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Mar 30, 2026 - World

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said negotiations between the U.S. and Iran are "going well," and the regime's public comments rejecting the Trump administration's demands are just for show.

Mar 30, 2026 - World

Catholic leaders will be able to conduct Easter services from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem under an agreement reached with Israeli police after priests were turned away from the holy site on Palm Sunday due to security concerns.

Mar 30, 2026 - World

One month into the Iran war, Donald Trump is discovering that his signature tactic — construct a narrative, declare it true, and force the world to submit — doesn't work when the other side refuses to play along.According to Guardian columnist David Smith, Trump's decades-long operating principle has finally collided with an immovable object: geopolitical reality that cannot be wished away or spun into submission.Because of that, "Trump is in trouble," he asserted."Donald Trump keeps declaring victory in Iran. But saying it over and over does not make it so." While the president insists his military campaign is a historic success, "the world is bracing for a conflict that continues to metastasize and could wreak havoc on the global economy."Trump's strategy has worked before — in Manhattan boardrooms, on reality television, even at the highest levels of Washington power. But Iran represents something fundamentally different: a conflict where "Trump's unique brand of 'truthful hyperbole' has collided with the truthful truth. His reality distortion field has run into a brick wall," Smith wrote.The track record of Trump's fantasy-based policymaking is well documented. During his first term, he made more than 30,000 false and misleading claims, according to the Washington Post. He constructed entire alternate realities. But that strategy catastrophically failed when COVID-19 arrived — hundreds of thousands of deaths couldn't be wished away — and voters rejected him in 2020.Now the Iran war is exposing the same fatal vulnerability at catastrophic scale. The conflict has already cost 13 American lives and billions of dollars, yet the Iranian regime shows no signs of collapse. Instead, exactly as predicted, "Tehran has triggered a global energy crisis by blocking the strait of Hormuz." Opinion polls show the war is deeply unpopular, and a ground invasion would be even more so. "There is no obvious exit strategy."Joel Rubin, former deputy assistant secretary of state, articulated the core problem: Trump's belief in his own mental supremacy fundamentally misunderstands how warfare actually functions."Trump clearly is a real believer in the power of the mind to control events and to shape how people perceive events and shape reality," Rubin said. "The problem with that in the case of the war is the Iranians don't have to bend to that. There are time-tested ways to win wars and end wars through force of arms or diplomacy that have nothing to do with the mind and willpower and willing it because the other side will do what we want. He's going to buck up against that and the sooner he relies not just on the reality of military power but the reality of diplomatic power the more likely he is to be successful."Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, was more blunt about the implications."Iran is Trump's Waterloo. This is the demolition of the Donald Trump myth. His supporters rave about his instincts and his improvisational style but the other interpretation is that he doesn't know what he's doing, that he hasn't taken care to investigate the devastating consequences of his actions and so he's digging himself deeper and deeper into a quagmire. This is plain to all."

Mar 30, 2026 - World

ABC News host George Stephanopoulos called out Secretary of State Marco Rubio after he said the U.S. was negotiating with "lunatics" in Iran, even though President Donald Trump had suggested new negotiators were reasonable people."You call them lunatics, but the president just had this post where he says we're in discussions with a new and more reasonable regime," Stephanopoulos told Rubio in a Monday interview on Good Morning America. "Let me try to pin you down on that. Who is this new and more reasonable regime?""Well, I'm not going to disclose to you who those people are because it probably would get them in trouble with some other groups of people inside of Iran," Rubio insisted. "Look, there's some fractures going on there internally. And at the end of the day, I think that if there are people in Iran who now, given everything that's happened, are willing to move in a different direction for their country, that would be great.""It's unfortunate the people of Iran are incredible people, the people who lead them, these this clerical regime that is the problem and there are new people now in charge who have a more reasonable vision of the future that would be good news for us, for them, for the entire world but we also have to be prepared for the possibility, maybe even the probability, that that is not the case."The ABC host pressed: "But the president said they are. Is that the case or is it not?""Well, what I mean is, yeah, you know, so you have people that are saying some of the right things privately," Rubio hedged. "Obviously, they're not going to put it out in press releases, and what they say to you or put out there for the world doesn't necessarily reflect what they're saying in our conversations.""There are clearly people there talking to us in ways that previous people in charge in Iran have not spoken to us in the past," he added. "We're going to test that proposition very strongly because we always prefer to settle things through negotiation and diplomacy. But we also have to be prepared for the fact that that effort might fail.""If it fails, the war expands?" Stephanopoulos wondered."Well, the war is about," Rubio replied before catching himself. "This operation, okay, and that's what this is, it's about very specific objectives."The secretary of state insisted that the "objective from the beginning" had been to destroy the Iranian air force, navy, missiles, and factories."We are on pace and, in fact, ahead of schedule in some of those things," he said. "And we are going to achieve those things in a number of weeks, not in a number of months."

Mar 30, 2026 - World

Investors nervous over escalation of Middle East conflict as US president says he wants to ‘take the oil in Iran’Business live – latest newsThe price of oil hit nearly $117 (£89) a barrel on Monday as Donald Trump threatened to “blow up” and “completely obliterate” Iranian electricity plants, oilwells and its export hub Kharg Island if it did not agree to a deal.Brent crude rose after the US president wrote on his social media platform Truth Social that if a deal was not agreed and the strait of Hormuz was not reopened, the US would take further action. Continue reading...