Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrived in Islamabad Friday evening, met with Pakistan’s military chief Saturday morning, and left the country without agreeing to meet American negotiators. Within hours, President Trump announced that special envoy Steve Witkoff and senior adviser Jared Kushner wouldn’t be making the trip.
“Too much time wasted on traveling, too much work!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, CNBC reported. He cited what he called “tremendous infighting and confusion” within Iran’s leadership. “Nobody knows who is in charge, including them.”
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei had said earlier Saturday that “no meeting is planned to take place between Iran and the U.S.,” NPR reported. The Iranian delegation departed for Muscat, Oman. Trump later said Iran submitted a revised proposal within minutes of his announcement, calling it “much better” than the previous version but “still not adequate,” CNN reported.
This is day 57 of the conflict that began February 28, when the United States and Israel launched military operations against Iran. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Oil is above $100 a barrel. The two countries haven’t sat across a table from each other.
In January 1981, the United States and Iran completed the Algiers Accords to secure the release of fifty-two American hostages. The negotiations were conducted entirely through Algerian intermediaries because neither government would meet face to face. The crisis lasted 444 days. The hostages came home on January 20, 1981, minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president. Forty-five years later, the two nations still don’t have formal diplomatic relations.
The Justice Department on Friday expanded the federal execution protocol to include firing squads, electrocution, and gas, the department announced. It also reinstated the single-drug lethal injection method used during the first Trump administration, when thirteen federal executions were carried out between July 2020 and January 2021, more than under any president in modern history, NPR reported.
“The prior administration failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to pursue and carry out the ultimate punishment against the most dangerous criminals, including terrorists, child murderers, and cop killers,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in the department’s statement.
Three people are currently on federal death row: Robert Bowers, who killed eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.
Hours later, Pope Leo XIV released a prerecorded video message to DePaul University in Chicago, marking the fifteenth anniversary of Illinois’s abolition of the death penalty. “We affirm that the dignity of the person is not lost even after very serious crimes are committed,” the pope said, NPR reported.
On June 29, 1972, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty as then applied constituted cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. The decision vacated the sentences of more than 600 people on death row. Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court upheld revised capital punishment statutes. The federal government then executed no one between 2003 and 2020. Seventeen years. Then thirteen executions in six months.
The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index fell to 49.8 in its final April reading, the lowest level in the survey’s seventy-four-year history, Bloomberg reported. Year-ahead inflation expectations jumped to 4.7 percent from 3.8 percent in March, the largest one-month increase since April 2025.
“Military and diplomatic developments that do not lift supply constraints or lower energy prices are unlikely to buoy consumers,” said Joanne Hsu, the survey’s director, Reuters reported. The decline crossed every demographic: age, income, education, political affiliation.
The previous record was 50.0, set in June 2022, when annual inflation reached 9.1 percent. Gas prices, which have roughly doubled since the Strait of Hormuz closed in late February, are the most visible driver. But the survey captures something broader than the price at the pump. It measures whether people believe things are going to get better. Right now, by the numbers, fewer Americans believe that than at any point since the university started asking the question in 1952.
In the Mississippi Delta, a seventy-three-year-old corn farmer named Sledge Taylor is standing in his fields outside Como, Mississippi, deciding whether to fertilize this year.
His corn is between vegetative stages, the window when nitrogen goes into the ground. But fertilizer prices have spiked because the Strait of Hormuz is closed, choking supply routes. And corn prices have dropped because tariffs and retaliatory trade measures have gutted the export markets that Delta farmers depend on. China has largely stopped buying American soybeans. Rice exports to Latin America have cratered. Cotton prices have bottomed out.
“I may not do it this year,” Taylor told NPR, “because of the price of nitrogen and the low price of corn,” NPR reported. A Farmer Bridge Assistance Program payment he received in March covered about 20 percent of what he actually lost last year. His patience with the administration, he said, is “wearing thin.”
Mississippi’s statewide agricultural losses are estimated at $550 million. Another farmer, Anthony Bland, told NPR: “With tariffs on top of the war, we know the results aren’t going to get any better.”
In the 1980s, falling commodity prices, soaring interest rates, and collapsed export markets produced what became known as the Farm Crisis. Thousands of family operations across the Midwest went into foreclosure. The causes were different. The arithmetic of a farmer standing in a field, calculating whether the cost of inputs justifies the price of what comes out, was the same.
The Trump administration is in advanced talks to provide Spirit Airlines with a $500 million loan that could give the federal government a 90 percent stake in the carrier, CNN reported. Spirit is in bankruptcy for the second time in a year. The White House is considering invoking the Defense Production Act, a 1950 law enacted at the start of the Korean War that gives the president broad authority to direct production of goods deemed critical to national defense. Under the proposed arrangement, the Pentagon would use Spirit’s excess seat capacity for troop transport and military cargo, Fortune reported.
The proposal has drawn opposition from within the president’s own party. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, called it “an absolutely TERRIBLE idea,” the Hill reported. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has also argued against the deal, NBC News reported.
In 1979, Congress passed the Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act, authorizing $1.5 billion in federal loan guarantees to keep the automaker from collapsing. Chrysler survived, repaid the loans ahead of schedule by 1983, and returned to profitability. The question then was the same question now: whether the government should use public money to rescue a private company that failed in the marketplace.
And on Florida’s Treasure Coast, volunteers and trained monitors have spent the past two months carrying sea turtle eggs to safety, one nest at a time.
Since March, the crews have moved 4,106 eggs from 45 nests. Forty-four of those nests belonged to leatherback turtles, holding 3,984 eggs. One was a loggerhead nest, with 122. Both species are endangered. Beach renourishment projects, the bulldozers and dump trucks sent to rebuild eroding shoreline, roll through the sand during nesting season. The monitors patrol starting at nine each night. When they find a nest in the path of the equipment, they remove each egg by hand, place it without rotating into a sand-lined container, and rebuild the nest at a safe site, Good Good Good reported.
It is Saturday. This was the week peace talks with Iran collapsed before they started, the Justice Department added firing squads to its execution protocols, consumer confidence fell to a level never recorded in seventy-four years of measurement, and a farmer in Mississippi weighed whether to put fertilizer in the ground. And on a stretch of Atlantic coastline, in the dark, people are carrying turtle eggs by hand to where the bulldozers can’t reach them. That’s the day.
