WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump appears poised to drive a stake through the heart of the Iran nuclear deal Tuesday, when he announces his verdict on US sanctions relief underpinning the landmark accord.
Officials and diplomats expect the pugnacious US leader to ignore last-ditch European pleas and move to withdraw the United States from a 2015 agreement, which he insists was “very badly negotiated.”
Trump has, unsuccessfully, demanded changes to the Obama-era deal, which saw Iran mothball a suspected nuclear weapons program in return for massive sanctions relief.
Months of intensive talks between the United States and European allies now appear deadlocked, with Berlin, London and Paris refusing to rewrite the agreement.
The president tweeted he would announce his decision at 2 p.m. (1800 GMT), even as British foreign secretary Boris Johnson shuttled around Washington to reach a last-gasp breakthrough.
One European diplomat echoed the mood around foreign embassies in Washington, saying “there is plainly a difference of opinion,” acknowledging Trump seems poised to walk away.
Concretely, the US president will now to decide whether to continue to waive sanctions on Iran’s central bank and its oil sector dealings, a key pillar of the agreement.
“It’s pretty obvious to me that unless something changes in the next few days, I believe the president will not waive the sanctions,” the European official said.
“I would like to pretend to you today that I feel that there is a chance of the existing (deal) remaining intact,” the official said. “I think that that chance may exist but it is very small.”
A French official said President Emmanuel Macron left the United States last week after a similar diplomatic offensive “convinced that we would get a negative decision.”
“We are preparing more for the scenario of a partial or total withdrawal than for the US staying in the deal,” the official added.
Trump’s decision to scrap sanctions relief would have global ramifications, straining Iran’s already crisis-racked economy, heightening tensions in the Middle East and laying bare the biggest transatlantic rift since the Iraq War.
The Iranian rial had lost around a third of its value in six months, before authorities in April took the drastic step of pegging the exchange rate to the dollar.
Trump could also decide to stop waivers for a thicket of other sanctions against Iran, effectively ending US participation in the deal and putting European companies at risk of sanction.
His decision will be closely watched across the Middle East, where a number of powers are mulling their own nuclear programs, and in Pyongyang ahead of non-proliferation talks between Trump and Kim Jong Un.
Tehran has sent mixed signals about its potential response, hinting it could leave a fatally undermined deal and return to military scale uranium enrichment.
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani — who very publicly advocated engaging with America and would be politically exposed should the deal fail — said his country would stay in the agreement even if the United States pulls out.
It is unclear whether Iran’s more hard-line military leaders, or Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, hold the same view.
And with tensions building between Iran and Israel, Tehran’s response could well come away from diplomatic antechambers or the meeting rooms of multilateral fora.
The United States does not allege that Iran is breaking the terms of the agreement, but says the accord itself does not permanently end Tehran’s controversial nuclear programs, stop missile tests or end bellicose Iranian activity in the region.
Since his days as a presidential candidate, Trump has vowed to scrap the deal, but has until now stopped short, amid fierce debate inside his administration.
He has complained, in particular, that Iran gets sanctions relief up front but could return to controversial activities once restrictions “sunset” in 2025.
His administration has also been angered by Iran’s support for Syrian President Bashar Assad, the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah in Syria’s civil war and Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen.
With the arrival of John Bolton as National Security Adviser and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State the Iran hawks now appear to be in the driver’s seat.
Imposing oil sanctions could be the first step of a “a broad coercive campaign” to “break the regime’s back,” according to Cliff Kupchan of the Eurasia group.
But European powers are skeptical that Trump’s administration has a backup plan to restrain Iranian ambitions once he has made good on his campaign promise to tear up the deal.
Britain’s Johnson, who was in Washington to lobby Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence, told Fox News: “Plan B does not seem to be, to me, particularly well-developed at this stage.”
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas warned the accord’s collapse could spark “an escalation” in the region and stressed that Washington’s European allies think the deal “makes the world a safer place.”
Trump to give verdict on Iran nuclear deal
Trump to give verdict on Iran nuclear deal
- The president tweeted he would announce his decision at 2 p.m
- Tehran has sent mixed signals about its potential response, hinting it could leave a fatally undermined deal and return to military scale uranium enrichment.
10 escape from New Orleans jail through hole in cell wall while lone guard left to get food
NEW ORLEANS: Ten men broke out of a New Orleans jail Friday in an audacious overnight escape by fleeing through a hole behind a toilet and scaling a wall while the lone guard assigned to their cell pod was away getting food, authorities said.
Nine of the escapees, which include suspects charged with murder, remain on the lam following the breakout that the local sheriff says may have been aided by members within the department.
Surveillance footage, shared with media during a press conference, showed the escapees sprinting out of the facility — some wearing orange clothing and others in white. They proceeded to scale a fence, using blankets to avoid being cut by barbed wire. Some could be seen sprinting across the nearby interstate.
A photograph obtained by The Associated Press from law enforcement shows the opening behind a toilet in a cell that the men escaped through. Above the hole are scrawled messages that include “To Easy LoL” with an arrow pointing at the gap.
The absence of the 10 men, who also utilized facility deficiencies that officials have long complained about in their escape, went unnoticed for hours. It was not until a routine morning headcount, more than seven hours after the men fled the facility, that law enforcement learned of the escape.
Officials from the sheriff’s office say there was no deputy physically at the pod, where the fugitives had been held. They said there was a technician, a civilian who was there to observe the pod, but she had “stepped away to grab food.”
Soon after the escape, one of the men, Kendall Myles, 20, was apprehended after a brief foot chase through the French Quarter. He had previously escaped twice from juvenile detention centers.
Sheriff blames ‘defective locks’ and possibly inside help
Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson said the men were able to get out of the Orleans Justice Center because of “defective locks.” Hutson said she has continuously raised concerns about the locks to officials and, as recently as this week, advocated for money to fix the ailing infrastructure.
Hutson said there are indications that people inside her department helped the fugitives escape.
“We do acknowledge there is no way people can get out of this facility without there being some type of lapse in security,” Hutson said of the jail, where she says 1,400 people are being held. “It’s almost impossible, not completely, but almost impossible for anybody to get out of this facility without help.”
The escapees yanked open a door to enter the cell with the hole in it around 1 a.m.
They shed their jail uniforms once out of the facility, and it is still unclear how some of them obtained regular clothing so quickly, officials said.
Authorities did not notice the men were missing until 8:30 a.m. Authorities initially said 11 had escaped, but at a Friday afternoon news conference said one man thought to have escaped was in a different cell.
Three employees have been placed on suspension pending the outcome of the investigation. It was not immediately clear whether any of the employees were suspected of helping with the escape.
Who are the fugitives?
The escapees range from 19 years old to 42. Most of the men are in their 20s.
One of the fugitives, Derrick Groves, was convicted on two charges of second-degree murder and two charges of attempted second-degree murder last year for his role in the 2018 Mardi Gras Day shootings of two men. He also faces a charge of battery against a correctional facility employee, court records show. Law enforcement warned that he may attempt to locate witnesses in the murder trial.
Another escapee, Corey Boyd, had pled not guilty to a pending second-degree murder charge.
Hutson said the police department is actively working with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to search for the fugitives.
Officials use facial recognition to find one fugitive
Police relied on facial recognition technology to identify and capture one fugitive, said Bryan LaGarde, executive director of Project NOLA, a nonprofit operating more than 5,000 cameras around New Orleans. His organization, which partners with Louisiana authorities, received the list of escapees and entered their images into the system — finding two within the French Quarter in minutes.
“When we saw them, they were wearing street clothes. They were walking openly in the street. They were keeping their heads down and checking over their shoulder.” LaGarde said, adding that the other fugitive walked out of sight of the cameras.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill called the escape “beyond unacceptable” and said local authorities had waited too long to inform the public.
She said she has reached out to surrounding states to alert them about the escape. Murrill said the fugitives have had “ample” time to escape to “frankly anywhere across the country.”
New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said her agency has put “a full court effort” to respond to the escape and are working with the FBI and US marshals.
Officers were focused on identifying and providing protection for people who may have testified in their cases or may be in danger. One family has been “removed” from their home, Kirkpatrick said.
“If there is anyone helping or harboring these escapees, you will be charged,” Kirkpatrick added.
Turmoil at New Orleans’ jail
New Orleans’ jail has for more than a decade been subject to federal monitoring and a consent decree intended to improve conditions.
Security problems and violence persisted even after the city opened the Orleans Justice Center in 2015, replacing the decaying Orleans Parish Prison, which had seen its own string of escapes and dozens of in-custody deaths.
A federal judge declared in 2013 that the lockup had festered into an unconstitutional setting for people incarcerated there.
Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson said staff is “stretched thin” at the facility, which is around 60 percent staffed.
The jail contained numerous “high security” people convicted of violent offenses who required a “restrictive housing environment that did not exist,” said Jay Mallett, Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office chief of Corrections. The sheriff’s office was in the process of transferring dozens to more secure locations.
Two dead and others injured in Las Vegas gym shooting, police say
LAS VEGAS: There was a shooting inside a gym, killing two people, with multiple other people injured, Las Vegas police said.
One person died as gunfire erupted at the Las Vegas Athletic Club on the city’s west side, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Undersheriff Andrew Walsh said Friday.
“The suspect in this incident has been shot and there is no longer a threat to the public,” he said.
In a social media post, police said the suspect in the shooting was confirmed dead at a local hospital.
Trump calls ex-FBI chief Comey a ‘dirty cop’ after alleged threat
- Comey made a post on Instagram showingan image of “86 47” spelled out in sea shells
- Trump's aides and allies charged that it was a veiled call to assassinate the president
WASHINGTON: Donald Trump labeled former FBI director James Comey a “dirty cop” Friday over a social media post that the US president deemed a veiled call for assassination and which prompted a Secret Service probe.
Comey made a now-deleted post on Instagram the previous day that showed an image of “86 47” spelled out in sea shells, with “86” being slang for kill and Trump the 47th president.
“He knew exactly what that meant,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News broadcast on Friday. “That meant assassination, and it says it loud and clear. Now, he wasn’t very competent, but he was competent enough to know what that meant.”
“He’s calling for the assassination of the president,” Trump said, branding Comey “a dirty cop.”
Trump was wounded in the ear during an assassination attempt at a campaign rally last July in Butler, Pennsylvania, and has faced other threats.
Comey said Thursday on Instagram that he posted “a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message.”
“I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” he said.
The “8647” and “8646” themes have been used as political slogans and on T-shirts during the administrations of both Trump and his predecessor, Democratic President Joe Biden, the 46th US president.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary says on its website that one recent meaning of the term 86 was “to kill” but that it had not adopted it “due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.”
Trump administration officials were unconvinced, with Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem saying DHS and the US Secret Service -- which is charged with protecting the president -- were investigating and "will respond appropriately."
FBI Director Kash Patel meanwhile said the law enforcement agency was "in communication with the Secret Service" and that it would "provide all necessary support."
And Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Comey had "issued a call to action to murder the president of the United States," adding: "We fully support the Secret Service investigation into Comey's threat on President Trump's life."
On Friday, US media reported Comey was questioned by the Secret Service over his post.
The meeting began around 6 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT) and lasted about an hour, the official said. Comey appeared voluntarily after being asked to come in, according to a law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Gabbard dismissed Comey’s explanation as absurd, and said the “8647” slogan has been used by anti-Trump protesters and was a veiled call to action against the sitting president.
Early in his first term, Trump fired Comey, who as FBI director had been leading an investigation into the Trump 2016 presidential campaign’s possible collusion with Russia.
Comey has been a sharp critic of his former boss, calling him “morally unfit” to lead in a 2018 interview.
Trump himself was accused of using Twitter posts to incite rioters, who attacked the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to prevent the certification of Biden’s election victory.
Trump last year also posted on social media a video that featured an image of Biden, who was then president, with his hands and feet tied together in the back of a pickup truck.
Elon Musk’s AI company says Grok chatbot focus on South Africa’s racial politics was ‘unauthorized’
- xAI blames employee at xAI made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic”
- Grok kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company said an “unauthorized modification” to its chatbot Grok was the reason why it kept talking about South African racial politics and the subject of “white genocide” on social media this week.
An employee at xAI made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic,” which “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values,” the company said in an explanation posted late Thursday that promised reforms.
A day earlier, Grok kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa.
One exchange was about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name. Others were about video games or baseball but quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence against South Africa’s white farmers. It was echoing views shared by Musk, who was born in South Africa and frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.
Computer scientist Jen Golbeck was curious about Grok’s unusual behavior so she tried it herself before the fixes were made Wednesday, sharing a photo she had taken at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show and asking, “is this true?”
“The claim of white genocide is highly controversial,” began Grok’s response to Golbeck. “Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the ‘Kill the Boer’ song, which they see as incitement.”
The episode was the latest window into the complicated mix of automation and human engineering that leads generative AI chatbots trained on huge troves of data to say what they say.
“It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview Thursday. “It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to.”
Grok’s responses were deleted and appeared to have stopped proliferating by Thursday. Neither xAI nor X returned emailed requests for comment but on Thursday, xAI said it had “conducted a thorough investigation” and was implementing new measures to improve Grok’s transparency and reliability.
Musk has spent years criticizing the “woke AI” outputs he says come out of rival chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has pitched Grok as their “maximally truth-seeking” alternative.
Musk has also criticized his rivals’ lack of transparency about their AI systems, fueling criticism in the hours between the unauthorized change — at 3:15 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday — and the company’s explanation nearly two days later.
“Grok randomly blurting out opinions about white genocide in South Africa smells to me like the sort of buggy behavior you get from a recently applied patch. I sure hope it isn’t. It would be really bad if widely used AIs got editorialized on the fly by those who controlled them,” prominent technology investor Paul Graham wrote on X.
Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white and has repeated a claim that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”
Musk’s commentary — and Grok’s — escalated this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees, the start of a larger relocation effort for members of the minority Afrikaner group that came after Trump suspended refugee programs and halted arrivals from other parts of the world. Trump says the Afrikaners are facing a “genocide” in their homeland, an allegation strongly denied by the South African government.
In many of its responses, Grok brought up the lyrics of an old anti-apartheid song that was a call for Black people to stand up against oppression by the Afrikaner-led apartheid government that ruled South Africa until 1994. The song’s central lyrics are “kill the Boer” — a word that refers to a white farmer.
Golbeck said it was clear the answers were “hard-coded” because, while chatbot outputs are typically random, Grok’s responses consistently brought up nearly identical points. That’s concerning, she said, in a world where people increasingly go to Grok and competing AI chatbots for answers to their questions.
“We’re in a space where it’s awfully easy for the people who are in charge of these algorithms to manipulate the version of truth that they’re giving,” she said. “And that’s really problematic when people — I think incorrectly — believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what’s true and what isn’t.”
Musk’s company said it is now making a number of changes, starting with publishing Grok system prompts openly on the software development site GitHub so that “the public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI.”
Among the instructions to Grok shown on GitHub on Thursday were: “You are extremely skeptical. You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media.”
Noting that some had “circumvented” its existing code review process, xAI also said it will “put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can’t modify the prompt without review.” The company said it is also putting in place a “24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems,” for when other measures fail.
Moody’s strips US government of top credit rating, citing failure to rein in debt
- Moody’s is the last of the three major rating agencies to lower the federal government’s credit
- White House dismisses downgrade as the work of a political opponent of Trump
WASHINGTON: Moody’s Ratings stripped the US government of its top credit rating Friday, citing successive governments’ failure to stop a rising tide of debt.
Moody’s lowered the rating from a gold-standard Aaa to Aa1 but said the United States “retains exceptional credit strengths such as the size, resilience and dynamism of its economy and the role of the US dollar as global reserve currency.”
Moody’s is the last of the three major rating agencies to lower the federal government’s credit. Standard & Poor’s downgraded federal debt in 2011 and Fitch Ratings followed in 2023.
In a statement, Moody’s said: “We expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9 percent of (the US economy) by 2035, up from 6.4 percent in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending, and relatively low revenue generation.”
Extending President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, a priority of the Republican-controlled Congress, Moody’s said, would add $4 trillion over the next decade to the federal primary deficit (which does not include interest payments).
White House communications director Steven Cheung reacted to the downgrade via a social media post, singling out Moody’s economist, Mark Zandi, for criticism. He called Zandi a political opponent of US President Donald Trump.
“Nobody takes his ‘analysis’ seriously. He has been proven wrong time and time again,” said Cheung.
A gridlocked political system has been unable to tackle America’s huge deficits. Republicans reject tax increases, and Democrats are reluctant to cut spending.
On Friday, House Republicans failed to push a big package of tax breaks and spending cuts through the Budget Committee. A small group of hard-right Republican lawmakers, insisting on steeper cuts to Medicaid and President Joe Biden’s green energy tax breaks, joined all Democrats in opposing it.
