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  • Israel holds to Lebanon truce, with troops kept on defense

    Israel holds to Lebanon truce, with troops kept on defense

    JERUSALEM — Israel and Hezbollah appeared to maintain a tense ceasefire in Lebanon for a second day on Monday, as mediators in the U.S.-Iran talks announced a mechanism aimed at ensuring the truce holds, and Israeli troops operated under new orders designed to lower the risk of flare-ups.

    Israel’s top diplomat, however, warned that the country would not withdraw its forces from the self-declared “security zone” it has established in Lebanon up to about 6 miles north of the border.

    “Israel will respect the ceasefire in Lebanon as long as it won’t be breached by Hezbollah,” Foreign Minister Gideon Saar wrote in a social media post on Monday. “We don’t have territorial ambitions in Lebanon, but we will not withdraw from the security zone and expose our citizens to Hezbollah’s attacks and possible invasion.”

    Saar’s post came hours after Pakistan and Qatar, the mediators in the U.S.-Iran talks, announced an agreement to create a “deconfliction cell” to ensure the “adherence of the termination of military operations in Lebanon.” It would include representatives from Iran, the United States, and Lebanon.

    The quiet on the Lebanon front was still settling in after a furious round of hostilities on Friday and Saturday that began when four Israeli soldiers, including a battalion commander, were killed when their tank exploded.

    A fifth soldier was killed in the same area Saturday, setting off waves of Israeli retaliatory strikes. The military said Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group, had launched more than 50 rockets targeting its soldiers operating in southern Lebanon.

    The fighting centered around the area of Kfar Tebnit and nearby Ali Taher, a strategic ridgeline overlooking the large city of Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon. The Israeli military recently issued an updated map of its security zone that placed Kfar Tebnit and Ali Taher just within the area under Israeli control.

    That appeared to be more than coincidental.

    The Israeli military said that Ali Taher was the location of a fortified underground Hezbollah stronghold that has long served as the militia’s southern headquarters from which it directed fire against Israeli forces and communities in northern Israel.

    Should the militants inside try to leave that stronghold without surrendering, it could pose a threat to the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire.

    Ceasefires in Lebanon have been declared, broken, and reinstated numerous times in recent weeks, but the fighting has persisted amid disagreements over what constitutes defensive actions by Israeli forces.

    An Israeli military statement Monday said that it had gained control of the area of the Hezbollah compound and encircled it, adding that “dozens of Hezbollah operatives are currently trapped with no ability to exit.”

    Hezbollah said Saturday that it had attacked Israeli forces advancing toward Ali Taher.

    Later on Saturday, the Israeli military said it had received “updated directives” from the country’s political leaders and would no longer be “conducting proactive strikes” in Lebanon. The military reserved the right to respond if Hezbollah did not abide by the ceasefire and targeted Israeli troops or civilians.

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted in a video statement Monday that his directive to the military, and that of the defense minister, remained clear and unchanged: “Our fighters in southern Lebanon have full operational freedom to thwart any direct or emergent threat against them or residents of the north.”

    He did not address whether the military had been ordered to refrain from offensive action, and a spokesperson would not elaborate.

    Israeli commanders received new orders Saturday restricting them to defensive actions in Lebanon, stating that troops may only fire to counter an immediate threat unless authorized by the military’s chief of staff.

    The new orders specifically bar Israeli soldiers from firing warning shots at civilians attempting to return to southern Lebanon unless they get too close to the soldiers, according to two Israeli officials who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

    The orders also bar Israeli soldiers from blowing up homes and other infrastructure inside the security zone without the approval of senior officers, the officials said.

    Spokespeople for the military did not respond to repeated requests for comment Monday.

    Sarit Zehavi, president of the Alma Research and Education Center, which focuses on Israel’s northern border, said she feared that the ban on offensive operations would put Israeli soldiers in the position of having to be responsive rather than proactive.

    “On the ground, it takes time till you understand what’s a threat,” she said. “This will eventually cost the lives of soldiers.”

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

  • First round of U.S.-Iran talks ends with high hopes and big challenges

    ZURICH — The morning after the first overnight session of renewed talks between the United States and Iran, aimed at turning an incomplete truce into a lasting peace deal, the vibes were as warm as the heat wave currently washing over Switzerland.

    Mediators from Pakistan and Qatar said early Monday that Vice President JD Vance and his Iranian counterparts had made “encouraging progress” toward the goal of cementing a final peace agreement within 60 days. Swiss officials called the outcome “constructive.”

    “Yesterday was a very, very good day,” Vance told reporters Monday afternoon. “We made a lot of good progress. We did exactly what we wanted to do.”

    He added that Iran had promised to readmit nuclear inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. watchdog, though Iran did not immediately confirm that.

    But other details that emerged from the luxury Bürgenstock Resort Lake Lucerne suggested that the discussions over the next two months could still prove difficult and that efforts to reach a deal could proceed in fits and starts.

    Iran’s delegation, headed by the speaker of parliament, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, walked away from the table Sunday to protest a social media post from President Donald Trump that threatened to resume U.S. attacks on Iran if a deal did not come together. They eventually returned.

    Perhaps more important were the still-unresolved topics that appear to have dominated much of the conversation.

    The 60-day window, which was established by the initial memorandum of understanding that Trump and Iran’s president signed last week, was meant to be a period for Iran and the United States to solve crucial issues left out of that first-step deal. Most notably, that includes Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The memorandum says that Iran will dilute its existing stockpile of near-weapons-grade nuclear material but does not clarify how that will happen or whether the country will be barred from producing such material in the future.

    Those issues were not center stage, aside from Vance’s mention of the IAEA inspectors, whose return would still be far from a solution to the nuclear question.

    Instead, the first talks focused largely on two topics that were supposed to be settled: How to enforce a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and how to ensure shipping traffic, including oil tankers, flows freely again through the Strait of Hormuz.

    Israel launched the war on Iran alongside the United States in February and was not party to last week’s initial deal. Despite the deal’s call for a ceasefire, both Israel and Hezbollah have continued to carry out attacks on each other. Iran protested Israel’s attacks over the weekend by saying that it had closed the Strait of Hormuz — which has been clogged throughout the war, sending global oil prices skyward — though U.S. officials said that ships were still passing through.

    Mediators from Qatar and Pakistan, who joined Iranian and U.S. officials at Lake Lucerne, said Monday morning that discussions would continue through this week.

    Some analysts warned Monday against an overly optimistic takeaway.

    Financial markets had reacted to Trump’s initial agreement with Iran “with a classic show of irrational exuberance,” Carl B. Weinberg, the chief economist for High Frequency Economics, an American analysis firm, wrote in a research note Monday morning. “This week should bring a reality check,” he noted.

    Weinberg added that he believed Iran was likely to string out the talks for much longer than 60 days — all the way until January 2029, when the next U.S. president will take office.

    The stop-start nature of the negotiations has heightened the uncertainty.

    Vance had been scheduled to fly to Switzerland on Thursday night, but canceled the trip at the last minute after Iran pulled out in protest, diplomats said, at continuing Israeli attacks in Lebanon.

    Nothing in the statements from the mediators, or from Iranian officials, suggested that the negotiations were barreling toward the sort of quick capitulation that Trump has intimated would be the endgame for the talks. For example, Qalibaf wrote on social media that Iran’s “armed forces are prepared to respond” if Trump attacked Iran again — raising the possibility of more war.

    Still, the releases from the mediators and hosts conveyed, at the very least, a sense that the talks had succeeded in starting the gears of a more traditional diplomatic process.

    Qatar and Pakistan said that the discussions had led to “the creation of a mechanism for further technical talks.” Swiss authorities said that the parties had agreed to “a road map aimed at reaching a final agreement within 60 days.”

    “Our aim,” Swiss officials wrote, “is that our diplomacy contributes to de-escalation, stability and peace.”

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

  • Supreme Court restores conviction in 1979 murder of Etan Patz

    Supreme Court restores conviction in 1979 murder of Etan Patz

    NEW YORK — The Supreme Court on Monday reversed a lower court decision that had reopened the case of the man convicted in the killing of Etan Patz, a 6-year-old boy whose 1979 abduction in Manhattan reshaped American childhoods.

    The court’s unsigned opinion restores the conviction of the man, Pedro Hernandez, who the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had said last year was entitled to a new trial.

    The three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — noted their objection to the majority’s order.

    Hernandez was found guilty in 2017 of kidnapping and murdering Etan, but an appeals court overturned that judgment in July. Months later, the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted Hernandez, asked the nation’s highest court to review the decision.

    On Monday, a defense lawyer for Hernandez, Harvey Fishbein, said the Supreme Court’s order meant his client would not get a new trial and that his team was “terribly disappointed.”

    “We firmly believe that an innocent man is in jail for a crime that he did not commit,” Fishbein said.

    In a statement, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said the case had “changed a generation of New Yorkers.”

    “This office has remained steadfast in its pursuit of justice for Etan and the Patz family and will continue to stand by this important conviction,” he said.

    The Supreme Court’s action sends the matter back to the lower courts and is the latest development in a case that stumped investigators for decades. Hernandez, a handyman who lived in New Jersey, was arrested in 2012 and first put on trial in 2015. But after 18 days of deliberations, the trial ended in a hung jury. The case went back to trial and, in 2017, a Manhattan jury convicted Hernandez after nine days of deliberations.

    The reversal of Hernandez’s conviction last year reopened a case that had appeared finally settled. From the first days Etan went missing, when he was walking the two blocks from his home in the SoHo neighborhood to a school bus stop, the case generated intense public interest. Etan’s abrupt disappearance — and the killing of 6-year-old Adam Walsh two years later — ushered in an era of heightened caution among American parents.

    In its 10-page opinion Monday, the Supreme Court said the 2nd Circuit got it wrong and exceeded its authority.

    The lower court opinion “appears to reflect serious doubt about the reliability of Hernandez’s confessions,” the majority said, but the relevant statute does not permit federal courts to “disturb a state-court conviction based on such an evaluation of the evidence.”

    The liberal justices did not explain their disagreement. The ruling was issued as part of the court’s routine orders and without the justices holding oral arguments.

    For decades, investigators in Manhattan struggled to figure out what happened to Etan. His body was never found, and in 2001, he was declared legally dead.

    The critical break in the case came in 2012, when one of Hernandez’s relatives contacted investigators. New York police officers traveled to Hernandez’s home in Camden, N.J. After about seven hours of questioning, police said, Hernandez confessed — first before being read his rights, and twice more after.

    Hernandez was 18 at the time of Etan’s disappearance and worked at a bodega where investigators believed Etan had been killed.

    There was no scientific evidence linking Hernandez to the crime, and his confessions to investigators were quickly called into question.

    Hernandez’s lawyers argued that the statements were invented to placate the police. They asked the court to suppress them, saying they were a result of Hernandez’s low IQ and the product of psychotic delusions. The judge nonetheless said that they could be used as evidence.

    During jury deliberations at the second trial in 2017, the jury asked the judge whether they should disregard one of Hernandez’s later confessions if they found that his first one was not voluntary. The judge gave a one-word answer: No.

    A federal appeals court found that the judge should have explained a Supreme Court precedent about such serial confessions and ordered that Hernandez be released from his 25-years-to-life sentence or get a new trial.

    Prosecutors in Manhattan, led by Bragg, argued to the Supreme Court that Hernandez’s conviction should not have been overturned because it was not based on an “error in the decades-long investigation, in the admission of Hernandez’s confessions or in the evidence presented at trial.” The appeals court had said that the judge overseeing the trial, Maxwell Wiley, had violated federal law and therefore invalidated a jury’s verdict.

    In their response, Hernandez’s lawyers said that the judge’s instruction to the jury had touched on the central issue in the case.

    “Far from exhibiting the kind of clear error for which summary reversal is typically reserved,” his lawyers wrote, “the 2nd Circuit’s decision is correct.”

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

  • Why Trump has been attacking the Supreme Court, with 3 key rulings ahead

    Why Trump has been attacking the Supreme Court, with 3 key rulings ahead

    When Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch hosted a gathering of his former clerks last year, a prominent attorney and Donald Trump ally who had played a key role in Gorsuch’s rise was notably absent.

    Gorsuch had nicknamed his friend Mike Davis “the general” for helping him secure his first federal judgeship, leading a campaign to get Gorsuch confirmed to the Supreme Court, and then serving as one of his inaugural clerks.

    But the relationship soured last year as the Supreme Court began to rule on some of Trump’s policies, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

    One recounted how Gorsuch became upset when Davis lashed out at Justice Amy Coney Barrett, calling her a “rattled law professor” for siding with the court’s liberals in a pair of rulings against Trump. The other said Davis was angered by Gorsuch’s vote to block Trump’s use of a wartime authority to deport Venezuelans.

    The people differed on whether Gorsuch had asked Davis not to come to his clerks’ gathering or he chose not to. Either way, the rift highlighted the growing conflict between Trump, his MAGA allies, and the justices, which has burst more fully into public view in recent months.

    That turbulence makes for a tense backdrop in the waning days of the Supreme Court’s 2025-26 term, as the justices prepare to rule on three signature Trump initiatives: limiting birthright citizenship, firing the heads of independent agencies, and reshaping the Federal Reserve.

    Many legal experts believe that the justices have signaled they will rule against Trump on two out of the three, blocking his bid to deny citizenship to those who were born to parents here illegally or lacking permanent residency, as well as his effort to remove a governor of the Fed board.

    “It seems like almost 100 years since you’ve had a clash approaching this level between the president and the court,” said Jeffrey L. Fisher, a law professor at Stanford University. “You’d have to go back to the New Deal to have any kind of an analogue.”

    During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to pack the court by expanding it from nine justices to 15 after the court struck down key parts of the New Deal. The plan ultimately failed, but not before the court began upholding some policies that Roosevelt championed, possibly in response to his threats to add justices.

    Davis, who declined to comment on his relationship with Gorsuch, said in an interview that if the court rules against Trump on birthright citizenship, as he expects, it would be an inflection point. Birthright citizenship is the principle that nearly everyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen.

    “When the Supreme Court gives Chinese birth tourists birthright citizenship, it’s going to destroy its legitimacy with a broad swath of the American public,” Davis said, referring to people who ostensibly travel to the United States to have American children. “They are following politics and vanity projects instead of the law.”

    Defenders of birthright citizenship note that the 14th Amendment says that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

    In another major case on Trump policies, the court will decide whether the president can remove without cause the heads of roughly two dozen independent agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, that Congress set up to be insulated from political influence.

    In addition, the justices will rule on whether Trump can fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook while a lawsuit over her removal plays out in the courts. A ruling for Trump would give the president far greater control over the powerful central bank.

    These rulings, and other major decisions, are likely to come in the next week or so as the justices sprint toward the end of the term in late June or early July.

    The disaffection with the Supreme Court among Trump’s allies is notable because the president reshaped the court in his first term with three staunchly conservative appointees, who have delivered major victories for conservatives on abortion, affirmative action, religious rights, and more.

    This term, the justices have handed the administration a string of wins on the emergency docket, allowing Trump policies on limiting immigration, freezing foreign aid, and dismantling the Education Department to move forward for now.

    Trump appointed Gorsuch, who did not respond to a request for comment, along with Brett M. Kavanaugh and Barrett.

    The wins have not satisfied Trump, who has attacked the court — including his own nominees — in increasingly caustic and personal terms that legal scholars say have little historical precedent; Trump has called the justices “bad,” “stupid,” “weak,” and other epithets.

    Davis suggested that such comments could have an effect on the justices. “Sometimes feeling the heat helps people see the light,” he said.

    White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that “this administration values the judicial branch.”

    “The American people have always valued President Trump’s ability to freely speak his mind and share his thoughts directly with them,” Jackson said. “It’s one of the many reasons why the President was resoundingly reelected. He will unapologetically share his opinions about the Court’s rulings, as is his right.”

    Richard Lazarus, a Harvard University law professor, said the heart of the conflict is Trump’s view that the conservative justices owe him fealty, rather than acting as an independent branch of government.

    “There’s no question that Trump, starting with the tariff case, has taken aim at the court and made quite clear his expectation that justices who were nominated by Republican presidents should vote for his positions,” Lazarus said.

    In a 6-3 decision in February, the justices ruled that Trump did not have the authority under a 1977 law to impose sweeping tariffs on most of the nation’s trading partners. Of the court’s conservatives, Gorsuch, Barrett, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the liberals in the majority.

    After that ruling, Trump excoriated some of the justices at a news conference in ways he had previously reserved for lower-court judges. The president said he was “ashamed” of the justices who ruled against him, later singling out Barrett and Gorsuch.

    “I think it’s an embarrassment to their families, you want to know the truth,” he said.

    In April, Trump kept the heat on by becoming the first sitting president to attend arguments at the court. Many saw his appearance at the birthright citizenship case as an attempt to pressure the justices to back the administration.

    Later that month, Trump accused the liberal justices of embracing “warped and perverse policies, ideas, and cases” and said the conservatives “give the Democrats win after win.” He added that “certain ‘Republican’ Justices have just gone weak, stupid, and bad.” The justices do not see themselves as representing particular parties but as expressing judicial philosophies.

    Trump’s attacks have continued. In a nearly 550-word Truth Social post in May, Trump lamented Barrett and Gorsuch’s lack of “loyalty” for ruling against him on tariffs.

    “Well, maybe Neil, and Amy, just had a really bad day, but our Country can only handle so many decisions of that magnitude before it breaks down, and cracks!!!” Trump wrote.

    Amid the acrimony, the justices and Trump have also exchanged olive branches. Trump invited the court’s conservatives to a state dinner for Britain’s King Charles.

    They’ve also had other interactions. Roberts hosted a clerk reunion that Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance attended.

    The justices have offered only muted responses to Trump’s broadsides.

    Asked whether he owed loyalty to the president during a CBS News interview in May, Gorsuch said his “loyalty is to the Constitution.” In March, Roberts said attacks against judges and justices are “dangerous” and have ”got to stop,” but did not mention Trump.

    Behind that reserve, Trump’s attacks have sparked debate among the justices, according to a person familiar with their thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Some want to ignore the attacks, while others favor a more forceful public response, the person said.

    Roman Martinez, who heads the Supreme Court practice at Latham & Watkins and argues frequently before the court, said responding to Trump could prove a slippery slope.

    “The net result of being drawn into a back-and-forth with politicians is it is going to lower the stature of the court and the institution and make it look more political and politicized,” Martinez said. “I don’t think that’s in the court’s best interest.”

    Fisher said it appears Trump is trying to demand loyalty from the justices the way he has with lawmakers and administration appointees, but he lacks an effective cudgel. Supreme Court justices have lifetime appointments, so Trump cannot threaten them with primary challenges or fire them.

    “He’s casting about, looking for some way to make the court feel like he’s watching them and is putting pressure on them, but I don’t think it has much of an effect,” Fisher said.

    Hanging over the strained relationship is the question of whether the president will openly defy one of the court’s rulings at some point, a scenario that many legal experts say could plunge the nation into a constitutional crisis.

    Most legal experts say the administration appears to be complying with high court orders so far. They note that Trump went along with a ruling blocking the deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago, among others.

    But dozens of lower-court judges have found that Trump officials are flouting their decisions, particularly when it comes to immigration cases. And some experts see signs of slippage even when it comes to the Supreme Court; Lazarus said the administration’s response to the tariff case, for example, “strikes me as pretty close to non-compliance.”

    The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s tariffs as illegal, and a specialized trade court has ordered the administration to refund $166 billion in import levies paid by businesses. Despite the rulings, Trump officials have gone back to court arguing they should not have to refund the full amount.

    Trump also said in an interview that he would “remember” companies that do not seek a refund, a comment some saw as a warning to those that do. A judge has complained about the pace of the administration’s refunds. The administration has said it is difficult to process so many payments.

    Whatever the outcome in the remaining cases this term, Fisher said he sees no letup in the tension between Trump and the court.

    “Almost all substantive policymaking is coming out of the White House instead of Congress, so it stands to reason there is going to be continued friction between the courts and the president,” Fisher said. “All the more so when you have a president that describes himself as willing to push boundaries.”

  • Quarantine comes to an end for the last of the hantavirus ship passengers in Nebraska

    OMAHA, Nebraska — The last eight American passengers who endured 42 days in a specialized hospital quarantine unit after exposure to an unusual hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship that killed three people have left the Nebraska facility.

    U.S. Department of Health and Human Services officials on Monday confirmed the end of the quarantine.

    “Through close collaboration among federal, state, and local partners, HHS helped protect the American people, contain potential risks, and bring this response effort to a successful conclusion,” HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said in an email.

    More than 120 people were evacuated from the MV Hondius in Spain’s Canary Islands early last month — including the 18 Americans who wound up in the National Quarantine Unit in Omaha — though most were from other countries.

    In addition to those people evacuated by health officials in full protective suits, at least 30 other passengers had left the ship earlier before the outbreak was documented. That included seven Americans, who were allowed to monitor for any symptoms at home. When the ship eventually docked in the Netherlands, 25 crew members and two medical personnel were on board and had to quarantine.

    The World Health Organization didn’t immediately respond Monday to questions about the status of all the other people who had to quarantine around the globe. A total of 13 cases of the virus, including the three who died, were identified among people who were on the ship.

    Most Americans returned home but some were forced to quarantine

    One of the American passengers, Angela Perryman, had been held against her will and against the recommendation of a government medical expert. She said in an interview Monday passengers were told that the quarantine monitoring period ended Sunday at 2 p.m. She left on a flight that evening. Others were flying out Monday, she said.

    “We were locked in our rooms until 1:55. And at 2 o’clock, ‘OK, well, everybody walk out and go home,’” Perryman said, speaking from her Florida home.

    Some stayed the night elsewhere in Omaha, but Perryman pushed for a flight home that evening. The government paid for the flights, she said.

    Seven of the last remaining patients stayed there voluntarily, but Perryman was forced to stay as the result of a controversial quarantine order that was deemed unnecessary even by some health officials.

    Perryman and seven others spent six weeks at the National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. That monitoring period was set because symptoms of hantavirus have taken as long as 42 days to appear in previous outbreaks. None were reported to have developed the illness.

    Ten others who were at the facility were allowed to leave earlier under an agreement that they would be closely monitored in their home states.

    Outbreak developed on a small cruise ship

    The passengers were on a Dutch cruise ship, the MV Hondius, traveling in the South Atlantic that became the setting of a hantavirus outbreak that killed three people, including a Dutch couple who health officials believe were the first exposed to the virus while visiting South America.

    Hantaviruses usually spread when people inhale contaminated residue of rodent droppings, but the hantavirus that caused the outbreak, called the Andes virus, may be able to spread between people in rare cases, health officials say.

    Some 25 Americans were on the ship, including about seven who disembarked in April and 18 who remained on board. Sixteen were evacuated to the Nebraska quarantine unit in Omaha on May 11, and two other Americans joined them a few days later.

    Passengers staying in Omaha enjoyed Nebraska hospitality

    During the passengers’ stay, local Omaha restaurants and food trucks delivered special meals for them to enjoy almost daily. And the nurses sometimes made Starbucks runs to deliver some of the passengers’ favorite drinks.

    The rooms they stayed in are like hotel rooms equipped with a desk, television, internet connection, and exercise equipment to help the passengers pass the time.

    One of the passengers, Jake Rosmarin, on Monday morning posted an “I’m finally coming home” video that showed him leaving his room at the quarantine center, hauling two suitcases and a backpack and turning out the lights as he walked out the door. Later Monday, he posted a video of the Omaha skyline shot out the window of his plane as he headed home to his fiance in Boston and his family.

    Rosmarin, who is a travel blogger, posted a tearful video Sunday thanking the staff of the quarantine unit, the Omaha community, and his family and friends who helped him get through quarantine.

    “I want to thank the Omaha, Nebraska, community for welcoming us with open arms and showing us complete kindness and generosity. And a big thanks to all of you who have helped me get through this because I really don’t know if it would have been as easy without the support from strangers,” he said while wearing a Nebraska Huskers sweatshirt that someone sent him.

    Florida wouldn’t agree to monitor passenger round the clock

    Perryman had a darker take. She was forced to stay after Florida officials refused a federal demand that the state provide round-the-clock surveillance on her if she were returned home. This happened even as they had started making travel arrangements for the passengers weeks ago, she said.

    “Nobody actually expected anybody to get sick at that point,” she said. “Everybody was well aware that we were all going home on commercial flights.”

    She called the six-week quarantine “a political stunt.”

  • Confirmed Ebola cases in Congo outbreak top 1,000 with 254 deaths, authorities say

    BUNIA, Congo — Confirmed cases in the Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo have reached 1,003, including 254 deaths, officials said, as tracing those who had been in contact with patients remains a major challenge.

    A total of 100 people have recovered in the outbreak concentrated in the Ituri province since it was declared on May 15, Congo’s Ministry of Health said Sunday. At least 365 patients are in hospitals or in isolation, it said.

    The Ebola outbreak caused by the rare Bundibugyo virus, which has no vaccines or treatment, was the worst ever in its first month. Officials admit there could be far more cases they still don’t know about and that the peak of the outbreak is still ahead.

    Contact tracing remains a key issue for local authorities, who have only achieved a 55% coverage rate, the ministry said.

    “If you want to control an outbreak, especially Ebola outbreak, you must know the index case. We don’t have confidence on when this outbreak started,” the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director-General Jean Kaseya told the Associated Press last week.

    Officials also are yet to identify the patient zero and trace more than 35,000 people who have come in contact with infected individuals as of last week, authorities said.

    That’s partly because eastern Congo is also battling ongoing violence from rebels. In Ituri, attacks by the Islamic State group-backed Allied Democratic Force have cut off access to many villages and forced people to flee their homes, including those sheltering in overcrowded camps and others constantly on the move.

    More than a month into the outbreak, officials believe the disease continues to outpace response efforts and no one knows its true scale.

    Displaced persons at risk

    At the Kigonze displacement camp in Bunia, the capital of Ituri province, camp officials said Friday that 10 people had died last week in unusual circumstances, raising the fear of a possible outbreak in the camp of over 20,000 displaced people.

    There had been no Ebola case confirmed at the site, camp officials said, but added that the death rate was unprecedented and called for investigation.

    The U.N. refugee agency has said at least 2 million people forcibly displaced from their homes, including over 320,000 refugees, live in areas at risk of Ebola in Congo.

    In a statement on Friday, the agency said it was “deeply concerned by the accelerating spread” of the virus and “the growing risks it poses to displaced communities across the region.”

    “If a disease or epidemic were to spread among the thousands of people living at this (Kigonze) site, it would be a real catastrophe given our already very precarious living conditions,” said Charité Banza, a civil society leader in Ituri.

  • Top Justice Department officials can remain part of prosecution of press gala attack, judge rules

    WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Monday denied a request to disqualify top Justice Department officials from supervising the prosecution of the man charged with trying to kill President Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

    Cole Tomas Allen had argued that involvement in his prosecution by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro created a potential conflict of interest because they were among many administration officials present at the April dinner. Allen’s attorney also had raised concerns about the close friendship between Trump and Pirro, a former Fox News commentator.

    U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden wrote in his ruling that neither their attendance at the dinner nor Pirro’s personal relationship with the president merited their disqualification. McFadden noted that Allen is not charged with attempting to harm Blanche and Pirro, and there is no evidence to suggest he even knew they would attend the dinner.

    “They are unlikely to be trial witnesses, nor do they meet the legal definition of victims,” wrote McFadden, who was nominated to the bench by Trump.

    Allen has been accused of trying to breach a security checkpoint armed with guns and knives. He has pleaded not guilty to various charges, including assaulting a federal official with a deadly weapon and attempted assassination of the president. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted of the attempted assassination charge alone.

    Allen also is accused of firing a shotgun at a Secret Service agent during the attack, which disrupted and ultimately prompted an early end to one of the highest-profile annual events in the nation’s capital. The Secret Service officer who was shot once in a bullet-resistant vest fired his own weapon five times without hitting anyone. Allen, of Torrance, Calif., was injured but was not shot.

  • U.S. oil blockade means children in Cuba are missing school

    U.S. oil blockade means children in Cuba are missing school

    HAVANA — Axisa and Aron Alfonso, 6- and 7-year-old siblings in western Cuba, are luckier than most of their classmates: Their father takes them on their 1-mile commute to school on horseback.

    The children and teachers who live farther away rely on a spluttering, yellow Soviet-era school bus that no longer shows up. Teachers often do not make it to class, so the Alfonso family and their horse, Chocolate, turn around and go home.

    A U.S. oil blockade has set off an increasingly agonizing energy crisis that has brought transportation largely to a standstill. Fewer cars and buses are on the streets, and, as a result, fewer students and teachers are in school.

    “My children rarely go to school. They go, but the teachers don’t come,” said Sergio Alfonso Vásquez, 33, a farmer and the father of Axisa and Arona. “I’m afraid because they aren’t learning anything.”

    To save energy, the Cuban government in February cut school to half-days and resorted to COVID-era remote learning for college students.

    Then Cuba decided to end the school year two weeks early and scrapped college entrance exams for high school seniors after acknowledging that sleepless nights without electricity and a lack of school meals were exhausting students and teachers alike.

    The Cuban government’s measures are the latest blows to the country’s once vaunted public education system, which had long been a signature triumph of the country’s socialist revolution.

    Schools were already reeling from Hurricane Melissa last fall, which damaged hundreds of buildings; a mass departure of teachers in recent years; and shortages of textbooks, uniforms, and even pencils and paper.

    The extreme gasoline shortage finally brought the strained system to a stop.

    The Trump administration’s pressure campaign, including an executive order that prohibited countries from delivering oil to Cuba, is aimed at forcing Cuba’s government into making political and economic changes.

    But experts say the damage to the educational system is a striking example of the negative consequences of U.S. measures on regular Cubans and that, in the case of schools, amounts to a serious long-term threat.

    “Education in Cuba is at risk due to the current energy crisis,” Anne Lemaistre, the regional director of UNESCO, the United Nations education organization, said on Instagram. “It jeopardizes the future of an entire generation.”

    All 240 of Cuba’s boarding schools had to close this semester, Lemaistre, who is based in Havana, told the New York Times.

    The Cuban government did not respond to requests for comment, but government officials have publicly discussed the schools crisis.

    “After a night without electricity, getting a kid to school, figuring out how to engage him, and the class itself, is a challenge,” Naima Ariatne Trujillo Barreto, Cuba’s minister of education, said in February on state television. “And for the teachers, who also suffer just as much, without electricity or with the problem of whether or not they have water at home, concentrating on giving classes has been quite a challenge.”

    Even before the Trump administration started imposing stricter measures against the Cuban government, the country had already been in a steep economic decline for several years.

    The Cuban government said the school system was facing a shortage of roughly 26,000 teachers, many of whom had quit for better-paying jobs in the private sector.

    In Camagüey, a city in eastern Cuba, nearly 1,000 teachers had left the country for good in recent years, state-run media reported.

    After the COVID-19 pandemic, the country experienced a record-breaking exodus. More than 1 million people, including thousands of teachers who earned an average of $11 a month, left the country.

    President Donald Trump cut off international fuel deliveries in January and introduced a new package of aggressive economic measures aimed at starving the Cuban government of cash.

    The Trump administration argues that the United States is not to blame for Cuba’s energy crunch, but instead faults Cuban officials for not investing enough in infrastructure while diverting “energy resources to line their own pockets.”

    The State Department, in a statement, questioned why the Cuban regime claims it has no fuel for schools, while Interior Ministry officials who quash protests have enough gas to carry out their operations.

    Remote learning for college students, one of the austerity measures adopted by the Cuban government, has proved all but impossible. Blackouts stretch over 20 hours a day, and most students and teachers cannot pay for enough data on their phones to support remote classes.

    Instead, professors have sent lessons using WhatsApp voice notes.

    Leonard Gómez León, a third-year law student at the University of Havana, described the semester as “hellish.”

    “The power outages have been constant, the lack of internet connection, and so on, and it’s truly terrifying to see how badly we students are doing,” he said. “I feel like this is almost a lost semester.”

    Gómez, 21, is the vice president of the University Student Federation of Cuba, a state-run organization that has traditionally toed the government line. But he helped organize a protest in March outside the university, demanding the semester be canceled until in-person classes could resume.

    The vice minister of education, Modesto Ricardo Gómez, told the protesting students that the Trump administration was “massacring an entire society.”

    The collapse of education is a stark contrast to the gains that the country made after Fidel Castro toppled a U.S.-aligned dictator and seized power in 1959.

    He made education a priority at a time when the illiteracy rate was higher than 20% and mobilized 250,000 students and teachers to teach adults to read, particularly in the countryside.

    Illiteracy was all but eradicated. The island’s universal, free university system steadily expanded over the decades, churning out doctors and engineers.

    But the government, which has a near monopoly on such professions, has for decades paid minuscule salaries, undercutting economic incentives to study or teach. And the quality of Cuba’s education has deteriorated since the fall of the Soviet Union, the country’s main benefactor, which led to budget shortfalls.

    Katrin Hansing, an anthropologist at the City University of New York’s Baruch College who has written extensively about Cuba, said the education system is now “a shell of its former self.”

    University education in particular, she said, is largely on pause.

    “What is happening online is very poor in quality,” she said. “There’s only one, or two, or less, hours of electricity a day, and people in that time are trying to do everything to survive, from washing to cooking.”

    Alejandro Paradero Almenarios, 20, had enrolled at the University of Guantánamo, hoping to become a biology teacher, but dropped out in January, five months into his freshman year. He decided the effort was not worth it given the paltry wages he would earn teaching high school, the equivalent of $7 a month.

    “I was studying and studying for nothing,” he said.

    He now works full time making charcoal, which people now rely on to prepare meals because cooking gas is unavailable.

    Raúl Cabrera Oliva, 18, was in his last year at a vocational high school in Artemisa, west of Havana, that specialized in veterinary medicine.

    With few transportation options for most students, the school closed.

    “No transportation, no school,” Cabrera said.

    The government’s push to reduce school hours to half a day caused another set of problems. By the time parents and children, many of whom hitchhiked, arrived at school, there was no time for parents to go home and then return in time for dismissal.

    Mothers killed time waiting outside.

    Yaymaris Rodríguez López said she would leave her house in a village in western Cuba every morning at 7 a.m. with her two sons, ages 12 and 4, and stood on the side of the road, hoping someone would drive by offering a ride to her children’s school.

    Sometimes, 10 a.m. came and went, and they would still be waiting.

    “What am I going to do? I have to take them to school,” Rodríguez said. “They can’t grow up to be dumb.”

    This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

  • Trump-endorsed de la Espriella holds slim lead in Colombia’s election as rival challenges vote

    BOGOTA, Colombia — Conservative political outsider Abelardo de la Espriella held a narrow lead Monday with almost all votes counted in Colombia’s polarized presidential runoff, as the ruling party’s progressive candidate vowed to challenge the results.

    De la Espriella, a business owner and lawyer who earned U.S. President Donald Trump’s endorsement despite never having run for office, led with 49.7% of the votes over lawmaker Iván Cepeda, with 99.9% of results released by electoral authorities. Cepeda, ally of outgoing President Gustavo Petro, had 48.7%.

    Election officials have not formally announced a winner.

    A victory by de la Espriella is expected to usher in policies that will reverse Petro’s agenda, including a contentious plan to hold parallel peace negotiations with illegal armed groups. Cepeda, Petro’s protégé, had pledged to push forward that strategy and other social reforms if he won Sunday’s vote.

    The election was colored by people’s fears of renewed internal conflict.

    “I will govern for all Colombians,” de la Espriella, nicknamed “The Tiger,” told thousands of supporters as he stood behind bulletproof glass in the northern city of Barranquilla on Sunday night. But his conciliatory tone changed as he spoke.

    “Pack your bags and prepare to become the opposition,” he added. “Make no mistake, Mr. Cepeda. You already know how fiercely the tiger roars.”

    Progressive candidate calls count “unofficial”

    Cepeda on Monday responded to de la Espriella’s remarks, warning him against threats, veiled or otherwise.

    “Let me be perfectly clear: We are half of this country in political terms, and we have a long history of resistance,” Cepeda said in the capital, Bogota. “We are very hardened. Don’t come threatening us. Neither your roars nor your screams frighten us.”

    He asked supporters to remain calm and maintain “exemplary behavior.” Hours earlier, people in the western city of Cali took to the streets, damaging a public bus, several surveillance cameras, and an ATM.

    The vote count showed that the municipality that includes Cali favored Cepeda with nearly 60%. Authorities there said four police officers were injured in the protest and two demonstrators were arrested.

    After the results became public Sunday, Cepeda characterized the count as “unofficial and non-binding” and announced that his team was challenging results from more than 30,000 voting stations. Petro also vowed to challenge the outcome.

    No recount has flipped the results of a presidential election in Colombian history.

    Sunday’s winner will begin a four-year term Aug. 7.

    The candidates pitched voters widely different strategies to protect the South American country from the nonstop violence, such as car bombs, kidnappings, disappearances, and forced displacements, that Colombians have lived with in previous decades.

    De la Espriella, 47, promised a heavy-handed approach to crime-fighting, including drug trafficking. He also said he plans to end Petro’s attempts to establish dialogue with multiple armed groups — an effort that has largely failed — and to build mega-prisons, emulating Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s aggressive policies. Those tactics have lowered homicide rates in the Central American country but have fueled accusations of human rights abuses.

    De la Espriella holds dual Colombian and U.S. citizenship. He’s a Trump supporter and a member of the Republican Party.

    “He Won, BIG!” Trump said on social media.

    ‘It’s always the same violence’

    Yolanda Hernández, who recycles trash for a living, voted for Petro in 2022 but cast her ballot for de la Espriella this time. While she acknowledged that Petro was unable to deliver on promises meant to help the poor because of congressional gridlock, she said Colombia cannot afford another four years under his vision for the country.

    “We want change in Colombia because it’s always the same violence, always the same thing,” Hernández, 49, said. “(Petro) said he was going to lower the cost of services, that he was going to lower the price of food, and everything is more expensive.”

    More than 426,000 voters chose a third, no-name option on the ballot meant to allow people to express dislike of both candidates. Another 29,000 voters cast blank ballots.

    Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Sunday’s result shows the country “has not shifted overwhelmingly or decisively” against Petro’s project or for de la Espriella’s outsider “iron fist showmanship.”

    Freeman said the result also underscored Colombia’s regional divisions.

    “It’s regional, not just ideological, polarization; or rather, the two overlapping,” he said. “Ironically, de la Espriella’s iron-fist message performed best in the core of the country, not the periphery, which bears the brunt of Colombia’s violence.”

    Colombia’s illegal groups have more than 27,000 members.

    Last year, authorities recorded 14,780 homicides, the most since at least 2015, driven by clashes among illegal armed groups. Among those killed was conservative presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe.

  • Rubio will visit Gulf allies amid scrutiny of his position on Iran deal

    ABU DHABI — Secretary of State Marco Rubio will head to the Middle East this week for meetings with Arab Gulf allies, a high-stakes diplomatic assignment for a prominent Iran hawk who largely kept a low profile as the Trump administration pursued its fragile ceasefire deal with Tehran.

    Rubio will travel to the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain from Tuesday to Thursday. All three countries faced heavy targeting from Iranian strikes after U.S. and Israeli forces began the Iran war in late February, and they suffered some of the most acute economic fallout from Tehran’s move to block traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane for export-dependent countries in the region.

    In addition to his bilateral meetings during the three stops, Rubio will meet in Bahrain with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a regional body for the Arab Gulf nations.

    The secretary’s trip follows Vice President JD Vance’s meeting with Iranian officials in Switzerland on Sunday, beginning a 60-day effort to build upon the ceasefire announced in a controversial memorandum of understanding signed by President Donald Trump last week. The meeting was delayed by several days after Israeli attacks on Lebanon prompted Iran to say it would reimpose its closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

    The outcome of U.S. talks with Iran would have significant impact across the Middle East. As part of the Trump administration’s proposed compromise with Tehran, the Iranian regime would give up its highly enriched uranium, which could be used to make a nuclear weapon, in exchange for a number of economic benefits, including the lifting of sanctions, access to frozen assets, and a $300 billion fund for reconstruction.

    That Vance, and not Rubio, has been the face of the deal has been widely noted in Washington.

    “I think Marco just sees a bad deal when he knows one,” said Sen. Chris Coons, (D., Del.), speaking at a roundtable with journalists hosted by Bloomberg News last week. Coons asserted that Rubio, his former colleague on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was not discussing the subject publicly to avoid being associated with a deal that the senator called a “near-total capitulation” to Tehran.

    The State Department dismissed this sentiment as ill-informed speculation. “Secretary Rubio and the entire administration is 100% in lockstep behind President Trump,” said Tommy Pigott, a spokesperson.

    Any public defense of the negotiations with Iran from Rubio could carry weight, as he was a fierce critic of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that was secured by the Obama administration. In one speech before that agreement was struck, Rubio said that “a bad deal [with Iran] almost guarantees war, because Israel is not going to abide by any deal that they believe puts them and their existence in danger.”

    “I think many will be waiting with bated breath to see how one of the most internationalist and hawkish members of this administration will be making sense of this document,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a D.C. think tank that has argued for more aggressive action against Tehran.

    Brett Bruen, who served on the White House National Security Council during the Obama administration, said Vance’s position as the public face of the deal was notable and may be because “the vice president so badly wanted to push peace, having been so ideologically at odds with the war.”

    “But it’s also because Rubio knows a dumb diplomatic deal from a distance and this one with Iran has ‘disastrous’ emblazoned all over,” Bruen added.

    Officials close to both Rubio and Vance have downplayed the significance of Vance’s role as the public face of the agreement, arguing that much of it was timing. The vice president, these people noted, had a book coming out and was already doing a press tour, whereas Rubio was traveling with Trump to the Group of Seven meetings in France, where naturally his boss took center stage.

    “From what I can tell, he’s supportive of the deal,” said one person familiar with Rubio’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. This person added that the secretary, who also serves as White House national security adviser, was also “clear-eyed about the fact that we are talking about the Iranians here.”

    Vance’s ownership of the issue has political implications, given that he and Rubio are widely expected to become political rivals in the race to succeed Trump as president.

    Jon Hoffman, a policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute think tank, said Rubio and Vance represented “the divide between the traditional neoconservative worldview and the growing constituency weary of foreign entanglements,” particularly in the Middle East.

    All three nations that Rubio is visiting were impacted by Iranian military retaliation after it was attacked. Bahrain, the smallest country in the region, saw major damage near the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet based in Manama, while the UAE was reported to have seen more attempted strikes than the five other Gulf Cooperation Council nations combined.

    Experts said that while all three appeared to welcome the ceasefire, across Arab Gulf nations there were major concerns about the memorandum of understanding’s lack of provisions addressing nonnuclear threats like Iran’s ballistic missiles and the prospect of large sums of money going to Tehran with few strings attached.

    Rubio will need to “reassure them that this is not some harbinger of a U.S. decision to leave the region or to abandon their security,” said William V. Roebuck, executive vice president of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington and a former U.S. ambassador to Bahrain. “In fact, it’s an opportunity to enhance it.”