optimistic takeaway.

    Financial markets had reacted to Trump’s initial agreement with Iran “with a classic show of irrational exuberance,” Carl B. Weinberg, the chief economist for High Frequency Economics, an American analysis firm, wrote in a research note Monday morning. “This week should bring a reality check,” he noted.

    Weinberg added that he believed Iran was likely to string out the talks for much longer than 60 days — all the way until January 2029, when the next U.S. president will take office.

    The stop-start nature of the negotiations has heightened the uncertainty.

    Vance had been scheduled to fly to Switzerland on Thursday night, but canceled the trip at the last minute after Iran pulled out in protest, diplomats said, at continuing Israeli attacks in Lebanon.

    Nothing in the statements from the mediators, or from Iranian officials, suggested that the negotiations were barreling toward the sort of quick capitulation that Trump has intimated would be the endgame for the talks. For example, Qalibaf wrote on social media that Iran’s “armed forces are prepared to respond” if Trump attacked Iran again — raising the possibility of more war.

    Still, the releases from the mediators and hosts conveyed, at the very least, a sense that the talks had succeeded in starting the gears of a more traditional diplomatic process.

    Qatar and Pakistan said that the discussions had led to “the creation of a mechanism for further technical talks.” Swiss authorities said that the parties had agreed to “a road map aimed at reaching a final agreement within 60 days.”

    “Our aim,” Swiss officials wrote, “is that our diplomacy contributes to de-escalation, stability and peace.”

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

  • Advocates say Delaney Hall detainees have ended hunger strike

    Advocates say Delaney Hall detainees have ended hunger strike

    A hunger and labor strike by detained immigrants at Newark migrant jail Delaney Hall that drew national attention and sparked weeks of violent protests outside the detention center has effectively ended, immigration advocates said Monday.

    The detainees ended their strike because of the actions taken by the jail’s guards, and not because conditions behind bars have improved, the advocates said.

    “Because of the intimidation tactics, the disciplinary consequences for folks to be placed in segregation, [detainees] have now resorted to going back to job assignments and eating,” said Sally Pillay, an advocate with Eyes on ICE who has spent months outside of the migrant jail aiding families of detainees.

    A request for comment from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was not immediately returned. Federal officials have said for weeks that detainees never engaged in a hunger or labor strike.

    More than 300 detainees inside the immigration detention center said they launched the strike May 22 to call attention to what they called inhumane conditions, including inedible food and poor treatment by guards. Delaney Hall soon became a national flashpoint, attracting members of Congress, state officials, and sustained crowds of protesters to Doremus Avenue in Newark on a near-daily basis.

    Amy Torres, the executive director of New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, speaks outside Delaney Hall on Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2025.

    Amy Torres, executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, said the tactics used to break the strike are nothing new. Some detainees were transferred out of the facility as a “means of punishing them for being part of that dissent,” she said.

    Torres said among those transferred was a 20-year-old man who crossed the border at 18. He was transferred in the last two days and his location remains unknown as of Monday, she said.

    “There are hundreds more that have disappeared,” Torres said. “There’s no way to account for where they are. Are they OK? What’s going on with them? It’s pure heartbreak.”

    Pillay said activist groups have tracked detainees to facilities in Louisiana, Texas, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, and Colorado.

    “These transfers have had devastating consequences,” she said. “We know that these facilities are in remote locations where people do not have access to their lawyers, to their families, and their support networks.”

    She noted that detainees in the units most active in the strike were deliberately broken up, with people dispersed throughout the facility. Detainees have also raised new concerns inside the jail, like discolored drinking water and weeks without access to hot water, Pillay said.

    Family visitation, which was briefly suspended during the strike, was reinstated with sharp restrictions. Pillay said visitations have been cut to 30 minutes, are only offered twice a week in some units, and are limited to immediate family members on an approved list. She said Geo Group — the private company that runs the detention center — has not posted information about the new visitation schedule online, so families show up expecting the old schedule and are turned away.

    Detainees have also been blocked from speaking with members of Congress conducting oversight visits. Detainees must now sign a privacy waiver, provided only in English, before a member of Congress can speak with them, and forms must be submitted in advance of the visit, a process Pillay said is “to probably intimidate and use retaliatory tactics against the individuals who speak out.”

    On Father’s Day, Pillay said of the 80 family members who arrived to visit loved ones, more than 30 were turned away.

    “We saw heightened emotions, distraught families, and loved ones outside,” she said.

    Dozens showed up for a protest Sunday. Some tied neckties to the fence outside the jail in honor of the fathers who remain detained and some held up signs that read, “Free the dads.”

    One protester holding an upside-down American flag near the driveway of the prison was hit by a car entering the jail parking lot, video shows. Newark Public Safety Director Emanuel Miranda said the incident is under investigation.

    “Federal agents are brutal, abusive, and reckless with the public,” Torres said. “We can only imagine what they’re doing to people in detention behind closed doors.”

    This story originally appeared on New Jersey Monitor.

  • Supreme Court restores conviction in 1979 murder of Etan Patz

    Supreme Court restores conviction in 1979 murder of Etan Patz

    NEW YORK — The Supreme Court on Monday reversed a lower court decision that had reopened the case of the man convicted in the killing of Etan Patz, a 6-year-old boy whose 1979 abduction in Manhattan reshaped American childhoods.

    The court’s unsigned opinion restores the conviction of the man, Pedro Hernandez, who the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had said last year was entitled to a new trial.

    The three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — noted their objection to the majority’s order.

    Hernandez was found guilty in 2017 of kidnapping and murdering Etan, but an appeals court overturned that judgment in July. Months later, the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Hernandez, asked the nation’s highest court to review the decision.

    On Monday, a defense lawyer for Hernandez, Harvey Fishbein, said the Supreme Court’s order meant his client would not get a new trial and that his team was “terribly disappointed.”

    “We firmly believe that an innocent man is in jail for a crime that he did not commit,” Fishbein said.

    In a statement, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said the case had “changed a generation of New Yorkers.”

    “This office has remained steadfast in its pursuit of justice for Etan and the Patz family and will continue to stand by this important conviction,” he said.

    The Supreme Court’s action sends the matter back to the lower courts and is the latest development in a case that stumped investigators for decades. Hernandez, a handyman who lived in New Jersey, was arrested in 2012 and first put on trial in 2015. But after 18 days of deliberations, the trial ended in a hung jury. The case went back to trial and, in 2017, a Manhattan jury convicted Hernandez after nine days of deliberations.

    The reversal of Hernandez’s conviction last year reopened a case that had appeared finally settled. From the first days Etan went missing, when he was walking the two blocks from his home in the SoHo neighborhood to a school bus stop, the case generated intense public interest. Etan’s abrupt disappearance — and the killing of 6-year-old Adam Walsh two years later — ushered in an era of heightened caution among American parents.

    In its 10-page opinion Monday, the Supreme Court said the 2nd Circuit got it wrong and exceeded its authority.

    The lower court opinion “appears to reflect serious doubt about the reliability of Hernandez’s confessions,” the majority said, but the relevant statute does not permit federal courts to “disturb a state-court conviction based on such an evaluation of the evidence.”

    The liberal justices did not explain their disagreement. The ruling was issued as part of the court’s routine orders and without the justices holding oral arguments.

    For decades, investigators in Manhattan struggled to figure out what happened to Etan. His body was never found, and in 2001, he was declared legally dead.

    The critical break in the case came in 2012, when one of Hernandez’s relatives contacted investigators. New York police officers traveled to Hernandez’s home in Camden, N.J. After about seven hours of questioning, police said, Hernandez confessed — first before being read his rights, and twice more after.

    Hernandez was 18 at the time of Etan’s disappearance and worked at a bodega where investigators believed Etan had been killed.

    There was no scientific evidence linking Hernandez to the crime, and his confessions to investigators were quickly called into question.

    Hernandez’s lawyers argued that the statements were invented to placate the police. They asked the court to suppress them, saying they were a result of Hernandez’s low IQ and the product of psychotic delusions. The judge nonetheless said that they could be used as evidence.

    During jury deliberations at the second trial in 2017, the jury asked the judge whether they should disregard one of Hernandez’s later confessions if they found that his first one was not voluntary. The judge gave a one-word answer: No.

    A federal appeals court found that the judge should have explained a Supreme Court precedent about such serial confessions and ordered that Hernandez be released from his 25-years-to-life sentence or get a new trial.

    Prosecutors in Manhattan, led by Bragg, argued to the Supreme Court that Hernandez’s conviction should not have been overturned because it was not based on an “error in the decades-long investigation, in the admission of Hernandez’s confessions or in the evidence presented at trial.” The appeals court had said that the judge overseeing the trial, Maxwell Wiley, had violated federal law and therefore invalidated a jury’s verdict.

    In their response, Hernandez’s lawyers said that the judge’s instruction to the jury had touched on the central issue in the case.

    “Far from exhibiting the kind of clear error for which summary reversal is typically reserved,” his lawyers wrote, “the 2nd Circuit’s decision is correct.”

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

  • A Delco judge denied a motion to dismiss trespassing charges in Swarthmore protest case

    A Delco judge denied a motion to dismiss trespassing charges in Swarthmore protest case

    A Delaware County judge on Monday denied a motion to dismiss criminal charges filed against nine people for refusing to leave a pro-Palestinian encampment on Swarthmore College’s campus last spring, setting the stage for a trial next week.

    Judge Dominic Pileggi ruled that prosecutors had presented sufficient evidence for the case to proceed to trial and allow a jury to decide whether the so-called Swarthmore 9 had trespassed.

    The group was arrested and briefly detained outside the college’s Trotter Hall in May 2025 when officers from surrounding police departments dismantled their encampment protesting the war in Gaza and Swarthmore’s IT contract with Cisco, a company that does business with the Israeli government.

    Of the nine people arrested, only one, Jace Boland, is a student at the college. Another, Brendan Cook, is a former student who was suspended for participating in an earlier protest in 2024, but the rest are not affiliated with Swarthmore, according to school officials.

    Members of the group — Boland, Cook, Jonathan Britt, Mara Helen Cahill, Daria C. Dressler, Thomas Falcone, Colin Buckley Malcarney, Riley J. McManus, and Andrew Thomas — have all been charged with trespassing, a third-degree misdemeanor.

    District Attorney Tanner Rouse has said his office offered each member of the group a plea deal that would see those charges reduced to summary offenses, similar to traffic citations, that could be resolved by paying a fine.

    The group has refused, saying pleading guilty would set a precedent on how colleges across the country could curtail students’ protest rights.

    During Monday’s hearing, the group’s attorney, Marni Jo Snyder, argued that Swarthmore and county prosecutors violated the protestors’ constitutional rights by arresting them.

    She noted that Swarthmore changed its policy allowing protests on its campus to explicitly outlaw encampments after a similar, monthlong demonstration in the same location in 2024.

    Policing a specific type of expressive speech, she said, is illegal.

    “The policy is wrong, the repeated orders to leave are wrong,” she said. “These are improper responses to constitutionally protected speech.”

    Snyder said that, though Swarthmore’s campus is private property, administrators have allowed previous demonstrations to be held there, as well as other quasi-private events. The arrests in this case, she said, showed that prosecutors were specifically targeting demonstrators protesting the war in Gaza.

    Samantha Door, who represented the district attorney’s office at the hearing, disputed that, saying the protestors’ conduct, and not the purpose of the encampment, was the reason criminal charges were filed.

    Swarthmore issued multiple warnings to the group to disperse over the course of three days, Door said, including one final warning 10 minutes before the encampment was dismantled.

    Other protestors who left the encampment and continued to chant and hold protest signs were not arrested, she said.

    Also, Door said administrators raised concerns about public safety, since many of the protestors wore masks and refused to identify themselves, vandalized campus property with graffiti, and used pallets and other materials to create barricades around the encampment.

    The trial in the case is scheduled to begin with jury selection on June 30.

  • Quarantine comes to an end for the last of the hantavirus ship passengers in Nebraska

    Quarantine comes to an end for the last of the hantavirus ship passengers in Nebraska

    OMAHA, Nebraska — The last eight American passengers who endured 42 days in a specialized hospital quarantine unit after exposure to an unusual hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship that killed three people have left the Nebraska facility.

    U.S. Department of Health and Human Services officials on Monday confirmed the end of the quarantine.

    “Through close collaboration among federal, state, and local partners, HHS helped protect the American people, contain potential risks, and bring this response effort to a successful conclusion,” HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said in an email.

    More than 120 people were evacuated from the MV Hondius in Spain’s Canary Islands early last month — including the 18 Americans who wound up in the National Quarantine Unit in Omaha — though most were from other countries.

    In addition to those people evacuated by health officials in full protective suits, at least 30 other passengers had left the ship earlier before the outbreak was documented. That included seven Americans, who were allowed to monitor for any symptoms at home. When the ship eventually docked in the Netherlands, 25 crew members and two medical personnel were on board and had to quarantine.

    The World Health Organization didn’t immediately respond Monday to questions about the status of all the other people who had to quarantine around the globe. A total of 13 cases of the virus, including the three who died, were identified among people who were on the ship.

    Most Americans returned home but some were forced to quarantine

    One of the American passengers, Angela Perryman, had been held against her will and against the recommendation of a government medical expert. She said in an interview Monday passengers were told that the quarantine monitoring period ended Sunday at 2 p.m. She left on a flight that evening. Others were flying out Monday, she said.

    “We were locked in our rooms until 1:55. And at 2 o’clock, ‘OK, well, everybody walk out and go home,’” Perryman said, speaking from her Florida home.

    Some stayed the night elsewhere in Omaha, but Perryman pushed for a flight home that evening. The government paid for the flights, she said.

    Seven of the last remaining patients stayed there voluntarily, but Perryman was forced to stay as the result of a controversial quarantine order that was deemed unnecessary even by some health officials.

    Perryman and seven others spent six weeks at the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. That monitoring period was set because symptoms of hantavirus have taken as long as 42 days to appear in previous outbreaks. None were reported to have developed the illness.

    Ten others who were at the facility were allowed to leave earlier under an agreement that they would be closely monitored in their home states.

    Outbreak developed on a small cruise ship

    The passengers were on a Dutch cruise ship, the MV Hondius, traveling in the South Atlantic that became the setting of a hantavirus outbreak that killed three people, including a Dutch couple who health officials believe were the first exposed to the virus while visiting South America.

    Hantaviruses usually spread when people inhale contaminated residue of rodent droppings, but the hantavirus that caused the outbreak, called the Andes virus, may be able to spread between people in rare cases, health officials say.

    Some 25 Americans were on the ship, including about seven who disembarked in April and 18 who remained on board. Sixteen were evacuated to the Nebraska quarantine unit in Omaha on May 11, and two other Americans joined them a few days later.

    Passengers staying in Omaha enjoyed Nebraska hospitality

    During the passengers’ stay, local Omaha restaurants and food trucks delivered special meals for them to enjoy almost daily. And the nurses sometimes made Starbucks runs to deliver some of the passengers’ favorite drinks.

    The rooms they stayed in are like hotel rooms equipped with a desk, television, internet connection, and exercise equipment to help the passengers pass the time.

    One of the passengers, Jake Rosmarin, on Monday morning posted an “I’m finally coming home” video that showed him leaving his room at the quarantine center, hauling two suitcases and a backpack and turning out the lights as he walked out the door. Later Monday, he posted a video of the Omaha skyline shot out the window of his plane as he headed home to his fiance in Boston and his family.

    Rosmarin, who is a travel blogger, posted a tearful video Sunday thanking the staff of the quarantine unit, the Omaha community, and his family and friends who helped him get through quarantine.

    “I want to thank the Omaha, Nebraska, community for welcoming us with open arms and showing us complete kindness and generosity. And a big thanks to all of you who have helped me get through this because I really don’t know if it would have been as easy without the support from strangers,” he said while wearing a Nebraska Huskers sweatshirt that someone sent him.

    Florida wouldn’t agree to monitor passenger round the clock

    Perryman had a darker take. She was forced to stay after Florida officials refused a federal demand that the state provide round-the-clock surveillance on her if she were returned home. This happened even as they had started making travel arrangements for the passengers weeks ago, she said.

    “Nobody actually expected anybody to get sick at that point,” she said. “Everybody was well aware that we were all going home on commercial flights.”

    She called the six-week quarantine “a political stunt.”

  • Confirmed Ebola cases in Congo outbreak top 1,000 with 254 deaths, authorities say

    Confirmed Ebola cases in Congo outbreak top 1,000 with 254 deaths, authorities say

    BUNIA, Congo — Confirmed cases in the Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo have reached 1,003, including 254 deaths, officials said, as tracing those who had been in contact with patients remains a major challenge.

    A total of 100 people have recovered in the outbreak concentrated in the Ituri province since it was declared on May 15, Congo’s Ministry of Health said Sunday. At least 365 patients are in hospitals or in isolation, it said.

    The Ebola outbreak caused by the rare Bundibugyo virus, which has no vaccines or treatment, was the worst ever in its first month. Officials admit there could be far more cases they still don’t know about and that the peak of the outbreak is still ahead.

    Contact tracing remains a key issue for local authorities, who have only achieved a 55% coverage rate, the ministry said.

    “If you want to control an outbreak, especially Ebola outbreak, you must know the index case. We don’t have confidence on when this outbreak started,” the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director-General Jean Kaseya told the Associated Press last week.

    Officials also are yet to identify the patient zero and trace more than 35,000 people who have come in contact with infected individuals as of last week, authorities said.

    That’s partly because eastern Congo is also battling ongoing violence from rebels. In Ituri, attacks by the Islamic State group-backed Allied Democratic Force have cut off access to many villages and forced people to flee their homes, including those sheltering in overcrowded camps and others constantly on the move.

    More than a month into the outbreak, officials believe the disease continues to outpace response efforts and no one knows its true scale.

    Displaced persons at risk

    At the Kigonze displacement camp in Bunia, the capital of Ituri province, camp officials said Friday that 10 people had died last week in unusual circumstances, raising the fear of a possible outbreak in the camp of over 20,000 displaced people.

    There had been no Ebola case confirmed at the site, camp officials said, but added that the death rate was unprecedented and called for investigation.

    The U.N. refugee agency has said at least 2 million people forcibly displaced from their homes, including over 320,000 refugees, live in areas at risk of Ebola in Congo.

    In a statement on Friday, the agency said it was “deeply concerned by the accelerating spread” of the virus and “the growing risks it poses to displaced communities across the region.”

    “If a disease or epidemic were to spread among the thousands of people living at this (Kigonze) site, it would be a real catastrophe given our already very precarious living conditions,” said Charité Banza, a civil society leader in Ituri.

  • Top Justice Department officials can remain part of prosecution of press gala attack, judge rules

    Top Justice Department officials can remain part of prosecution of press gala attack, judge rules

    WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Monday denied a request to disqualify top Justice Department officials from supervising the prosecution of the man charged with trying to kill President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

    Cole Tomas Allen had argued that involvement in his prosecution by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro created a potential conflict of interest because they were among many administration officials present at the April dinner. Allen’s attorney also had raised concerns about the close friendship between Trump and Pirro, a former Fox News commentator.

    U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden wrote in his ruling that neither their attendance at the dinner nor Pirro’s personal relationship with the president merited their disqualification. McFadden noted that Allen is not charged with attempting to harm Blanche and Pirro, and there is no evidence to suggest he even knew they would attend the dinner.

    “They are unlikely to be trial witnesses, nor do they meet the legal definition of victims,” wrote McFadden, who was nominated to the bench by Trump.

    Allen has been accused of trying to breach a security checkpoint armed with guns and knives. He has pleaded not guilty to various charges, including assaulting a federal official with a deadly weapon and attempted assassination of the president. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted of the attempted assassination charge alone.

    Allen also is accused of firing a shotgun at a Secret Service agent during the attack, which disrupted and ultimately prompted an early end to one of the highest-profile annual events in the nation’s capital. The Secret Service officer who was shot once in a bullet-resistant vest fired his own weapon five times without hitting anyone. Allen, of Torrance, Calif., was injured but was not shot.