Sometimes, despite our best efforts, our emotions win. We snap, we sulk, or we drop the ball. Responsibility isn’t about being a robot who never messes up; it’s about being the head of your own cleanup crew. When your feelings dictate a poor action, you don’t get to walk away from the mess. You have […]
Physicists just discovered a brand-new particle that appears to be an exotic cousin to the protons and neutrons that make up atoms.
Those mundane subatomic particles are made up of even smaller building blocks of matter called “up” and “down” quarks, which are the lightest kinds of quarks. But quarks come in heavier flavors as well, including “charm,” “strange,” “bottom”, and “top” (the most massive fundamental particle known).
The new particle, discovered at the world’s largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, contains two charm quarks and a down quark. Like protons and neutrons, its total of three quarks classifies it in particle physics as a baryon, which is a type of hadron—or a particle made of quarks. The discovery brings the current tally of known hadrons discovered by LHC experiments to 80.
The new particle, which physicists are calling a doubly charmed baryon, essentially replaces the two up quarks in a proton with charm quarks, giving it about four times the mass of the more common and stable proton.
The LHC accelerates protons to more than 99 percent the speed of light and then slams them together. The protons are destroyed, and the energy of the crash gives rise to new particles in their wake. Every time a doubly charmed baryon was created within the collider, it quickly decayed into lighter particles.
The new particle was discovered by the LHCb experiment, one of nine detectors stationed around the LHC’s 17-mile-long ring. It’s the first new particle seen at the experiment since scientists upgraded LHCb in 2023.
The doubly charmed baryon is only the second baryon with two heavy quarks ever seen—the rest have all contained two up or down quarks and just one of the heavier flavors. The previous heavy baryon was discovered in 2017, also at LHCb, and consists of two charm quarks and an up quark. Despite their similarities, the newfound particle is even less stable than the other heavy baryon, with a lifetime predicted to be about six times shorter.
Finding these kinds of particles helps teach physicists about the strong force, which is the most powerful force in nature and binds hadrons together. The strong force is also the most mysterious and confusing force, governed by a complex theory called quantum chromodynamics. Physicists hope to understand how the strong force holds quarks together and how the composite particles’ properties, such as mass and spin, arise.
Physicists announced the discovery this week at the Moriond particle physics conference in Italy.
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Artist’s impression of the new particle, which contains two charm quarks and one down quark. CERN
Hmmmm … Are European immigrants scrutinized so severely?
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been deployed to more than a dozen airports across the U.S. after President Donald Trump’s threats to mobilize federal law enforcement during a partial government shutdown that has thinned the ranks of airport workers and snarled security lines.
Armed ICE officers wearing military-style vests moved into at least 13 major transit hubs on Monday, including airports in New York City, Houston, and Atlanta, to supplement Transportation Security Administration personnel who have been working without pay while Congress is deadlocked on a funding deal for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees TSA as well as ICE and other immigration agencies.
What exactly ICE is doing there remains unclear. Trump says the agents are relieving TSA workers, performing immigration arrests, and providing “security like no one has ever seen before” — but ICE agents cannot perform TSA screening duties, making it unclear what impact, if any, the deployment of armed federal officers into American airports will have on wait times plaguing security checkpoints.
ICE agents, who are still being paid during the partial shutdown, were seen standing around inside several airport terminals on Monday while travelers once again faced hours-long wait times to get through security lines.
“If that’s not enough, we’ll bring in the National Guard,” Trump told reporters Monday. “ICE loves it because they’re able to now arrest illegals as they come into the country. It’s very fertile territory. But that’s not why they’re there. They’re there to help.”
Trump’s idea, which appears to have come from a right-wing radio show, has drawn mixed reactions from airline passengers who are already on edge, while civil rights groups and unions representing federal workers argue that ICE’s presence only injects unnecessary fear and potential violence into an already-tense environment.
“I guess it’s a good use of our federal money,” one traveler at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport told CBS News. “But other than that, I mean, hopefully, we don’t get any bad situations from it.”
Tom Charging Hawk told The New York Times that he was “rattled” by the presence of ICE agents inside Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. He said his colleagues dropped out of attending a conference because of “ICE and security weirdness.”
“How are they going to keep us safe?” a passenger at Newark Liberty International Airport worker asked CNN.
Travelers are feeling for TSA agents who are entering another pay period without a paycheck but are questioning whether ICE — after months of scrutiny into officers’ lethal use of force and the president’s violent mass deportation efforts — is merely being used as a political tool to bully Trump’s critics.
“Are they going to handle it the way it’s supposed to be handled?” Lamar Weaver, who was traveling from Philadelphia International Airport, told CBS News. “Do they have the emotional intelligence to do it the way it’s supposed to be done?”
Roughly 60,000 TSA workers are caught in the middle of a congressional stalemate over Homeland Security’s budget, which saw a massive injection of taxpayer cash for immigration enforcement under a separate measure last year.
TSA workers, considered essential staff, have been showing up to work without a paycheck over the last month, but workers are calling out sick, and roughly 400 employees have quit. More than a third of TSA officers at Atlanta’s airport — the busiest in the U.S., handling roughly 100 million passengers annually — have called out sick.
Most airports are no longer displaying TSA wait times during the shutdown, but are instead advising travelers to show up at least four hours before their flights.
Democratic members of Congress have proposed separate funding bills to keep TSA running while lawmakers hammer out guardrails for federal immigration enforcement under DHS, but Republicans have rejected the deals.
The White House and Trump’s allies insist Democrats are the problem, and the president is now suggesting that he is no longer interested in reaching a funding deal at all unless Democrats vote with Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act, a sweeping bill to overhaul elections and further block trans Americans from public life — completely separate from the DHS debate.
The president said the SAVE Act, not funding TSA to end the weeks-long crisis, is “far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate.”
TSA officer Darrell English, president of Chicago’s chapter of the American Federation of Government Workers, which represents TSA workers, said he’s “unaware” what role ICE is playing inside airports.
“I can’t see them doing anything as far as screening procedures, so it might be limited as far as what they can do,” he told CNN.
The union’s national president, Everett Kelley, said TSA workers “have been showing up every day, without a paycheck, because they believe in the mission of keeping the flying public safe.”
“They deserve to be paid, not replaced by untrained, armed agents who have shown how dangerous they can be,” Kelley said in a statement.
A spokesperson for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said the agency expects that any ICE agents assigned to New York-area airports “will be appropriately trained and focused on supporting screening operations.”
“I don’t [know] what their purpose is,” Newark airport worker Tonya Johnson told The New York Times. “They’re just standing there, and they’re in the way.”
The war in the Middle East has halted most of the oil and gas trade from the region, forcing countries thousands of miles to contend with their energy supplies suddenly vanishing.
The Persian Gulf accounts for roughly a fifth of the world’s energy needs. As Iran effectively blocks shipments, international prices for oil and gas have shot up. That in turn has meant gasoline, jet fuel, and other products have become costlier — hurting drivers, business owners, and others from Los Angeles to Lahore, Pakistan. As the world becomes gripped by the energy crisis, some nations are feeling the loss more acutely.
In 2024, nearly 21 million barrels of oil a day crossed through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passageway connecting the Persian Gulf to the world. Four-fifths of that supply went to Asia.
China has long been the biggest purchaser of oil and gas from Persian Gulf nations. And with more than a third of its total supply coming from the region, the disruption is significant for Beijing. But other countries are almost entirely reliant on the region for their energy needs.
Pakistan has considered imposing a four-day workweek, and remote school and work, in order to preserve energy stockpiles. A state-led fund in Thailand, to subsidize the cost of fuel when prices surge, plunged into a deficit this month.
In India, where the economy depends on the Middle East for roughly 40 percent of the country’s oil imports and 80 percent of its gas, a shortage of cooking gas is squeezing households. And across Asia, fliers are being stranded because airlines running low on jet fuel have canceled thousands of flights.
Europe has traditionally been less reliant on the Gulf than Asia has been. It used to get most of its natural gas from Russia, but in recent years it has relied more on the United States and Norway. But the continent has had to endure one energy crisis after another in recent years, including from Russia’s war with Ukraine and the Western sanctions that followed.
Russia is the world’s third-largest producer of oil and second-largest producer of gas, and the sales of its energy products have been significantly restricted while Moscow continues its invasion of Ukraine.
This current crisis comes as European countries, confronting lackluster economic output, try to rebuild their industrial bases and fend off competition from cheaper Chinese exports.
Confronted with soaring prices since its attack with Israel on Iran, the United States temporarily lifted sanctions on Russian oil that is currently at sea, hoping to ease the global supply and markets in the process. The European Union has not made similar moves.
African nations, like many other countries in the global south, could feel the disruption unevenly. Seychelles, the island nation off the east coast of Africa, imported almost all of its energy from Gulf states in 2024. Mauritius has had a similar reliance, while Nigeria, an oil-rich state and a member of the OPEC Plus oil cartel, has traditionally imported relatively few fossil fuels from the Middle East.
But as the war continues, the impact is being felt beyond the imports of oil and gas. The Persian Gulf is a dominant source of fertilizer, partly because the region’s abundance of energy has spurred the development of factories that make the raw materials for many types of agricultural chemicals.
A sustained rise in the cost of fertilizer could force governments in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to subsidize the cost of growing crops or otherwise watch food prices climb. That could add to debt burdens afflicting many lower-income countries.
The United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and gas. That means the impact of halting the energy trade from the Middle East is much less severe.
But the United States and other countries in the region that do not import great quantities from the Gulf are still feeling economic strain. The jump in oil prices – to over $100 a barrel in recent weeks – has already weighed on other major economic factors.
The cost of gasoline has jumped by about a dollar a gallon nationally since the war began. American airlines have begun to cut flights because of fuel costs. Concerns about inflation have pushed mortgage rates to their highest level in three months, just weeks after they fell below 6 percent for the first time since 2022.
If the war drags on, or if oil and gas prices continue to rise, the damage will most likely grow, economists say. It is perhaps one reason why the White House has forcefully insisted that it does not need Middle Eastern oil — and is increasingly trying to use military force to stop Iran’s blockade of it.
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Asian countries are the biggest buyers of Persian Gulf energy
Note: Only countries with energy imports from Gulf countries are shown.
A flashy fireball streaked across the skies above the Midwest on Tuesday, falling to Earth near Lake Erie and Ohio at around 9:00 AM EDT. Some reported hearing a boom loud enough to shake their houses.
The object appears to have been a seven-ton asteroid that spanned nearly six feet in diameter, according to NASA. When it fell, it was traveling at around 40,000 miles per hour in a southeasterly direction before “fragmenting”—blowing up—over Valley City in Ohio. The explosion had the equivalent force of 250 tons of TNT, the agency said, and “may have also shook houses north of Medina.”
The blast sent a wave of pressure toward the ground, which would have been heard by local residents. Some fragments of the meteor fell as meteorites near Medina, NASA said, but it’s unclear if there was any damage as a result of the fireball.
“What occurred this morning was a daylight fireball at least several feet across,” says Robert Lunsford, who helps coordinate fireball reports at the American Meteor Society. “This is large enough to survive down to the lower atmosphere, where the air molecules are dense enough to carry sound. Therefore, people under the path of this fireball heard a delayed sonic boom produced by this fireball.”
Early on, the object didn’t have the characteristics of a piece of space junk—another possible falling space object—astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell noted ahead of NASA’s identification. “Space debris usually has slowed to below supersonic by the time it gets low enough that it would make an audible boom,” McDowell says.
It’s also a mystery where the asteroid came from. Earth is bombarded by falling space dust and rocks all the time, but only some of these are large enough to make it close enough to the ground to be visible in the daytime without first burning up in our atmosphere. If any part of a meteor survives the journey to land on the ground, it becomes a meteorite.
“We receive several reports of daylight fireballs per month from all over the world,” Lunsford says. “If they are large and bright enough, they can be seen against the blue daytime sky. So it’s rare for an individual to see one of these but fairly common over the entire planet. Still, they make up far less than one percent of the total number of fireballs reported to us.”
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This image, taken with a meteorite tracking device developed by amateur astronomer George Varros, shows a meteorite as it enters Earth’s atmosphere during the Leonid meteor shower on November 19, 2002. Photo by George Varros and Dr. Peter Jenniskens/NASA/Getty Images
Tehran has said it will “irreversibly destroy” essential infrastructure across the Middle East, including vital water systems, if the US follows through on Donald Trump’s threat to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants unless the strait of Hormuz is fully opened within two days.
As Iranian missiles struck two southern Israeli cities overnight, injuring dozens of people, and Tehran deployed long-range missiles for the first time, the developments signalled a dangerous potential escalation of the war, now in its fourth week, with both sides threatening facilities relied on by millions of people.
Iran war timeline: civilians bear brunt of US and Israel’s weeks-long campaign
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The speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said on Sunday that vital infrastructure in the region – including energy and desalination facilities – would be considered a legitimate target and would be “irreversibly destroyed” if his country’s own infrastructure was attacked.
Amnesty International said this month there was a substantial risk that attacks on systems providing essential services such as electricity, heating, and running water would violate international law and “in some cases could amount to war crimes” because of the potential for “vast, predictable, and devastating civilian harm”.
The Iranian military’s operational command headquarters, Khatam al-Anbiya, said Iran would strike “all energy, information technology and desalination infrastructure” belonging to the US and Israel in the region.
The statement also said that if Trump’s threat was carried out, the strait of Hormuz would be “completely closed, and will not be reopened until our destroyed power plants are rebuilt”.
Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said “threats and terror” were “only strengthening Iranian unity”, while the “illusion of erasing Iran from the map” showed “desperation against the will of a history-making nation”.
The US president said on Saturday that he was giving Iran 48 hours – until shortly before midnight GMT on Monday – to open the Strait of Hormuz, a vital pathway for the world’s oil flows, or the US would “hit and obliterate” Iranian power plants, starting with the biggest one first”.
The US ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, defended Trump’s threat on Sunday, insisting that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) controlled much of the country’s infrastructure and used it to power its war effort.
He said Trump would start by destroying one of Iran’s largest power plants, but did not identify it. “There are gas-fired thermal power plants and other type of plants,” and “the president is not messing around”, he said.
A No 10 spokesperson said Keir Starmer spoke to Trump on Sunday evening about the need to reopen the strait of Hormuz.
Iran’s representative to the International Maritime Organisation, Ali Mousavi, said on Sunday that the strait was open to all shipping except vessels linked to “Iran’s enemies”, with passage possible by coordinating security arrangements with Tehran.
Iranian attacks have in effect closed the narrow strait, which carries about a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies, causing the world’s worst oil crisis since the 1970s and sending European gas prices surging by as much as 35% last week.
Only a relatively small number of vessels, estimated at about 5% of the prewar volume, from countries that Tehran considers friendly – including China, India, and Pakistan – have been allowed to pass.
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Smoke rises above Tehran after an Israeli airstrike on Sunday evening. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
President Trump’s hopes that an Israeli plan to ignite an internal uprising against Iran’s theocratic government could bring the war to a swift end have so far been dashed.
As the United States and Israel prepared to go to war with Iran, the head of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, went to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a plan.
Within days of the war’s beginning, said David Barnea, the Mossad chief, his service would likely be able to galvanize the Iranian opposition — igniting riots and other acts of rebellion that could even lead to the collapse of Iran’s government. Mr. Barnea also presented the proposal to senior Trump administration officials during a visit to Washington in mid-January.
Mr. Netanyahu adopted the plan. Despite doubts about its viability among senior American officials and some officials in other Israeli intelligence agencies, both he and President Trump seemed to embrace an optimistic outlook. Killing Iran’s leaders at the outset of the conflict, followed by a series of intelligence operations intended to encourage regime change, they thought, could lead to a mass uprising that might bring about a swift end to the war.
“Take over your government: It will be yours to take,” Mr. Trump told Iranians in his initial address at the war’s start, after saying they should first seek shelter from the bombing.
Three weeks into the war, an Iranian uprising has not yet materialized. American and Israeli intelligence assessments have concluded that the theocratic Iranian government is weakened but intact, and that widespread fear of Iran’s military and police forces has dampened prospects both for nascent rebellion in the country and for ethnic militias outside of Iran to launch cross-border incursions.
The belief that Israel and the United States could help instigate widespread revolt was a foundational flaw in the preparations for a war that has spread across the Middle East. Instead of imploding from within, Iran’s government has dug in and escalated the conflict, striking blows and counterblows against military bases, cities and ships around the Persian Gulf, and against vulnerable oil and gas installations.
This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former American, Israeli and other foreign officials, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss national security and intelligence issues during a war. The New York Times interviewed officials with a variety of views on the likelihood of an uprising.
Since Mr. Trump’s first speech, American officials have largely abandoned speaking publicly about the prospects for revolt inside of Iran, yet some remain hopeful that one could materialize. Though his rhetoric has become more tempered, Mr. Netanyahu still says the American and Israeli air campaign will be aided by forces on the ground.
“You can’t do revolutions from the air,” he said during a news conference on Thursday. He added: “There has to be a ground component as well. There are many possibilities for this ground component, and I take the liberty of not sharing with you all those possibilities.”
Mr. Netanyahu also added that “it is too early to tell if the Iranian people will exploit the conditions we are creating for them to take to the streets. I hope that will be the case. We are working toward that end, but ultimately, it will depend only on them.”
Behind the scenes, however, Mr. Netanyahu has expressed frustration that Mossad’s promises to foment revolt in Iran have not materialized. In one security meeting days after the war began, the prime minister vented that Mr. Trump might decide to end the war any day and that Mossad’s operations had yet to bear fruit.
In the run-up to the war, current and former American and Israeli officials said, Mr. Netanyahu invoked Mossad’s optimism about a possibility of an Iranian uprising to help convince Mr. Trump that bringing about the collapse of the Iranian government was a realistic goal.
Many senior American officials, as well as intelligence analysts at the Israel Defense Forces military intelligence agency, AMAN, viewed the Israeli plan for a mass uprising during the conflict with skepticism. U.S. military leaders told Mr. Trump that Iranians would not come out to protest while the United States and Israel were dropping bombs. Intelligence officials had assessed that the possibility of a mass uprising threatening the theocratic government was low, and doubted that the U.S.-Israeli attack would ignite any kind of civil war.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. But a senior administration official noted that in Mr. Trump’s initial remarks after the beginning of the war he told Iranians to remain in their homes and urged them to take to the streets only after the air campaign was over.
“When we are finished, take over your government,” Mr. Trump said at the time.
Nate Swanson, a former State Department and White House official who was on the Trump administration’s Iran negotiating team led by Steve Witkoff until July, said he had never seen a “serious plan” to promote an uprising in Iran within the U.S. government in his many years working on Iran policy.
“A lot of protesters are not coming into the street because they’ll get shot,” said Mr. Swanson, now at the Atlantic Council. “They’re going to get slaughtered. That’s one thing. But the second thing is that there’s a good chunk of people who just want a better life, and they’re just sidelined right now. They don’t like the regime, but they don’t want to die opposing it. That 60 percent is going to stay home.”
He added, “You still have fervent anti-regime folks, but they’re not armed, and they’re not bringing the majority of the population into the streets.”
Mr. Trump appeared to have arrived at the same conclusion two weeks into the war. On March 12, he noted that Iran has security forces in the streets “machine-gunning people down if they want to protest.”
“So I really think that’s a big hurdle to climb for people that don’t have weapons,” he said on Fox News Radio. “I think that’s a very big hurdle. So it’ll happen, but it probably will be maybe not immediately.”
The Kurdish Option
While many of the specifics of Mossad’s plans remain secret, one element included supporting an invasion by Iranian Kurdish militia groups based in northern Iraq.
Mossad has longstanding ties with Kurdish groups, and American officials have said that both the C.I.A. and Mossad have given arms and other support to Kurdish forces in recent years. The C.I.A. had existing authorities to support Iranian Kurdish fighters, and had provided arms and advice well before the current war.
During the first days of the war, Israeli jets and bombers pounded Iranian military and police targets in northwest Iran in part to help pave the way for the Kurdish forces.
During a telephone briefing on March 4, an Israeli military spokesman was asked whether Israel was carrying out intense bombings in western Iran to help a Kurdish invasion. The spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, said, “We’ve been operating very heavily in western Iran to degrade the Iranian regime’s capabilities and to open up the way to Tehran, and to create freedom of operations. That’s been our focus there.”
ut American officials are no longer enthusiastic about their idea from well before the war of using the Kurds as a proxy force, a shift that has created tension with their Israeli counterparts.
A week into the war, on March 7, Mr. Trump said he had explicitly told Kurdish leaders not to send militias into the country. “I don’t want the Kurds going in,” he told reporters. “I don’t want to see the Kurds get hurt, get killed.”
Soon after reports emerged that Kurdish militias might join the campaign, Bafel Talabani, the president of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the main Iraqi Kurdish political parties, said in an interview on Fox News that no such plans were in the works. A Kurdish advance, he added, might have the opposite of its intended effect.
“You could argue that that’s actually a detriment,” he said, adding that Iranians are very nationalistic. “I believe if they fear that Kurds coming in from elsewhere will cause a split or a splintering of their country, this may actually unify the people against this separatist movement.”
Turkey has warned the Trump administration not to support any Kurdish action. The message was delivered by the Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, to Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a recent conversation, a Turkish diplomat said. Turkey, a NATO ally, has long been opposed to any operations by armed Kurds since it is grappling with Kurdish separatists inside its own borders.
The Uprising That Has Yet to Come
American officials briefed on intelligence assessments before the war said the C.I.A. evaluated a variety of possible developments inside Iran once the conflict began. Intelligence agencies considered a full collapse of the Iranian government to be a relatively unlikely outcome.
Other U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence said that even when the government is under pressure, as it was during mass protests in the country in January in which thousands of protesters were killed, it managed to quell uprisings relatively quickly.
The American intelligence assessments have suggested that armed elements of the Iranian government could turn on one another, or take action that might spark a civil war. But those factions are more likely to back rival groups of religious leaders, rather than represent any sort of democratic movement, the reports concluded.
The most likely outcome, however, was that hard-line elements of the existing government would maintain control over the levers of power, the reports said.
A spokeswoman for the C.I.A. declined to comment. The Mossad and the I.D.F. declined to comment
Israeli intelligence agencies have long examined the possibility of instigating revolt inside Iran as its own operation or shortly after the beginning of a military campaign, but until very recently dismissed the prospects.
As Israel’s main service responsible for foreign operations, Mossad was in charge of the planning.
Shahar Koifman, a former head of the Iran desk at the I.D.F.’s Military Intelligence Research Division, said Israel had explored various ideas to try to undermine or topple the Iranian government, but that in his opinion they were doomed to fail from the start. He said he did not believe that bringing down the Iranian government was an achievable goal of the current conflict.
Mr. Barnea’s predecessor at Mossad, Yossi Cohen, decided that trying to foment rebellion inside Iran was a waste of time and ordered that the resources devoted to the matter be reduced to a minimum. During Mr. Cohen’s tenure, which ended in 2021, Mossad calculated how many of the country’s citizens would need to participate in protests for them to truly threaten the Iranian government, comparing the estimates to the size of actual protests since the 1979 Iranian revolution.
“We wondered if we could bridge this gap,” Mr. Cohen said in 2018, “and we came to the conclusion that we couldn’t.”
Instead, Mossad’s strategy during that period was to try to weaken the government until it essentially surrendered to Israeli and American demands — using a combination of crippling economic sanctions and operations to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists and military leaders and sabotage nuclear facilities.
Over the past year, as the prospect of Israeli military action against Iran became more likely, Mr. Barnea reversed Mossad’s approach, devoting the agency’s resources to plans that could lead to toppling the government in Tehran in the event of a war.
In recent months, according to officials, Mr. Barnea came to believe that Mossad could potentially begin igniting riots around Iran after several days of intense Israeli and American airstrikes and the assassination of senior Iranian leaders.
After the strikes and assassinations of the war’s earliest days, the uprising did not come. But Israeli officials say they have yet to give up hope.
“I think that we need boots on the ground, but they’ve got to be Iranian boots,” Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, said on CNN on Sunday, when asked how the war will end. “And I think they’re coming.”
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The aftermath of U.S.-Israeli airstrikes in Tehran on Saturday. Three weeks into the war, American and Israeli intelligence assessments have concluded that the theocratic Iranian government is weakened but intact. Credit…Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Send Help is a survival horror thriller co-produced and directed by Sam Raimi and written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift. It premiered at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, California, on January 21, 2026, and was released in the United States by 20th Century Studios on January 30. The story features an employee […]
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Trump says ICE will go maskless at airports
Smoke rises above Tehran after an Israeli airstrike on Sunday evening. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
The aftermath of U.S.-Israeli airstrikes in Tehran on Saturday. Three weeks into the war, American and Israeli intelligence assessments have concluded that the theocratic Iranian government is weakened but intact. Credit…Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
James' World 2 