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Mar 6, 2026 - World

Jared Kushner grew up sleeping in Benjamin Netanyahu’s bed.That isn’t a metaphor or hyperbole. Netanyahu, during his visits to New York over the decades, was close enough to the Kushner family that, as the New York Times reported, he slept in Jared’s childhood bedroom. Jared Kushner didn’t grow up watching Netanyahu on the news the way the rest of us did. He grew up knowing the man as something close to a family institution.And that man, who has said publicly that he has “yearned” to destroy Iran’s military and political leadership “for 40 years,” is the same man whose government may have been coordinating directly with Kushner in the days before the most consequential American military action since the invasion of Iraq or the Vietnam War.We need to ask the question that official Washington is too timid, too compromised, or too captured by the moment’s war fever to ask: “Was Jared Kushner sitting across from Iranian negotiators in good faith? Or was he trying to get the Iranian leadership to meet together so Netanyahu could kill them all in one single decapitating strike?”Here’s what we know. The third round of nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran wrapped up in Geneva on Feb. 26th and 27th. The Omani foreign minister, who’d been mediating the talks for months, told CBS News on the eve of the bombing that a deal was “within our reach” and that Iran had fully given in to American demands and agreed it would never produce nuclear material for a bomb, or an ICBM capable of striking the United States.A fourth round had already been scheduled for Vienna the following week to work through the technical details following final discussions in Tehran. The Iranian foreign minister told reporters his team was ready to stay and keep talking for as long as it took.And then, less than 48 hours after those talks in Switzerland concluded, the bombs began to fall.On the morning of Feb. 28th, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council was gathered together in their offices for meetings. That body, the one that manages Iran’s nuclear dossier and makes the regime’s most consequential decisions, is exactly where you would expect the Iranian leadership to be sitting after a round of talks with America that their own foreign minister was calling “historic.”They were almost certainly deliberating whether to accept or reject Kushner's American proposal. And according to the Wall Street Journal, American and Israeli intelligence had verified that senior Iranian leaders would be gathered at three locations that could be struck simultaneously. How they knew that is, as the Journal carefully noted, still unknown.In other words, Iran’s entire decision-making apparatus was assembled in one place most likely because they were in the middle of an active negotiation with Jared Kushner. The talks had created a predictable, intelligenceable window.Diplomats who were part of the earlier rounds of talks now tell reporters that the Iranian side has come to believe they’d been misled, and that Tehran now views the Witkoff-Kushner negotiations as, in their words, “a ruse designed to keep Iran from expecting and preparing for the surprise strikes.”That’s not the assessment of Iranian state media spinning a narrative after a military defeat; it’s the conclusion of people who were in the room, speaking to American journalists, on the record.Now layer on top of that what we know about who Witkoff was meeting with in the days before they sat down with the Iranians. He flew to Israel and was briefed directly by Netanyahu and senior Israeli defense officials and then, with Kushner, flew to Oman and Geneva and sat across the table from the Iranian negotiators.The man who briefed Kushner’s partner (Witkoff) before those talks — Netanyahu — is the same man who said on the night the bombs fell that “this coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” He wasn’t even remotely subdued or reluctant about the possibility of the Middle East going up in flames, perhaps even igniting World War III. He was, instead, triumphant that he finally got an American president to do something he’d been unsuccessfully pushing for decades.We also know that the Trump regime’s explanations for why the attacks happened when they did have collapsed into open contradiction. Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially told reporters the US struck because Israel was going to attack anyway and Iran would have retaliated against American forces. Trump then went on television and flipped the scenario upside-down, saying he might’ve “forced Israel’s hand.”The two most senior officials in the administration told two diametrically opposite stories within 48 hours of each other, and neither story explains why the diplomacy that the Omani mediator called substantively successful — that essentially got America everything we said we wanted — was abandoned without the final round.None of this proves that Kushner was running a deliberate double-cross operation designed to concentrate Iranian leadership in a killable location. What it does prove, though, is that the question is entirely legitimate and demands an answer under oath.This is not the first time in American history that such a question has had to be asked, or that it damaged America’s reputation on the world stage. In October of 1972, Henry Kissinger stood before the cameras and told the world that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam. The Paris negotiations, he assured everyone, were on the verge of ending the war.But it was a lie: two months later, Nixon ordered Operation Linebacker II, the most intensive bombing campaign of the entire war, dropping more tonnage on North Vietnam in twelve days than had been dropped in all of 1969 and 1970 combined.The Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973 on terms that serious historians have long argued were not meaningfully different from what had been on the table long before the bombing. Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for those negotiations. His North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, however, refused to accept his share of the prize, saying that peace had not actually been achieved and the Vietnamese had been deceived because the negotiations were a sham. And he was right: the war dragged on for two more years and was ended by Jerry Ford with the fall of Saigon.The question that has haunted the world since those 1973 negotiations is the same question hanging over Kushner’s Geneva talks today: were the talks ever meant to succeed on their own terms, or were they simply a setup to destroy the Iranian leadership even if they gave us everything we wanted?There’s also the Ronald Reagan precedent. His campaign was credibly accused of running a back-channel to Iran to delay the release of American hostages held in Tehran so that Jimmy Carter couldn’t get a pre-election boost from securing their freedom. It took decades for anything close to a full picture to emerge, but now we know that the Reagan campaign successfully committed that treason just to get him into the White House in 1980.We don’t have decades this time. A war is under way and Americans are already dying. The leadership of a modern, developed country of ninety million people has been decapitated. And every foreign ministry on Earth is watching and drawing conclusions about whether they’ll ever again trust American diplomacy.If the Iranians were right that they were “negotiated” into a kill box, no government facing an existential American ultimatum will ever be able to assume our good faith again.The damage this administration is doing to American credibility isn’t abstract or temporary: when a country uses the negotiating table as a targeting opportunity, it poisons the well for every administration that comes after it.North Korea is watching. Iran’s neighbors are watching. China is watching. The next time an American president sends an envoy somewhere with a genuine offer of peace, why would anyone believe it? Le Duc Tho knew the answer to that question when Kissinger betrayed his Vietnamese negotiating partners in 1973. The world is apparently relearning it now.Congress has the constitutional power and the institutional obligation to call Kushner and Witkoff before investigative committees and ask them directly: What did you know about Israeli targeting plans during the Geneva talks? When did you know it? What were you instructed to accomplish or delay? Did you communicate with Netanyahu’s government during the negotiations themselves?The man at the center of this diplomacy grew up treating Benjamin Netanyahu like a member of the family. That’s not a reason to assume guilt, but it sure as hell is a reason to demand answers, loudly, now, before the war makes the asking impossible.Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.

Mar 6, 2026 - World

After years of court action and complaints, trademark office in Spain rules name is counter to ‘public order and morality’A Spanish restaurant chain called The Mafia Sits at the Table may soon have to change its name after the country’s patent and trademark office heeded objections from the Italian government and ruled that the brand’s nomenclature ran counter to “both public order and morality”.Italy has pursued its claim against the chain – known in Spanish as La Mafia se sienta a la mesa – through various courts and official bodies over the past few years, alleging that the name trivialises both organised crime and efforts to fight it. Continue reading...

Mar 6, 2026 - World

WASHINGTON — Republicans are happy to criticize President Donald Trump’s war on Iran behind closed doors but “willing to give up congressional power” when given chances to actually rein him in, a prominent Democrat charged, shortly before the House of Representatives rejected a bipartisan attempt to assert its constitutional powers.“There is an incredible sense in the Congress in the last year that so many Republicans have been willing to give up congressional power,” Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) told Raw Story at the Capitol. Republicans, Balint said, “all tell you behind closed doors a whole variety of things they don't like about what's happening. “If you pick your head up and all of a sudden your power is gone, don't whine about it because you gave it away.”‘I’m not stupid’Under Article One of the U.S. Constitution — and the 1973 War Powers Resolution — only Congress can declare war.In reality, presidents have long ignored such strictures.Balint was speaking shortly before the House considered a war powers resolution that would have forced the Trump administration to pause strikes on Iran.“I'm not stupid,” Balint, a member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, said.“I can count. I don't think we're going to have the votes, but I think in every opportunity we have to assert our Article I powers, we have to keep doing these actions that show that we understand that every time we don't stand up to [Trump], legislative powers are slipping away.”Another Democrat, Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA), said such votes were important, to “get people on the record.”The record for the ensuing vote showed the resolution was rejected 219-212, with Republican Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Warren Davidson (R-OH) voting yes, while four Democrats voted no.Massie co-sponsored the resolution with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), his partner in pressuring the Trump administration over the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his links to powerful figures, prominently including the president himself.Davidson, a former military officer, is usually a loyal supporter of the Republican line.On the floor of the House, he said, “Make no mistake, Iran is an enemy of the United States. As our military engages them, they do so justly. Unfortunately, they are not yet doing so constitutionally.“For some, this debate will be about whether we should even be fighting in Iran. For me, the debate is more fundamental: is the president of the United States, regardless of the person holding the office, empowered to do whatever he wants? “That’s not what our constitution says.”‘Whatever it takes to win’Amid continued confusion over Trump’s aims in attacking Iran — currently by air and at sea and at the cost of six American lives and more than 1,000 Iranians killed — it was reported on Thursday that strikes could extend until September. Raw Story asked one senior Republican if that bothered him.“Not worried at all,”Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) replied “Trump knows what he’s doing.”Raw Story pressed: Was Norman really saying he would be okay with such a lengthy campaign, with all its attendant dangers for wider conflict through the Middle East and the world?“Whatever it takes to win,” Norman said.'Spiraling out of control'Balint considered another pressing issue: Republicans’ reluctance to even say Trump has taken America to war, despite the president’s own use of the word.“You can't call it a ‘military action,’ that it has a very short timeline, when this is the chatter,” Balint said, of the reports of a possible September end date.“We knew that it's spiraling out of control … and again, like, where's the opposition within his own party?”

Mar 6, 2026 - World

Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko has pardoned 18 more prisoners as part of his recent effort at a rapprochement with the United States

Mar 6, 2026 - World

Local officials say Islamic militants attacked a town in northeastern Nigeria, abducting more than 300 people, including women and children