President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the United States would give Iran “one shot” at a diplomatic agreement to end the 2026 war. The conflict, launched by the U.S. and Israel on February 28, has been under a ceasefire for weeks. Pakistan’s army chief, General Asim Munir, has been traveling between capitals as an informal intermediary. U.S. officials say the talks have narrowed some gaps without closing them, Iran International reported.
The deadlock is specific. Washington is asking Iran to halt its nuclear program for at least ten years and surrender an estimated 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Tehran is asking for something else first: a formal end to the war, a lifting of sanctions, and a conclusion to the U.S. naval blockade on its ports, with the nuclear question deferred to a later stage. Each side is asking the other to go first.
In July 2015, when the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was signed after two years of negotiations, it required Iran to reduce its enriched uranium stockpile by 97 percent and cap enrichment at 3.67 percent purity, well below weapons-grade, for fifteen years. Sanctions were lifted in exchange. Trump withdrew from the agreement in May 2018. Iran rebuilt its stockpile in the years after. The current 440-kilogram figure is the arithmetic result.
“One shot” is how the White House described its posture Wednesday. The ceasefire is holding. A deal has not been reached.
Former Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts died Tuesday at his home in Ogunquit, Maine, CNBC reported. He was 86 and had been in hospice care for congestive heart failure. Frank served thirty-two years in the House and chaired the House Financial Services Committee from 2007 to 2011, which put him at the center of the Congressional response to the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, signed by President Obama in July 2010, imposed new liquidity requirements and stress tests on large banks, established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and put in place the Volcker Rule limiting banks’ use of customer deposits for proprietary trading. Supporters called it the most significant financial regulatory overhaul since the New Deal. Its critics argued it imposed excessive costs on smaller institutions. Parts of it were rolled back in 2018 under legislation that exempted banks under $250 billion in assets from some of the strictest requirements.
In 1987, Frank became the first member of Congress to voluntarily come out as gay. He did this at a moment when the political climate wasn’t sympathetic and the AIDS crisis was killing tens of thousands of Americans. He served another twenty-four years in Congress after that.
Two police officers who helped defend the Capitol on January 6, 2021, filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday seeking to block payments from a new $1.8 billion fund created by the Department of Justice, the Washington Post reported. The plaintiffs are Harry Dunn, a former U.S. Capitol Police officer, and Daniel Hodges, an active officer of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington. Both were at the Capitol on January 6.
The fund, which the administration calls the Anti-Weaponization Fund, was created as part of a settlement in which Trump dropped a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax records. In their complaint, Dunn and Hodges argue the fund “is illegal,” that “no statute authorizes its creation,” and that “the settlement on which it is premised is a corrupt sham.”
Their constitutional argument rests on the Fourteenth Amendment. Ratified in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended, Section 4 states that neither the United States nor any state shall “assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” The language was written to prevent the federal government from compensating those who had taken up arms against it. Dunn and Hodges argue that language applies here because the fund’s likely beneficiaries include people convicted of or charged with offenses connected to the January 6 assault.
The Sandy Fire continued to burn in Simi Valley on Thursday morning, with more than 2,100 acres scorched and 22 percent of the blaze contained, NBC Los Angeles reported. More than 43,000 residents remain under evacuation orders. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, which sits in the hills above the valley, closed Wednesday as a precaution. Simi Valley is about thirty miles northwest of Los Angeles.
The fire began Monday when a tractor clearing brush struck a rock and ignited dry chaparral. Southern California is under red-flag conditions this week, with low humidity and offshore winds. At least one home has been destroyed. The Sandy Fire is the third-largest wildfire currently burning in California.
The World Health Organization declared the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on May 17, the WHO announced. A Public Health Emergency of International Concern is the WHO’s highest level of alert, the same designation used for COVID-19 in January 2020 and for the mpox outbreak in July 2022. The current outbreak has produced more than 500 suspected cases and at least 130 suspected deaths. The virus is Bundibugyo, a species of Ebola for which there are no approved vaccines or therapeutics. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday he was concerned about the “scale and speed” of the spread, NPR reported. The CDC has restricted travel from the DRC.
The 2014-2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak, the largest in recorded history, killed more than 11,000 people across Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. That outbreak also began as a cluster that didn’t draw sustained international attention in its early weeks. Global health surveillance is stronger now, and there’s more recent institutional memory of how fast an outbreak can escalate if the early response window closes. The CDC’s confirmation earlier this week that an American working in Congo had tested positive will bring more attention to an outbreak that’s been underreported in American media for weeks.
The International Booker Prize was awarded Tuesday evening in London to Taiwan Travelogue, a novel by Taiwanese author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, NPR reported. It’s the first work translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the prize. The announcement was made at Tate Modern.
The novel is set in 1930s Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule and follows a Japanese author and her Taiwanese interpreter on a government-sponsored tour. The International Booker is awarded each year to the best work of fiction translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. Yáng and King are the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners in the prize’s history.
And one more thing worth reading.
Ruben Navarro writes about what a sommelier actually is, and what the work genuinely requires, in “What Is a Sommelier”, publishing tomorrow in Living. It’s a short title for a question with a longer answer: the training, the palate work, the professional hierarchy of the wine world, and what it means to know something well enough to guide someone else toward it. After a day watching governments argue over stockpiles and blockades, there’s something clarifying about spending time with a person who has given their working life to understanding one thing at real depth.
It is Thursday. Donald Trump gave Iran what he called one final shot at a deal. Barney Frank, who helped write the rules that kept the 2008 financial crisis from becoming something worse, died at eighty-six. Two officers who were at the Capitol on January 6 sued to block payments from a fund they say the Constitution forbids. A wildfire burned through Simi Valley while the Reagan Library closed its doors. The WHO declared a global health emergency over an Ebola strain that has no approved vaccine. A Taiwanese novel became the first work translated from Mandarin Chinese to win the International Booker Prize. That’s the day.
