Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter and Lebanese Ambassador Nada Hamadeh Moawad met at the State Department on Tuesday for the first direct talks between their governments since Israel launched Operation Eternal Darkness against Lebanon six days ago, the Hill reported. U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa, working under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, mediated the session, according to News9Live.
The two ambassadors spoke by phone over the weekend to arrange the meeting. What they couldn’t agree on before sitting down was the purpose of it. Israel says it won’t discuss a ceasefire with Hezbollah, Al Jazeera reported. Lebanon says any negotiations must begin with one, a Lebanese government official told AFP, according to Al Jazeera. Pakistan, which brokered the broader U.S.-Iran ceasefire, says Lebanon is covered by the agreement. Israel’s prime minister says it isn’t.
In Islamabad, the talks between Vice President JD Vance’s delegation and Iran’s seventy-one-member team entered their fourth day, NPR reported. Three issues have dominated the table: the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium, and the Israeli offensive in Lebanon, according to NPR. If confirmed as direct and face-to-face, these are the highest-level negotiations between Washington and Tehran since the founding of the Islamic Republic in 1979. The two-week ceasefire that brought both sides to Pakistan expires April 21. One week from today.
On October 30, 1991, the Madrid Conference opened in Spain’s Royal Palace. It was the first time Israel had sat at the same table as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and a Palestinian delegation since the Lausanne Conference of 1949, according to the State Department’s Office of the Historian. Those talks didn’t produce a peace agreement. They produced bilateral negotiations, which moved to Washington that December and eventually led to the Oslo Accords in 1993. Madrid didn’t end anything. It started a process. The process took years. Some of it remains unfinished thirty-five years later. Processes are like that. They begin.
Congress returned to Washington on Tuesday after a two-week Easter recess, and the Department of Homeland Security’s partial shutdown came back with it. It’s day sixty.
The shutdown began February 14 after Congress failed to agree on funding for immigration enforcement operations at ICE and Customs and Border Protection, NBC News reported. Democrats have demanded specific guardrails on enforcement operations before approving full DHS funding. On March 29, the lapse surpassed the 2025 federal government shutdown to become the longest in American history. Republican leaders announced a two-track approach before the recess: fund most of DHS through the Senate’s bipartisan bill, then address ICE and Border Patrol separately through party-line legislation, Federal News Network reported.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin recalled all furloughed staff to their next scheduled shifts despite the funding lapse, and back pay began arriving Friday, Federal News Network reported. TSA officers worked without paychecks for weeks while security lines at airports stretched for hours.
The International Monetary Fund released its full World Economic Outlook on Tuesday, and the lead chapter carried a title that read like a summary of the present moment: “The Macroeconomics of Defense Spending, Conflicts, and Recovery,” according to the IMF.
The findings aren’t theoretical. In a typical defense spending boom, military outlays rise by about 2.7 percentage points of GDP over two and a half years, with roughly two-thirds financed through deficit, the IMF found. In countries where fighting occurs, economic output falls by about 3 percent at the onset and keeps falling, reaching cumulative losses of roughly 7 percent within five years. Recoveries depend critically on sustained peace. The report draws on global conflict data going back to the end of World War II, according to the IMF.
The report was published on day forty-seven of the Iran war, while talks to end it were underway on two continents. The IMF’s January forecast projected 3.3 percent global growth for 2026. Tuesday’s report updates that projection through the lens of a world that has added a major military conflict since January, and the defense spending to go with it.
The story that deserves more attention than it’s getting: March 2026 was the hottest March on record for the continental United States, and the margin was unlike anything in 132 years of federal recordkeeping, NOAA reported.
The average temperature was 50.85 degrees Fahrenheit, 9.35 degrees above the 20th-century average. That’s the first time any month has exceeded 9 degrees above the baseline, according to NOAA. Ten states recorded their warmest March: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. More than 19,800 daily temperature records were broken for heat across the country, the Hill reported. More than 1,400 counties, covering over half the continental land area and a third of the population, set their single warmest March day on record, NOAA confirmed.
The January-through-March period was also the driest on record for the contiguous United States, breaking a mark that had stood since 1910, according to NOAA. The hottest and the driest, in the same three months.
At least fifty newly created accounts on the prediction market platform Polymarket placed substantial bets on a U.S.-Iran ceasefire in the hours and minutes before President Trump announced the deal on social media last week, NPR reported. Those were the only bets made through those accounts.
It wasn’t the first time. In January, an anonymous user made $400,000 by betting that Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro would be removed from office, hours before it happened. Researchers at Harvard University, using public blockchain data, estimated that $143 million in profits have been made on Polymarket by individuals who may have had prior knowledge of outcomes, from geopolitical events to celebrity announcements, according to NPR.
Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York, who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, sent a letter Thursday to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission asking the regulator to investigate, NPR reported. There are two bills pending in Congress, one in each chamber, both with bipartisan sponsors.
Prediction markets aren’t new. Betting on foreknowledge of government decisions is as old as governments. The question is whether a platform that runs on a public blockchain has made it easier to do, and harder to ignore.
And in Croatia, the last of 107,000 landmines has been pulled from the ground.
Croatia completed its demining operations on March 1, fulfilling its obligations under the Ottawa Convention, Croatia Week reported. It took thirty years. The mines were left over from the Croatian War of Independence, which lasted from 1991 to 1995 as Yugoslavia broke apart. Over 870 square kilometers of land had to be cleared, along with roughly 470,000 pieces of unexploded ordnance. The effort cost 1.2 billion euros, according to the European Commission. More than 200 people were killed by the mines they were trying to remove.
Thirty years is a long time to clean up a four-year war. Deminers worked in marked fields where the ground could kill them for doing their jobs. The last mine has been found. The country is clear. That’s the day.
