President Trump said Sunday that the ceasefire with Iran is on “massive life support,” rejecting Tehran’s latest counterproposal to end a conflict now in its eleventh week. The administration imposed sanctions Monday on twelve companies and individuals it says are facilitating the sale and shipment of Iranian oil to China. Several administration officials told Axios that the president is now more seriously considering a resumption of major combat operations.
“I would say the ceasefire is on massive life support, where the doctor walks in and says, ‘Sir, your loved one has approximately a 1% chance of living,’” Trump said, according to CNN.
The war began with U.S. strikes on February 28 and has stalled oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, where roughly twenty thousand seafarers remain stranded aboard some 1,600 ships, as Al Jazeera reported last week. The United States and Iran have been in some form of diplomatic confrontation for forty-seven years, since the 1979 hostage crisis. They came closest to a negotiated resolution in 2015, when the Obama administration and five other world powers reached the JCPOA nuclear agreement, which limited Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief. The U.S. withdrew from that deal in 2018. The current talks aren’t expected to advance significantly until Trump meets Chinese President Xi Jinping later this week, CNN reported.
President Trump told CBS News on Monday that he wants to suspend the federal gasoline tax “for a period of time,” as the national average price at the pump has risen more than fifty percent since the war began. Regular gasoline cost just under three dollars a gallon before February 28. On Sunday, the national average hit $4.52, according to AAA data reported by NPR. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Monday that the administration is “open” to the idea, NBC News reported.
“Yup, we’re going to take off the gas tax for a period of time, and when gas goes down, we’ll let it phase back in,” Trump told CBS News.
The federal excise tax on gasoline is 18.4 cents per gallon. On diesel, it is 24.4 cents. Suspending it requires an act of Congress. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said Monday he would introduce legislation to do so. Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida said she plans to introduce a companion bill in the House, CNBC reported. The suspension would cost the federal government approximately half a billion dollars a week. The revenue funds the Highway Trust Fund, which pays for road and bridge maintenance across the country.
The last serious push for a federal gas tax holiday came in 2008, when gasoline prices were climbing toward a then-record national average of $4.11 a gallon that July. Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain both supported the idea during the presidential primary. Senator Barack Obama opposed it, calling it a “gimmick” that would save drivers about thirty dollars over a summer. The tax wasn’t suspended. Eighteen years later, the proposal is back, the price is higher, and the math is similar. At 18.4 cents per gallon, a twelve-gallon fill-up would cost about $2.21 less, NPR reported.
Péter Magyar took the oath of office as Hungary’s prime minister on Saturday, ending sixteen years of rule by Viktor Orbán. Magyar’s center-right Tisza Party won 141 of the country’s 199 parliamentary seats in April’s election, the largest parliamentary majority in Hungary’s post-Communist history, the Washington Post reported.
“I’m not standing here because I’m different than anyone else in the country,” Magyar told lawmakers during the ceremony. “I stand here because millions of Hungarians decided that they want change.”
The European Union flag was raised on the parliament building’s facade for the first time since 2014, when Orbán ordered it removed, Euronews reported. Magyar, who is forty-five, campaigned on restoring Budapest’s relationship with the EU, reviving an economy that stagnated under Orbán, and addressing a budget deficit that reached nearly three quarters of its full-year target by April.
In May 1989, thirty-seven years ago this month, Hungary cut the barbed wire along its border with Austria. It was one of the first acts that led to the fall of the Iron Curtain. Thousands of East Germans crossed through, and the architecture of Communist rule in Central Europe began to collapse. Hungary has been on both sides of that story now. It tore down a barrier in 1989. It built a new fence along its southern border in 2015. On Saturday, it hung the EU flag back up.
Seventeen American passengers from the cruise ship MV Hondius arrived at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s National Quarantine Unit early Monday for evaluation and monitoring, CNN reported. The Dutch-flagged vessel, which left Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1 for an Atlantic crossing, has been at the center of a hantavirus outbreak that has killed three passengers and confirmed at least seven cases since late April.
The World Health Organization confirmed that the pathogen is the Andes virus, the only hantavirus strain documented to spread from person to person, though such transmission is rare and requires close, prolonged contact. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote in an open letter to residents of Tenerife, where the ship anchored over the weekend: “This is not another COVID. And the risk to the public is low,” UN News reported.
Health authorities in more than a dozen countries are now tracking passengers who disembarked before the outbreak was formally identified on May 2. The first recognized outbreak of hantavirus in the United States came in 1993 in the Four Corners region of the Southwest, when a previously unknown strain killed multiple people on the Navajo Nation. That strain doesn’t spread between humans. The Andes variant does, which is what makes this outbreak different and what put seventeen Americans in a quarantine unit in Nebraska on a Monday morning.
The Israeli military disclosed Monday that troops conducted a weeklong raid north of Lebanon’s Litani River, approximately ten kilometers from the Israeli border, to destroy Hezbollah positions. The operation was led by the Golani Brigade’s Reconnaissance Unit. The IDF said troops achieved “operational control” over the area and encountered dozens of Hezbollah operatives in close-quarters combat. Troops located tunnels, weapons depots, and rocket launchers during the operation, the military said. Several soldiers were lightly injured, the Times of Israel reported.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, adopted in August 2006 to end that summer’s war between Israel and Hezbollah, established the Litani River as the line south of which Hezbollah was supposed to disarm and north of which Israeli forces were supposed to withdraw. That resolution is nearly twenty years old. Neither side honored it fully. The crossing this week was the first significant Israeli military operation north of the river since 2006.
The S&P 500 closed at 7,412.84 on Monday, a record. The Russell 2000 closed at 2,868.58, also a record. The Nasdaq closed at 26,274.13. All three indices reached new highs on a day when global oil benchmarks rose nearly three percent on concerns about the Iran conflict, TheStreet reported. Technology and energy stocks led the advance, though gains slowed in the final hour of trading as oil prices settled higher.
And one good thing.
A study published in JAMA last month found that suicide deaths among Americans aged fifteen to thirty-four fell eleven percent in the two and a half years after the launch of the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in July 2022. That translates to approximately 4,300 fewer deaths than researchers expected based on prior trends, NPR reported. The study, which examined data from all fifty states and the District of Columbia, found the effect was strongest where the most calls were answered. States with the highest call volume saw an eighteen percent decline.
“This is one of those rare moments in public health where we can say that something might actually be working,” Dr. Vishal Patel of Harvard Medical School told STAT News.
The lifeline replaced the old ten-digit National Suicide Prevention Hotline number with three digits. The idea was simple: make it easier to call. Four thousand three hundred people are alive who the models say wouldn’t be. The phone rang, and someone answered.
