NEW YORK — Neil Sedaka, the hitmaking singer-songwriter whose boyish soprano and bright melodies made him a top act in the early years of rock and roll and led to a second run of success in the 1970s, has died.
Mr. Sedaka, whose hits included “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” and “Laughter in the Rain,” died Friday at age 86.
“Our family is devastated by the sudden passing of our beloved husband, father and grandfather, Neil Sedaka,” his family said in a statement. “A true rock and roll legend, an inspiration to millions, but most importantly, at least to those of us who were lucky enough to know him, an incredible human being who will be deeply missed.”
No other details of his death were immediately available.
A key member of the Brill Building songwriting factory, Mr. Sedaka teamed with lyricist and boyhood neighbor Howard Greenfield on songs that reflected the teen innocence of the post-Elvis, pre-Beatles era of the late 1950 and early 1960s, including “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen,” “Calendar Girl,” and “Oh! Carol,” a lament for his high school sweetheart, Carole King.
After a long dry spell, he reemerged with such smashes as “Laughter in the Rain” and “Bad Blood.” The Captain & Tennille’s cover of his “Love Will Keep Us Together” was a chart-topper in 1975.
Short and dark-haired, with a big smile and high-pitched voice, he was a Juilliard-trained, Brooklyn-born son of a Jewish taxi driver who began performing as a teen and kept at it for decades.
Mr. Sedaka still played dozens of concerts a year well into his 80s. He retained the enthusiasm and broad vocal range of his youth and never tired of the standards he had sung hundreds of times.
“Past 70, Pavarotti told me the vocal cords are not what they used to be. I’m very fortunate that my voice has held,” he told the Associated Press in 2012. “It’s nice to be a legend, but it’s better to be a working legend.”
Mr. Sedaka’s songs sold millions worldwide and have been covered by a range of performers, from Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra to The 5th Dimension and Nickelback. Mr. Sedaka helped propel the career of Connie Francis with “Stupid Cupid” and “Where the Boys Are,” the latter for the soundtrack of the movie with the same name. The Captain & Tennille received a best-album Grammy thanks largely to “Love Will Keep Us Together” and included a nod to Mr. Sedaka at the end of the song, when Toni Tennille exclaimed “Sedaka’s back!”
Growing up in Brooklyn, loving performing
Mr. Sedaka grew up in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach neighborhood, pampered by his grandparents, aunts, and mother in a two-bedroom apartment he shared with 11 relatives. He has a street there named in his honor, Neil Sedaka Way.
But his music compensated for his unpopularity as a kid, he once recalled. His talent was recognized by a second-grade teacher who urged his homemaker mother, Eleanor, to buy him a piano. She went to work in a department store to pay for a secondhand upright and managed his career for years, as did his wife, Leba.
Mr. Sedaka loved songwriting and never quit, but he craved performing.
“Once a performer, always a performer. It’s that adrenaline rush. It’s like a natural high when you’re in front of an audience, and if you get that standing ovation, it’s infectious,” he told the AP.
At 16, Mr. Sedaka was chosen by Arthur Rubenstein in a contest as the city’s best high school piano student and performed on a classical radio station as a prize. It was the same year he discovered rock and roll, when he performed a song, “Mr. Moon,” he had written with Greenfield, his classmate at Abraham Lincoln High School.
“I sang it in the auditorium for a ballyhoo show and I remember there was a bit of a riot. The kids were jumping and screaming,” Mr. Sedaka said. “After that I was able to go into the sweet shop with the tough kids with the leather jackets.”
After high school, and then Juilliard, Mr. Sedaka and Greenfield were signed to Don Kirshner’s Aldon Music, where they scored their first hit with Francis, “Stupid Cupid.”
Sedaka churns out hits, until the Beatles
In 1958, at age 19, Mr. Sedaka signed with RCA Victor Records and his first single, “The Diary,” enjoyed modest success. He began touring and promoting his songs through regular TV appearances on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and Shindig!
At the Brill Building, Mr. Sedaka and Greenfield were joined by other up-and-coming writers and lyricists including King, Neil Diamond, and Paul Simon.
“Neil Sedaka was so talented, and he inspired me to follow my dream of being a songwriter,” King said on her Facebook page Friday. “With love and gratitude and condolences to his family.”
Micky Dolenz of the Monkees also paid tribute to Mr. Sedaka, saying on Instagram that he was “one of those rare songwriters who could do it all.”
From 1959 to 1962, Mr. Sedaka had 10 records in the Top 10, including “Calendar Girl,” “Oh! Carol,” “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen,” and “Next Door to an Angel.” But in the mid-1960s, the Brill Building sound, influenced by the doo-wop groups of the New York City streets, was pushed off the charts by the Beatles -led British Invasion and the psychedelic and protest music that followed. Mr. Sedaka would endure 13 years “in the wilderness,” as he described it to the AP.
Sedaka’s unlikely comeback, with help from Elton John
Mr. Sedaka was among the lucky, however, enjoying a renaissance that began in the mid-’70s thanks to the patronage of Elton John, whom he met at a party after Mr. Sedaka moved his wife and two kids to England to take advantage of his lingering popularity there. John signed him to his fledgling, U.S.-based Rocket Records label, providing him a chance at more hits with the album Sedaka’s Back.
At Rocket, Mr. Sedaka and a new writing partner, Philip Cody, topped charts with “Bad Blood” and the joyous “Laughter in the Rain.” He also achieved a rare feat with “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.” His original up-tempo version went No. 1 in 1962. He rerecorded it as a slow ballad in 1975 and that, too, went No. 1.
He recorded five albums from 1972 to 1976. They included hits “Standing on the Inside,” “That’s Where the Music Takes Me,” and “Our Last Song Together,” about his breakup with Greenfield, with whom he began writing songs when Mr. Sedaka was only 13 and Greenfield 16.
He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, but the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame eluded him despite a fan petition drive.
Mr. Sedaka married wife Leba in 1962. They had two children. Daughter Dara recorded a duet with dad in 1980, “Should’ve Never Let You Go.” It was a hit, but she never joined him in the music business. Son Marc is a film and television writer.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Friday ordered all U.S. agencies to stop using Anthropic’s artificial intelligence technology and imposed other major penalties, culminating an unusually public clash between the government and the company over AI safety.
President Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other officials took to social media to chastise Anthropic for failing to allow the military unrestricted use of its AI technology by a Friday deadline, accusing it of endangering national security after CEO Dario Amodei refused to back down over concerns the company’s products could be used in ways that would violate its safeguards.
“We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!” Trump said on social media.
Hegseth also deemed the company a “supply chain risk,” a designation typically stamped on foreign adversaries that could derail the company’s critical partnerships with other businesses.
Anthropic had said it sought narrow assurances from the Pentagon that its AI chatbot Claude would not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon said it was not interested in such uses and would only deploy the technology in legal ways, but it also insisted on access without any limitations.
The government’s effort to assert dominance over the internal decision-making of the company comes amid a wider clash over AI’s role in national security and concerns about how increasingly capable machines could be used in high-stakes situations involving lethal force, sensitive information or government surveillance.
Trump and others lash out at Anthropic
Trump said Anthropic made a mistake trying to strong-arm the Pentagon. He wrote on Truth Social that most agencies must immediately stop using Anthropic’s AI but gave the Pentagon a six-month period to phase out the technology that is already embedded in military platforms.
“The United States of America will never allow a radical left, woke company to dictate how our great military fights and wins wars!” he wrote in all caps.
After months of private talks exploded into public debate this week, Anthropic said Thursday that the government’s new contract language would allow “safeguards to be disregarded at will.” Amodei said his company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the demands.
Anthropic can afford to lose the contract. But the government’s actions posed broader risks at the peak of the company’s meteoric rise from a little-known computer science research lab in San Francisco to one of the world’s most valuable startups.
The president’s decision was preceded by hours of top Trump appointees from the Pentagon and the State Department taking to social media to criticize Anthropic, but their complaints posed contradictions.
Top Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said on social media Thursday that Anthropic’s unwillingness to go along with the military’s demands was “jeopardizing critical military operations and potentially putting our warfighters at risk.” Hegseth said Friday that the Pentagon “must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic.”
Trump’s social media post also mandated the company “better get their act together, and be helpful” during a six-month phase-out period or there would be “major civil and criminal consequences to follow.”
However, Hegseth’s choice to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk uses an administrative tool that has been designed for companies owned by U.S. adversaries to prevent them from selling products that are harmful to American interests.
Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, noted that this dynamic, “combined with inflammatory rhetoric attacking that company, raises serious concerns about whether national security decisions are being driven by careful analysis or political considerations.”
Anthropic didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on the Trump administration’s actions.
Dispute shakes up Silicon Valley
The dispute stunned AI developers in Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists, prominent AI scientists and a large number of workers from Anthropic’s top rivals — OpenAI and Google — voiced support for Amodei’s stand in open letters and other forums.
The move is likely to benefit Elon Musk’s competing chatbot, Grok, which the Pentagon plans to give access to classified military networks, and could serve as a warning to two other competitors, Google and OpenAI, that have still-evolving contracts to supply their AI tools to the military.
Musk sided with Trump’s administration, saying on his social media platform X that “Anthropic hates Western Civilization.”
But one of Amodei’s fiercest rivals, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, sided with Anthropic and questioned the Pentagon’s “threatening” move in a CNBC interview and a letter to employees that said OpenAI shared the same red lines. Amodei once worked for OpenAI before he and other OpenAI leaders quit to form Anthropic in 2021.
“For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company, and I think they really do care about safety,” Altman told CNBC, hours before he gathered employees for an all-hands meeting Friday.
Retired Air Force Gen. Jack Shanahan, a former leader of the Pentagon’s AI initiatives, wrote on social media this week that “painting a bullseye on Anthropic garners spicy headlines, but everyone loses in the end.”
Shanahan said Claude is already being widely used across the government, including in classified settings, and Anthropic’s red lines were “reasonable.” He said the AI large language models that power chatbots like Claude, Grok, and ChatGPT are also “not ready for prime time in national security settings,” particularly not for fully autonomous weapons.
Anthropic is “not trying to play cute here,” he wrote Thursday on LinkedIn. “You won’t find a system with wider & deeper reach across the military.”
TEL AVIV, Israel — President Donald Trump said Friday he’s “not happy” with the latest talks over Iran’s nuclear program but indicated he would give negotiators more time to reach a deal to avert another war in the Middle East.
He spoke a day after U.S. envoys held another inconclusive round of indirect talks with Iran in Geneva. As American forces gather in the region, Trump has threatened military action if Iran does not agree to a far-reaching deal on its nuclear program, while Iran insists it has the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes and denies seeking a nuclear weapon.
“I’m not happy with the fact that they’re not willing to give us what we have to have. I’m not thrilled with that. We’ll see what happens. We’re talking later,” Trump told reporters as he left the White House on Friday. “We’re not exactly happy with the way they’re negotiating. They cannot have nuclear weapons.”
Trump was asked about the risks of the U.S. getting involved in a drawn-out conflict if it strikes Iran.
“I guess you could say there’s always a risk,” Trump replied. “You know, when there’s war, there’s a risk of anything, both good and bad.”
Later Friday, as he visited Texas, Trump sounded more pessimistic, telling reporters that Iranian negotiators “don’t want to quite go far enough. It’s too bad.”
He reiterated that he did not want to see Iran allowed to enrich any amount of uranium and said the oil-rich nation should not need to enrich uranium for an energy program.
When asked by a reporter how close he was to deciding on whether to launch a military strike, he said, “I’d rather not tell you.”
Trump later told a crowd of supporters in a speech in Corpus Christi, Texas, that he would rather handle Iran “the peaceful way” and that he discussed the issue aboard Air Force One with Texas’ two Republican senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn.
Rubio heads to Israel
Secretary of State Marco Rubio plans to make a quick trip to Israel early next week, the State Department said. The U.S. Embassy in Israel had earlier urged staff who want to leave to depart, joining other nations in encouraging people to leave the region and signaling that U.S. military action might be imminent.
The announcement of Rubio’s visit, and Trump’s latest remarks, could indicate a longer timeline for any potential strike.
The State Department said Rubio would visit Israel on Monday and Tuesday to “discuss a range of regional priorities including Iran, Lebanon, and ongoing efforts to implement President Trump’s 20-Point Peace Plan for Gaza.” It offered no other details.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long urged tougher U.S. action against Iran, and has warned that Israel will respond to any Iranian attack.
A confidential report from the U.N. nuclear watchdog meanwhile confirmed that Iran has not offered inspectors access to sensitive nuclear sites since they were heavily bombed during the 12-day war launched by Israel last June. As a result, it said it could not confirm Iran’s claims that it stopped uranium enrichment after the U.S. and Israeli strikes.
The report was circulated to member countries and seen by The Associated Press.
Those wishing to leave ‘should do so TODAY’
The announcement of Rubio’s visit came just hours after the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem implemented “authorized departure” status for nonessential personnel and family members, which means that eligible staffers can leave the country voluntarily at government expense.
In an email, U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee urged staff considering departure to do so quickly, advising them to focus on getting any flight out of Israel and to then make their way to Washington.
“Those wishing to take AD should do so TODAY,” Huckabee wrote, using an acronym for “authorized departure.”
“While there may be outbound flights over the coming days, there may not be,” he added. The email was recounted to the Associated Press by someone involved with the U.S. mission who wasn’t authorized to share details.
On a town-hall meeting Friday after the email was sent, Huckabee told staff that he was encouraging airlines to keep flying.
Vance meets with mediator
Iran and the United States on Thursday walked away from another round of nuclear negotiations in Geneva without a deal. Technical discussions are scheduled to take place in Vienna next week.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Thursday said “what needs to happen has been clearly spelled out from our side,” without offering specifics. Iran has long demanded relief from heavy international sanctions in return for taking steps to limit but not end its nuclear program.
Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr al-Busaidi, who has been mediating the talks, met Friday with Vice President JD Vance to discuss the negotiations.
“I am grateful for their engagement and look forward to further and decisive progress in the coming days,” al-Busaidi posted on X. “Peace is within our reach.”
Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, meanwhile met with Christopher Yeaw, a U.S. arms control official. Grossi posted on X that the two men had a “timely exchange on current non-proliferation issues, including in Iran and other areas of common interest.”
The U.N. chief urged Iran and the U.S. “to focus on the diplomatic track.”
“We’re seeing both positive messages coming out of the diplomatic tracks, which we’re continuing to encourage,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said, according to his spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric.
“We’re also seeing very worrying military movements throughout the region, which is extremely concerning as well.”
Flights suspended as people are urged to leave
The U.S. has gathered a massive fleet of aircraft and warships in the Middle East, with one aircraft carrier already in place and another heading to the region. Iran says it will respond to any U.S. attack by targeting American forces in the region, potentially including those stationed in U.S. bases in allied Arab countries.
Airlines such as Netherlands-based KLM have already announced plans to suspend flights out of Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport, and other embassies have also made plans for authorized departures from Israel and neighboring countries.
Britain’s Foreign Office said that “due to the security situation, U.K. staff have been temporarily withdrawn from Iran.” It said the embassy was operating remotely.
In Israel, the U.K. said Friday it moved some diplomatic staff and their families from Tel Aviv to another, unspecified location in Israel “as a precautionary measure.” In an update to its travel advice, the Foreign Office advises against “all but essential travel” to Israel.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Thursday the U.K. was focused on “supporting the political process” between Washington and Tehran.
Germany‘s Foreign Ministry meanwhile advised urgently against travel to Israel.
Australia on Wednesday “directed the departure of all dependents of Australian officials posted to Israel in response to the deteriorating security situation in the Middle East.” China, India, and several European countries with missions in Iran have advised citizens to avoid travel to the country.
China’s Foreign Ministry also advised its citizens already in Iran to leave, according to a statement reported by Chinese state media.
WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton told members of Congress on Friday that he “did nothing wrong” in his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and saw no signs of Epstein’s sexual abuse as he faced hours of grilling from lawmakers over his connections to the disgraced financier from more than two decades ago.
“I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong,” the former Democratic president said in an opening statement he shared on social media at the outset of the deposition. The closed-door deposition ended after more than six hours of questioning from lawmakers who said he answered every question posed to him.
The closed-door deposition in Chappaqua, N.Y., marks the first time a former president has been compelled to testify to Congress. It came a day after Clinton’s wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sat with lawmakers for her own deposition.
Bill Clinton has also not been accused of any wrongdoing. Yet lawmakers are grappling with what accountability in the United States looks like at a time when men around the world have been toppled from their high-powered posts for maintaining their connections with Epstein after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges in Florida for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.
“Men — and women for that matter — of great power and great wealth from all across the world have been able to get away with a lot of heinous crimes and they haven’t been held accountable and they have not even had to answer questions,” said Republican Rep. James Comer, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, before the deposition began Friday.
Hillary Clinton told lawmakers Thursday that she had no knowledge of how Epstein had sexually abused underage girls and had no recollection of even meeting him. But Bill Clinton will have to answer questions on a well-documented relationship with Epstein and his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, even if it was from the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Bill Clinton in his opening statement said that he would likely often tell the committee that he did not recall the specifics of events from more than 20 years ago. But he also expressed certainty that he had not witnessed signs of Epstein’s abuse.
Still, Republicans were relishing the opportunity to scrutinize the former Democratic president under oath.
Still, Republicans were relishing the opportunity to scrutinize the former Democratic president under oath.
“No one’s accusing anyone of any wrongdoing, but I think the American people have a lot of questions,” Comer said.
Republicans finally get a chance to question Bill Clinton
Republicans have wanted to question Bill Clinton about Epstein for years, especially as conspiracy theories arose following Epstein’s 2019 suicide in a New York jail cell while he faced sex trafficking charges.
Those calls reached a fever pitch late last year when several photos of the former president surfaced in the Department of Justice’s first release of case files on Epstein and Maxwell, a British socialite who was convicted of sex trafficking in December 2021 but maintains she’s innocent. Bill Clinton was photographed on a plane seated alongside a woman, whose face is redacted, with his arm around her. Another photo showed Clinton and Maxwell in a pool with another person whose face was redacted.
Epstein also visited the White House several times during Clinton’s presidency, and the pair later made several international trips together for their humanitarian work. Comer claimed the committee has collected evidence that Epstein visited the White House 17 times and that Bill Clinton flew on Epstein’s airplane 27 times.
“We are only here because he hid it from everyone so well for so long,” Bill Clinton said in his opening statement. “And by the time it came to light with his 2008 guilty plea, I had long stopped associating with him.”
Comer pledged extensive questioning of the former president. He claimed that Hillary Clinton had repeatedly deferred questions about Epstein to her husband.
Bill Clinton went after Comer for calling his wife before the committee, telling him that “including her was simply not right.”
The committee was working to quickly publish a transcript and video recording of her deposition.
Has a precedent been set?
Democrats, who have supported the push to get answers from Bill Clinton, are arguing that it sets a precedent that should also apply to President Donald Trump, a Republican who had his own relationship with Epstein.
“I think that President Trump needs to man up, get in front of this committee and answer the questions and stop calling this investigation a hoax,” said Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee, on Friday.
Comer has pushed back on that idea, saying that Trump has answered questions on Epstein from the press.
Trump on Friday expressed remorse at Bill Clinton being forced to testify. “I like Bill Clinton, and I don’t like seeing him deposed,” he told reporters as he departed the White House en route to Corpus Christi, Texas.
Democrats are also calling for the resignation of Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Lutnick was a longtime neighbor of Epstein in New York City but said on a podcast that he severed ties with Epstein following a 2005 tour of Epstein’s home that disturbed Lutnick and his wife.
The public release of case files showed that Lutnick actually had two engagements with Epstein years later. He attended a 2011 event at Epstein’s home, and in 2012 his family had lunch with Epstein on his private island.
“He should be removed from office and at a minimum should come before the committee,” Garcia said of Lutnick.
Republican Rep. Nancy Mace questioned Hillary Clinton about Lutnick’s relationship to Epstein during the deposition on Thursday. On Friday morning, Mace joined in calling for the commerce secretary to come before the committee.
“I believe we will have the votes to subpoena him,” Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna said.
ISLAMABAD — Pakistan and Afghanistan exchanged cross-border attacks overnight in a dramatic escalation of tensions that led Pakistan’s defense minister to say on Friday that the two countries are in a state of “open war.”
Afghanistan launched an attack on Pakistan late Thursday, saying it was in retaliation for deadly Pakistani airstrikes on Afghan border areas Sunday. Pakistan then carried out airstrikes in Kabul and two other Afghan provinces early Friday, saying it targeted military installations.
Tensions have been high for months. Border clashes in October killed dozens of soldiers, civilians and suspected militants. Pakistan accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban government of harboring militant groups that stage attacks against it and also of allying with its archrival India.
A Qatari-mediated ceasefire ended the intense fighting in October, but several rounds of peace talks in Turkey in November failed to produce a lasting agreement. The two sides have occasionally traded fire since then.
Qatar once again appears to be mediating. Its minister of state, Mohammed bin Abdulaziz al-Khulaifi, spoke Friday with the foreign ministers of Afghanistan and Pakistan in an effort to de-escalate tensions, Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted on X.
Cross-border attack
Afghanistan’s attacks against Pakistani military targets was meant as “a message that our hands can reach their throats and that we will respond to every evil act of Pakistan,” Afghan government spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said. “Pakistan has never sought to resolve problems through dialogue,” he said.
After the Afghan strikes, Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Mohammad Asif posted on X: “Our patience has now run out. Now it is open war between us.”
Asif said Pakistan had hoped for peace in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of NATO forces in 2021 and expected the Taliban, which seized power in the country, to focus on the welfare of the Afghan people and regional stability.
Instead, he said the Taliban had turned Afghanistan “into a colony of India” — a reference to recently improving ties between India and Afghanistan, including offers of enhanced bilateral trade. Pakistan and neighboring India, both nuclear armed powers, have periodically engaged in wars, clashes and skirmishes since gaining independence from British colonial rule in 1947.
‘Exporting terrorism’
Asif also accused Afghanistan of “exporting terrorism,” an allegation Pakistan frequently levies at its neighbor as militant violence in the country surges. Specifically, Pakistan accuses Afghanistan of supporting the Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, as well as outlawed Baloch separatist groups.
Pakistan accuses the TTP, which is separate from but closely allied with Afghanistan’s Taliban, of operating from inside Afghanistan. Both the group and Kabul deny that charge.
“Pakistan’s internal conflict is a purely domestic issue and is not a new one,” Mujahid said Friday, noting the TTP had been active for nearly two decades.
Pakistan has also frequently accused neighboring India of backing the outlawed Baloch Liberation Army and the Pakistani Taliban, allegations New Delhi denies.
Retaliatory strikes
Afghanistan said its attack Thursday was in retaliation for deadly Pakistani airstrikes on Afghan border areas Sunday.
The governments have issued sharply differing casualty claims.
Pakistan’s army spokesperson Lt. Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry said Pakistani air and ground operations killed at least 274 members of Afghan forces and affiliated militants and wounded more than 400, while 12 Pakistani soldiers were killed and 27 others were wounded. One Pakistani soldier was missing in action.
Mujahid rejected the claims of the high number of Afghan casualties as “false.” He said that 55 Pakistani soldiers were killed with the bodies of 23 of them taken to Afghanistan. He also said “many” Pakistani soldiers were captured. Thirteen Afghan soldiers had been killed, he said, and another 22 wounded, while 13 civilians were also wounded.
Later on Friday, the Afghan government said that 19 civilians were killed and 26 others injured when Pakistan struck the provinces of Khost and Paktika in southeastern Afghanistan. Deputy spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat accused Pakistan of having “deliberately targeted the residences of ordinary civilians” and said most of the dead and wounded were women and children.
The Afghan government had reported earlier that a religious school in Paktika province was bombed without providing details of casualties.
The claims of either side could not be independently verified.
Pakistan’s air force carried out airstrikes Friday night targeting military installations in Afghanistan’s Laghman province, two senior Pakistani security officials said. They said an arms depot and two key military installations were destroyed. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media on the record.
Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said Pakistan’s anti-drone systems shot down several small drones over the northwestern cities of Abbottabad, Swabi, and Nowshera Friday. He said they appeared to be part of a failed attack by the Pakistani Taliban, and there were no casualties. Tarar claimed the drone attacks “once again exposed direct linkages between the Afghan Taliban regime and terrorism in Pakistan.”
International calls for restraint
Turkey’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan held separate phone calls with his Pakistani, Afghan, Qatari, and Saudi counterparts on Friday to discuss the conflict, a Turkish official said, without providing details on the talks. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with government policy.
In October, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia had facilitated talks between the sides.
On Friday, Mujahid said Afghanistan had “always emphasized a peaceful solution, and we still want to resolve the problem through dialogue.”
In a statement, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres urged both sides to try to resolve their differences through diplomacy, and to protect civilians.
Russia called for an immediate halt to the fighting and for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, Russian diplomat Zamir Kabulov told news agency RIA Novosti. Kabulov, who is President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy for Afghanistan, said that Moscow would consider mediating between the two countries if asked, according to RIA Novosti.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi urged Pakistan and Afghanistan to resolve their differences through dialogue during the holy month of Ramadan. He also said that Tehran was ready to assist in facilitating dialogue.
Refugees at the border
Pakistani authorities said that dozens of Afghan refugees in the Torkham border area had been relocated to safer places.
Pakistan launched a sweeping crackdown in October 2023 to expel migrants without documents, urging those in the country to leave of their own accord to avoid arrest and forcibly expelling others. Iran also began a crackdown on migrants at around the same time.
Since then, millions have crossed the border into Afghanistan, including people who were born in Pakistan decades ago and had built lives and created businesses there.
In 2025, 2.9 million people returned to Afghanistan, the U.N. refugee agency has said, with nearly 80,000 having returned so far this year.
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced charges Friday against 30 more people who are accused of civil rights violations in a January protest inside a Minnesota church where a pastor works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Bondi said on social media that 25 people were in custody and more arrests would follow. The new indictment comes a month after independent journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort and prominent local activist Nekima Levy Armstrong were charged for their alleged roles in the protest at Cities Church in St. Paul.
Bondi accused the group of attacking a house of worship.
“If you do so, you cannot hide from us — we will find you, arrest you, and prosecute you,” she wrote on social media.
In total, 39 people now face charges of conspiracy against religious freedom and interfering with the right of religious freedom.
A livestreamed video posted on Facebook shows people interrupting services at Cities Church on Jan. 18 by chanting “ICE out” and “Justice for Renee Good,” a reference to the woman who was fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis on Jan. 7.
The new defendants will have an initial court appearance and a magistrate judge will set conditions for their likely release. Lemon and Fort said they were at the church as journalists covering news. Levy Armstrong was the subject of a doctored photo posted by the White House showing her crying during her arrest. The three have pleaded not guilty.
Protesters descended on Cities Church after learning that one of the church’s pastors also serves as an ICE official. The protest drew swift condemnation from Trump administration officials and conservative leaders for disrupting a Sunday service.
The indictment says the “agitators” entered the church in a “coordinated takeover-style attack” and engaged in acts of intimidation and obstruction.
“Young children were left to wonder, as one child put it, if their parents were going to die,” the indictment says.
A lawyer for the church praised the Justice Department for charging more people.
“The First Amendment does not give anyone — regardless of profession, prominence, or politics — license to storm a church and intimidate, threaten, and terrorize families and children worshipping inside,” Doug Wardlow said in a statement.
The revised indictment adds new allegations when compared to the original filed in January.
It says two people “conducted reconnaissance” outside the church a day before the protest and recorded their visit on video, with one saying, “My thoughts are to be able to close up this whole alleyway right here.”
The court filing quotes one protester as chanting in the church, “This ain’t God’s house. This is the house of the devil.”
Levy Armstrong defended the protest shortly after it occurred. She said critics needed to “check their hearts” if they were more concerned about a disruption than the “atrocities that we are experiencing in our community.”
The protest came at a tense time in Minnesota, where the Trump administration sent thousands of federal officers for Operation Metro Surge after a series of public fraud cases where the majority of defendants had Somali roots. Officers frequently deployed tear gas for crowd control in neighborhood clashes with residents, often detaining them along with immigrants.
Good, 37, was shot in Minneapolis. In another fatal shooting a week after the church protest, a federal officer killed 37-year-old nurse Alex Pretti.
Nationwide demonstrations erupted in response, followed by a change in Operation Metro Surge’s leadership and the eventual wind-down of the immigration enforcement operation. Roughly 400 ICE officers and Homeland Security agents were expected to remain in Minneapolis by early March, down from roughly 3,000 at the peak, according to a court filing.
Since then, the Twin Cities have grappled with the impact to communities and the local economy. Minneapolis said it suffered an impact of $203 million due to the operation, with tens of thousands of residents in need of urgent relief assistance.
Separately, a woman who was at the church service has filed a lawsuit against some people who were charged, alleging emotional trauma and an inability to exercise her religion that day.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. is in talks with Havana and raised the possibility of a “friendly takeover of Cuba” without offering any details on what he meant.
Speaking to reporters outside the White House as he left for a trip to Texas, Trump said Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in discussions with Cuban leaders “at a very high level.”
“The Cuban government is talking with us,” the president said. “They have no money. They have no anything right now. But they’re talking to us, and maybe we’ll have a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
He added: “We could very well end up having a friendly takeover of Cuba.”
Trump didn’t clarify his comments but seemed to indicate that the situation with Cuba, a communist-run island that has been among Washington’s bitterest adversaries for decades, was coming to a critical point. The White House did not respond to requests for more information Friday.
The president also said that Cuba “is, to put it mildly, a failed nation” and “they want our help.”
His remarks came two days after the Cuban government reported that a Florida-registered speedboat carrying 10 armed Cubans from the U.S. opened fire on soldiers off the island’s north coast. Four of the armed Cubans were killed, and six were injured in responding gunfire, according to Cuba’s government. One Cuban official also was injured.
Cuba has been on Trump’s mind since at least early January, after U.S. forces ousted one of Havana’s closest allies, Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolás Maduro. Trump suggested in the aftermath of that raid that military action in Cuba might not be necessary because the island’s economy was weak enough — particularly in the absence of oil shipments from Venezuela that stopped after Maduro was taken into custody — to soon collapse on its own.
“We’ve had a lot of years of dealing with Cuba. I’ve been hearing about Cuba since I’m a little boy. But they’re in big trouble,” he said Friday.
Then, noting the exile community from the island living in the U.S., Trump said there could be something coming that “I think [is] very positive for the people that were expelled, or worse, from Cuba and live here.” He did not elaborate.
The U.S. has maintained a strict trade embargo on Cuba since 1962, the year after a failed, CIA-sponsored invasion of the island at the Bay of Pigs. Trump nonetheless indicated earlier this month that talks with Cuban officials were underway.
Cuba’s government confirmed earlier this week that it was communicating with U.S. officials following the shooting of the American boat. Rubio has said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Coast Guard are investigating what happened.
An executive order that Trump signed in late January pledged to impose tariffs on countries providing oil to Cuba, threatening to further cripple a country already plagued by a deepening energy crisis, though U.S. authorities have since indicated that oil from Venezuela can be sold to Cuban interests in some cases.
Carlos Fernández de Cossío, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, posted, then later deleted on Friday that “the US maintains its fuel embargo against Cuba in full force, and its impact as a form of collective punishment is unwavering.”
“Nothing announced in recent days changes this reality,” he wrote on X before the post was removed. “The possibility of conditional sales to the private sector already existed and does not alleviate the impact on the Cuban population.”
Meanwhile, 40-plus U.S. civil society organizations sent a letter to Congress on Friday asking that it “press the Trump administration to reverse its aggressive policy towards Cuba” and saying that efforts to cut oil shipments to the Caribbean island would spark a humanitarian collapse.
Signees included the Alliance of Baptists, ActionAid USA and the Presbyterian Church.
“Policies that deliberately impose hunger and mass hardship on millions of civilians constitute a form of collective punishment, and as such are a grave violation of international humanitarian law,” the letter reads.
It’s a tale as old as time — or about 3,600 years, anyway.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection on Friday announced the seizure of 36 Bronze Age-era short swords and 50 arrowheads following their arrival in Philadelphia in October. Considered cultural artifacts, the items were imported into the United States without proper permitting, and were likely the product of “illicit excavations of burial sites,” federal officials said.
Now, they may soon be returned to Iran, where they are believed to have originated and date from 1600 to 1000 BCE.
CBP tries “to repatriate them to their rightful owners, which in this case would be the country,” said agency spokesperson Stephen Sapp. “So they can retain a piece of their cultural history.”
The Bronze Age is considered to have spanned from 3300 to 1200 BCE, a historical period during which bronze — an alloy of copper and tin — was the prevailing metal used for making weapons and tools. What is today considered Iran was a pivotal area during that time, serving as an important trade route connector and bronze producer.
The items arrived in Philadelphia on Oct. 16 via an express delivery flight from the United Arab Emirates, having been “mis-manifested,” as Sapp put it, as “metal decoration articles.” CBP officers went on to X-ray the shipment, and discovered objects that resembled swords, prompting them to open up the items.
Inside, they saw what appeared to be ancient-looking swords and arrowheads covered in the teal patina of oxidized bronze. Suspecting the items to be of antiquity, the officers detained the shipment for additional investigation.
CBP officers worked with the Antiquities Unit of the department’s National Targeting Center to determine the historical and cultural value of the swords and arrowheads. That unit sought assistance from an archaeologist associated with an unnamed Philadelphia university for more information. The archaeologist later pegged them as hailing from what is today the northeastern area of Iran and dating back as far as 3,600 years.
Being that old, the items were considered to be the historical and cultural property of their origin nation. Many countries, federal officials noted, have laws that require official permission to export such items.
Investigators also reached out to the person who imported the items, and found that they did not have the documentation that would allow them to obtain the objects. As a result, even if the items were legally purchased, they were not able to be lawfully imported into the United States.
“That’s the key thing. If it is considered an artifact, or historical or cultural property of a country, that country has to permit that commodity leaving,” Sapp said. “Generally, you are going to be able find there is a black market — or a market, period — for all things.”
Sapp added that no criminal charges have been filed in the incident. However, he noted that the importer is now known to investigators, and lost the shipment as a result of the investigation.
Elliot N. Ortiz, CBP’s acting area port director in Philadelphia, said in a statement that officers “strive to rescue cultural artifacts from the grips of illicit international traders.” Items are often smuggled into the United States using “deceptive practices” that both violate import laws and “undermine efforts to preserve and protect the integrity of cultural history,” he added.
The investigation lasted about four months — a length of time Sapp said is not unusual in cases like this. Largely, he added, it comes down to investigators doing the due diligence when it comes to seeking the importer’s permitting, as well as allowing archaeologists to properly investigate the items to determine their age and origin.
“We aren’t going to give an archaeologist a day or two to look at this stuff,” Sapp said. “They need to be able to make sure they are accurate to the best of their ability, so when they give their determination, we can trust that to be truthful.”
Now, CBP officers will hold on to the items until the agency issues a disposition order. When that will happen exactly, Sapp said, has not yet been determined.
NOGALES, Mexico — Lidia Hernandez has been searching for her son, lost to drug violence in Mexico, for seven years. But she spent this week scouring rocky dirt for clues in the disappearance of a far more well-known crime victim — Nancy Guthrie.
On Sunday, Hernandez posted fliers on the mailbox at Guthrie’s home in the Catalina Foothills north of Tucson. On Wednesday, she led a group of other “Searching Mothers” in prayer across the border in Mexico as they tried to find out whether Guthrie had been taken there. On Thursday, she returned to Guthrie’s neighborhood once again.
Hernandez said her group, the Searching Mothers of Sonora, feels authorities aren’t doing enough to find Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of “Today” anchor Savannah Guthrie who wasreported missing on Feb. 1.
It’s a common refrain for the mothers, who have used pickaxes and shovels to locate hundreds of bodies of victims of drug and gang violence in Mexico themselves over the years, decrying government inaction all the while.
“They’re not looking for her!” Hernandez, 66, a retired food service worker from Nogales, Arizona, said. “So we have to step in.”
Lidia Hernandez leads the Searching Mothers of Sonora in prayer during their search for Nancy Guthrie on Wednesday in Nogales, Mexico.
As the investigation entered its fourth week, unauthorized search parties have exacerbated the chaos surrounding the high-profile case, which has gripped the nation and attracted media, true-crime streamers and curiosity seekers to the area around Guthrie’s spacious home.
The Pima County Sheriff’s Department has tried to calm the situation, asking in a statement Saturday that volunteer searchers back off and let the investigators do their jobs. On Thursday they instituted new parking restrictions around the house.
“We appreciate their concern, and we all want to find Nancy, but this work is best left to professionals,” the sheriff’s office said on a post on X.
Despite the sheriff’s office admonitions, the informal search parties have continued, including members of the United Cajun Navy — a volunteer group that normallyresponds tohurricanes — arriving in town midweek with sniffer dogs and drones. The sheriff’s office referred additional questions about the new searchers back to its Saturday post.
The Searching Mothers hike through Nogales, Mexico, during their search.
This week, the pace of the investigation appeared to slow, as investigators await the results of a complicated DNA test that could take weeks, authorities have said. Separately, ABC News reported that the FBI was downscaling its operations in Tucson and moving agents back to Phoenix. But thousands of citizens continue to call in tips to the FBI — more than 23,000 so far, authorities said. The Guthrie family this week offered a $1 million private award for informationabout their mother’s whereabouts.
“We still believe in a miracle,” Savannah Guthrie said in an Instagram video.
Amateur sleuths — especially those analyzing clues in web forums — have proliferated in recent years and sometimes do more harm than good, experts say. In the Guthrie case, for example, some have continued to speculate online that the Guthrie family could be involved, despite the fact that Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos cleared them as suspects.
Tricia Arrington Griffith, who manages the web forum for true-crime buffs called Websleuths, attributes the intense interest in the case to Savannah Guthrie’s fame and the possibility that her mother could still be alive.
“Time of the essence,” she said. “You tell people somebody out there is in trouble and with a bad guy and might die? People will move heaven and earth to try and help.”
On Wednesday, Hernandez and the Searching Mothers traveled on a dirt road, deep with ruts about an hour south of Guthrie’s home, to a remote area with cacti and mesquite trees near the U.S.-Mexico border. The border wall, a rust-colored ribbon, unspooled in the northern distance over the dun-colored landscape.
Hernandez led the group in prayer before they hoisted shovels and metal rods and began combing the earth, looking for disturbed ground, which might indicate a burial. If they saw a telltale disturbance, they began immediately driving metal rods deep into the ground and pulling them back, sniffing the ends for the smell of a decomposing corpse.
The Searching Mothers inspect a backpack found in a canyon commonly used by border crossers.
For Hernandez, the grim work has been a boon, a constructive activity she has embraced in the pain and uncertainty she has lived with since her son, Jorge, 28, disappeared in Nogales on Nov. 4, 2019. Like the other mothers, she wears a white T-shirt with a purple logo andphoto of her son above the word “DISAPPEARED.”
When Nancy Guthrie vanished, she felt an immediate affinity for the Guthrie family, she said.
“It was pain, and sadness, the same feeling that the mothers go through — every day, every week, every year,” she said. “The pain is permanent.”
The Searching Mothers had received an anonymous tip, the group’s leader, Ceci Patricia Flores Armenta, said, pointing them to this area — a swath of forested land crisscrossed with narrow pathways used by migrants and drug traffickers.
“They told us, ‘If they wanted to take her across to Mexico, this would have been the best way to take her,’” she said.
She brushed off criticism from authorities that the volunteer searchers are at risk of hampering the investigation.
“The [police] are not searching underground — they’re doing investigations, they’re waiting for someone to hand her over alive, or she’s in a place where they won’t be able to find her,” Flores said. “If we managed to find her, with our technology — which is only a shovel and a bar — I think they’d end up embarrassed.”
She continued: “They say we’re violating the investigation, but what investigation? They’ve had a month and they haven’t been able to resolve the case. And so they must let the mothers participate.”
Investigators for Mexico’s lead criminal agency do not believe Guthrie has been taken across the border, according to Agent Alberto Osona Guerrero, who was at the scene of mothers’ search Wednesday.
“The truth is, it’s very difficult to transport a person against their will and cross them into Mexico,” Osona Guerrero said. The mothers might find a body, he said, but likely not the one they’re looking for.
Flores founded the group in 2019 to search for the tens of thousands of missing — more than 130,000 according to the government’s last count — victims of drug cartels and gang violence who are left in shallow graves or burned. She has two sons who have been kidnapped, and despite her public pressure, authorities have given her no indication of their whereabouts.
The mothers don’t try to find the perpetrators of crimes, instead focusing on reuniting families or providing closure when they find remains, whichthey call “treasures.” They’ve had some success. Volunteer mother groups in Flores’s home state of Sonora have found five missing people just this year, according to the state’s commission on missing people.
In 2024, Flores and other mothers searching outside Mexico City found a clandestine dumping ground filled with human remains, and was criticized by a local prosecutor for disturbing evidence, according to an Associated Press account of the discovery. Her response? Do your job.
On Wednesday near the border, Flores and other volunteers found a spent shell casing on the ground. Flores directed them where to dig.
“Here, this is where they would have fallen,” she said, as the volunteers began swinging pickaxes, the sound of metal hitting rock resonating through the small grove of trees. But after digging for an hour, they found nothing.
Ceci Patricia Flores Armenta, founder of the Searching Mothers of Sonora, smells the dirt for any sign of a decomposing corpse.
Other searchers, including Yolanda Veronica Paredes, a local resident who also lost her son in a kidnapping, followed a stream bed deep into the hills, toting their shovels. They passed a small lake, the bleached ribs of a dead cow, a shrine to the Virgin Mary and the detritus of wanderers along the narrow path — a sock, an empty Pall Mall package, a discarded bottle of orange soda.
They reached a trash pile in the woods and began to dig. Soon, Paredes pulled up a clump of earth and sniffed deeply.
“I smell something dead!” she said. She and the other searchers began digging and pulled up more trash, including a fraying windbreaker. But eventually they reached a point that required stronger tools than what they had brought with them. They conferred and decided to return the following day — with a pickax.
As the search wrapped up for the day, Fernandez said she would continue looking for Guthrie as long as her disappearance remains unsolved. But she said her hope in finding her alive was waning and believed her spirit had left the earth.
