After a two-hour meeting with his national security team in the White House Situation Room on Friday, President Trump told reporters he would make a “final determination” on a proposed framework to extend the Iran ceasefire, according to ABC News. Trump wrote on social media that any deal requires Iran to “never have a Nuclear Weapon or Bomb” and that the Strait of Hormuz must be “immediately open, no tolls, for unrestricted shipping traffic.”
Under the proposed framework, the existing ceasefire would extend by 60 days. Iran would remove all sea mines from the Strait within 30 days, and the US naval blockade would lift proportionally as commercial shipping resumed. Iran would commit formally not to pursue a nuclear weapon. Bloomberg reported that Vice President JD Vance described the US as “very close” to a memorandum of understanding. Iran’s Tasnim News Agency said Friday that the text still hasn’t been finalized from Tehran’s side.
The ceasefire has been in place since April 8. It has survived two previous extensions. Negotiators have something resembling a draft. The difference between Thursday and Friday is that the president walked into the Situation Room and came out saying the final call was his.
In September 1978, President Carter personally convened President Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Begin of Israel at Camp David, after two years of Egyptian-Israeli talks that hadn’t closed. He spent thirteen days there with them and refused to declare the talks over until they’d produced a result. The Camp David Accords were signed September 17. A president deciding to take personal ownership of a deal is a different thing from a president waiting for his negotiators to finish. Whether that’s what happened Friday in the Situation Room is the question going into the weekend.
A federal judge ruled Thursday that the Trump name must come off the Kennedy Center within 14 days, NPR reported. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ordered all signage and digital materials referencing the “Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts” or any similar variant removed. The judge also temporarily blocked the administration’s plan to close the center starting in July for a two-year renovation, NBC News reported. The lawsuit was brought by US Representative Joyce Beatty, Democrat of Ohio.
In his ruling, Judge Cooper wrote: “The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”
Congress named the center the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by an act signed by President Johnson on January 23, 1964, seven weeks after Kennedy’s assassination. The building opened September 8, 1971, and has carried that name for 55 years. The Trump administration took control of the board of trustees earlier this year. There are many things a board of trustees can do unilaterally. Thursday’s ruling held that renaming the building isn’t one of them.
Massachusetts certified a union representing nearly 70,000 Uber and Lyft drivers operating in the state on Friday, PBS News reported. The Massachusetts Department of Labor Relations granted the certification to the App Drivers Union, backed by 32BJ SEIU and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Labor leaders called it the largest private-sector organizing win since Ford Motor Company workers unionized in June 1941.
Voters made it possible in November 2024, when a ballot measure passed creating a framework for gig workers classified as independent contractors to organize and bargain collectively over pay and benefits, WBUR reported. Drivers aren’t employees under state law. The ballot measure created something that didn’t exist before in American labor law: collective bargaining rights for workers who don’t technically have an employer in the traditional legal sense.
Ford held out against the UAW longer than any of the major American automakers. General Motors and Chrysler had both signed union contracts in 1937, after the sit-down strikes. Ford management resisted until workers voted 70 percent in favor in May 1941, and the company concluded that further resistance cost more than agreement. The 1941 Ford contract helped set the terms for labor relations across American manufacturing for a generation. What Massachusetts certified Friday isn’t a factory floor, but the question is the same one Ford workers asked in 1941: who decides the terms of work?
Asia’s premier defense conference, the Shangri-La Dialogue, opened Friday in Singapore with doubts about American priorities as the dominant subject, NPR reported. Vietnamese leader To Lam delivered the opening keynote. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is scheduled to speak Saturday. Bloomberg reported that China took a notably low-key posture this year, largely leaving the American delegation to set the tone.
It has operated annually since 2002. This year’s opening comes two weeks after Trump’s visit to Beijing, where Chinese President Xi Jinping warned that the US and China could clash over Taiwan if the issue wasn’t handled carefully. The region’s defense officials are in Singapore knowing what was said in Beijing. They’re waiting to learn what it means.
The US State Department designated two of Brazil’s largest criminal organizations as foreign terrorist organizations Thursday, with the classifications taking effect June 5, the Washington Post reported. Comando Vermelho, known as Red Command, and Primeiro Comando da Capital, or PCC, were also listed as Specially Designated Global Terrorists. The State Department said the two organizations command thousands of members and have carried out attacks against Brazilian police officers, public officials, and civilians.
Brazil’s government has opposed the designations, arguing that Red Command and PCC don’t qualify as terrorist organizations under Brazilian law because their actions are driven by economic interests and territorial control rather than ideology. The designations followed a White House visit by Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who told reporters afterward he had requested the move. There are now two governments that have classified the same organizations in different legal categories. What that gap produces in practice, for companies operating in Brazil, for extradition requests, for cooperation between law enforcement agencies, will take some time to clarify.
This week in the Letters section, Lorraine Kessler published Since You Asked: How to Make Friends as an Adult, and it does what her best columns do: it takes a subject that sounds simple and treats it as the genuinely hard thing it is. Adult friendship doesn’t get the serious attention it deserves in most advice writing. Lorraine gives it that attention. She’s specific, direct, and writes from somewhere real. If you haven’t found her column yet, Friday is a good day to start.
