Category World News

Washington, DC – New media reports in the United States, citing intelligence assessments, have cast doubt over President Donald Trump’s assertion that Washington’s military strikes last month “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme.

The Washington Post and NBC News reported that US officials were saying that only one of the three Iranian nuclear sites – the Fordow facility – targeted by the US has been destroyed.

The Post’s report, released on Friday, also raised questions on whether the centrifuges used to enrich uranium at the deepest level of Fordow were destroyed or moved before the attack.

“We definitely can’t say it was obliterated,” an unidentified official told the newspaper, referring to Iran’s nuclear programme.

Trump has insisted that the US strikes were a “spectacular” success, lashing out at any reports questioning the level of damage they inflicted on Iran’s nuclear programme.

An initial US intelligence assessment, leaked to several media outlets after the attack last month, said the strikes failed to destroy key components of Iran’s nuclear programme and only delayed its work by months.

But the Pentagon said earlier in July that the attacks degraded the Iranian programme by one to two years.

While the strikes on Fordow – initially thought to be the most guarded facility, buried inside a mountain – initially took centre stage, the NBC News and Washington Post reports suggested that the facilities in Natanz and Isfahan also had deep tunnels.

‘Impenetrable’

The US military did not use enormous bunker-busting bombs against the Isfahan site and targeted surface infrastructure instead.

A congressional aide familiar with intelligence briefings told the Post that the Pentagon had assessed that the underground facilities at Isfahan were “pretty much impenetrable”.

The Pentagon responded to both reports by reiterating that all three sites were “completely and totally obliterated”.

Israel, which started the war by attacking Iran without direct provocation last month, has backed the US administration’s assessment, while threatening further strikes against Tehran if it resumes its nuclear programme.

For its part, Tehran has not provided details about the state of its nuclear sites.

Some Iranian officials have said that the facilities sustained significant damage from US and Israeli attacks. But Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said after the war that Trump had “exaggerated” the impact of the strikes.

The location and state of Iran’s highly enriched uranium also remain unknown.

Iran’s nuclear agency and regulators in neighbouring states have said they did not detect a spike in radioactivity after the bombings, suggesting the strikes did not result in uranium contamination.

But Rafael Grossi, the head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, did not rule out that the uranium containers may have been damaged in the attacks.

“We don’t know where this material could be or if part of it could have been under the attack during those 12 days,” Grossi told CBS News last month.

According to Grossi, Iran could resume uranium enrichment in a “matter of months”.

The war

Israel launched a massive attack against Iran on June 13, killing several top military officials, as well as nuclear scientists.

The bombing campaign targeted military sites, civilian infrastructure and residential buildings across the country, killing hundreds of civilians.

Iran responded with barrages of missiles against Israel that left widespread destruction and claimed the lives of at least 29 people.

The US joined the Israeli campaign on June 22, striking the three nuclear sites. Iran retaliated with a missile attack against an air base housing US troops in Qatar.

Initially, Trump said the Iranian attack was thwarted, but after satellite images showed damage at the base, the Pentagon acknowledged that one of the missiles was not intercepted.

“One Iranian ballistic missile impacted Al Udeid Air Base June 23 while the remainder of the missiles were intercepted by US and Qatari air defence systems,” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told Al Jazeera in an email last week.

“The impact did minimal damage to equipment and structures on the base. There were no injuries.”

After a ceasefire was reached to end the 12-day war, both the US and Iran expressed willingness to engage in diplomacy to resolve the nuclear file. But talks have not materialised.

Iran and the US were periodically holding nuclear talks before Israel launched its war in June.

EU-Iran talks

During his first term in 2018, Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

The agreement saw Iran scale back its nuclear programme in exchange for lifting international sanctions against its economy.

In recent days, European officials have suggested that they could impose “snap-back” sanctions against Iran as part of the deal that has long been violated by the US.

Tehran, which started enriching uranium beyond the limits set by the JCPOA after the US withdrawal, insists that Washington was the party that nixed the agreement, stressing that the deal acknowledges Iran’s enrichment rights.

I had a joint teleconference with E3 FMs & EU HR last night, in which I made the following points clear:

It was the US that withdrew from a two-year negotiated deal -coordinated by EU in 2015- not Iran; and it was US that left the negotiation table in June this year and chose a… pic.twitter.com/NFQdK2HZD4

On Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said he held talks with the top diplomats of France, the United Kingdom and Germany – known as the E3 – as well as the European Union’s high representative.

Araghchi said Europeans should put aside “worn-out policies of threat and pressure”.

“It was the US that withdrew from a two-year negotiated deal – coordinated by EU in 2015 – not Iran; and it was US that left the negotiation table in June this year and chose a military option instead, not Iran,” the Iranian foreign minister said in a social media post.

“Any new round of talks is only possible when the other side is ready for a fair, balanced, and mutually beneficial nuclear deal.”

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) is seeking a shortened prison sentence of just one day for an ex-police officer convicted of using excessive force during a raid in Louisville, Kentucky that led to the death of Breonna Taylor, an African-American medical worker, in March 2020.

Brett Hankison was convicted in November last year of blindly firing several shots during a failed drug raid, which resulted in Taylor’s death. Although his shots were not the ones which hit Taylor, prosecutors argued his actions were a violation of Taylor’s rights and others present at the scene.

After it spent several years pursuing a conviction under the previous administration, the DOJ’s recommendation on Thursday represents a 180-degree turn, which has caused anger in the Black community.

Hankison’s sentencing will take place on Monday, when a federal judge will decide his term at a hearing.

Here’s what we know about the case:

What happened to Breonna Taylor?

Taylor, an emergency medical technician, was shot dead during a raid by police from the Louisville Metro Police Department in her apartment in the early hours of March 13, 2020.

Seven plain-clothed officers executed a “no-knock” search warrant. Three officers broke down the door to her two-bedroom apartment, where Taylor was in bed with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker.

Walker, who possessed a licensed firearm, fired one shot. He later told police he thought the men were intruders.

One officer, Jonathan Mattingly, was struck and wounded in the thigh. Mattingly and his colleague, Miles Cosgrove, directly returned fire into the apartment. Cosgrove delivered the fatal shot that killed Taylor. She was shot six times and died in the hallway.

Hankison ran to the side of the building and fired 10 shots into the apartment through a window and sliding door covered with blinds. Some of the bullets hit an occupied apartment adjacent to Taylor’s. A report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) determined that the police fired 32 shots in total.

Jamarcus Glover, Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, had been the original target of the search, as authorities believed he hid narcotics at Taylor’s apartment. He was arrested at a separate location in Louisville that night, before Taylor’s killing. It is unclear if the same team of officers arrested Glover.

Taylor’s murder, and an initial absence of charges against the police officers involved, triggered mass, months-long protests across the country.

No officers faced direct charges over Taylor’s death. Only Hankison faced charges for firing blindly.

Taylor’s case and the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, fuelled a national reckoning on racism and police brutality as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. Taylor’s family received a $12m settlement from the city of Louisville in September 2020. The city also banned no-knock raids with the introduction of the “Breonna Law”.

Why are prosecutors recommending a one-day sentence?

Prosecutors under the Trump administration are recommending that Hankison serve no further jail term for the case, and that he should instead be sentenced to time already served plus three years of supervised probation.

Hankison served one day in jail after he was arrested in 2023 for his first court appearance. At the time, federal prosecutors under the Biden administration sought a conviction against him that could have amounted to a maximum life sentence.

In November 2024, a federal jury found Hankison guilty of using excessive force and depriving Taylor of her civil rights.

However, in a memo on Thursday, the DOJ said there “is no need for a prison sentence to protect the public” from Hankison.

The memo added that although Hankison’s response in the “fraught circumstances was unreasonable” in hindsight, “that unreasonable response did not kill or wound Breonna Taylor, her boyfriend, her neighbours, defendant’s fellow officers, or anyone else”.

What happened to the other officers?

Hankison is the only one of the three officers at the scene to face charges. He was fired from the police force in June 2020, and Cosgrove was fired in 2021, after local investigations determined they had violated standard practice by shooting blindly. Mattingly retired in April 2021.

Another ex-officer who was not at the scene pleaded guilty to federal charges of violating Taylor’s civil rights by falsely stating on the search warrant that Taylor received packages for Glover. Two other former officers pleaded not guilty to similar charges.

If the court heeds the DOJ’s advice, none of the officers involved in the case would have faced jail time. It is not certain that the court will agree to the recommendation.

How have Taylor’s family responded?

Ben Crump, the civil rights lawyer who helped Taylor’s family secure the $12m settlement against Louisville, said in a statement on the social media site X that the DOJ’s recommendation was an “insult to the life of Breonna Taylor and a blatant betrayal of the jury’s decision”.

“This sets a dangerous precedent,” Crump wrote on Thursday. “When a police officer is found guilty of violating someone’s constitutional rights, there must be real accountability and justice. Recommending just one day in prison sends the unmistakable message that white officers can violate the civil rights of Black Americans with near-total impunity.”

What was the verdict in Hankison’s trial?

The DOJ, under a different leadership, charged Hankison in 2022 on one count of violating the civil rights of Taylor and her boyfriend, Walker, as well as Taylor’s neighbours, when he blindly fired into her home.

The state of Kentucky arraigned Hankison on similar charges but cleared him of wrongdoing in March 2022.

However, after four days of deliberation, a federal jury declared a mistrial in November 2023, as jurors were unable to reach a joint decision.

Witnesses gave conflicting testimonies, including about whether the police officers had announced themselves at the scene of the shooting. Walker, for one, testified that the officers did not identify themselves before breaking in.

Other police officers, including Cosgrove, also testified that Hankison had violated standard practice when he shot into Taylor’s apartment blindly, and without identifying a target.

Hankison, who took the stand, defended his “helplessness” at the scene, saying he believed his team was being attacked. The officer claimed he saw Walker’s figure illuminated by the muzzle flash from his weapon and said he thought the gun was an AR-15 rifle, which prompted him to go to the other side of the apartment and open fire.

Do police officers receive light sentences for killing or assaulting Black people in the US?

Many activists and rights groups believe the US law enforcement and justice systems allow officers, especially white officers involved in the wrongful deaths and assault of Black people, to get away with overly lenient punishment, compared with civilians.

Derek Chauvin, the officer who knelt on George Floyd for nine minutes until he died in May 2020, was seen as an exception when he was sentenced to 22 years in jail.

Some other cases which have drawn criticism for light sentences for police officers, however, include the following:

Daunte Wright

Police officer Kimberly Potter shot dead Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, during a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, in April 2021. Potter, who shot Wright at close range in the chest, later said she had meant to use her service Taser rather than her gun. Wright died at the scene.

Potter was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter and second-degree manslaughter and received a sentence of just two years, serving 16 months. The city of Brooklyn Center paid a settlement of $3.25m to Wright’s family for his wrongful death.

Following public outrage and protests over Wright’s death, the police department changed its policies about arresting people for misdemeanour offences. Wright’s death also led to changes in police Taser procedures in Minnesota and other states.

Elijah McClain

Elijah Jovan McClain, 23, was arrested by police officers in Aurora, Colorado, while walking home from a convenience store on August 24, 2019. The police officers were responding to a call from a person concerned about an unarmed man wearing a ski mask and “looking sketchy”.

McClain was handcuffed while one of the officers applied a chokehold. When paramedics arrived, they injected McClain with 500mg of ketamine to sedate him. He suffered cardiac arrest and died in hospital six days later.

Three police officers and two paramedics were charged with his death. Two officers were acquitted of all charges. Both paramedics and one of the officers were convicted of negligent homicide. One of the paramedics was also found guilty of second-degree assault and sentenced to five years in prison and three years’ probation.

Laquan McDonald

Chicago ex-officer Jason Van Dyke was sentenced to just seven years in 2019 on charges of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery over the October 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old African American.

Initial police reports claimed officers had responded to alerts of a teenager behaving erratically, and that McDonald had slashed the tyres of a truck with a knife and lunged at officers.

Van Dyke fired 16 shots at McDonald as he walked away from police, according to dashcam footage released a year later. The officer was released early in 2022 for good behaviour.

In 2019, the Chicago Police Board fired four officers for allegedly covering up the shooting. The nine-member board found the officers had exaggerated the threat posed by the teenager.

Botham Jean

Former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger was sentenced to 10 years for murder after she killed her 26-year-old African-American neighbour and accountant, Botham Jean, in Dallas in September 2018. The sentence was far less than the 28 years prosecutors had sought.

Guyger claimed she had entered Jean’s apartment, which was directly below hers, by mistake, and thought he was an intruder.

Damon Grimes

Mark Bessner was sentenced to five-to-15 years for involuntary manslaughter after he fired his Taser at African-American teenager Damon Grimes during a police car chase in Detroit in August 2017. Grimes crashed and died from his injuries.

Rodney King

Los Angeles Officers Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno and Stacey Koon were charged with excessive force but later acquitted after severely assaulting Rodney King, an African American, in March 1991.

King was pulled over on suspicion of intoxicated driving but was severely assaulted, resulting in scores of fractures and brain damage. A court’s decision to acquit the officers led to widespread riots in the city, during which 63 people died.

Berry Lawson

Officers FH Pascal, WF Stevenson, and PL Whalen were sentenced to 20 years on manslaughter charges for the March 1938 death of Berry Lawson, a 27-year-old African American, but were pardoned within a year.

Lawson was sleeping in the lobby of the Seattle hotel where he worked when he was arrested for loitering.

Donald Trump’s MAGA base appears to be revolted by the Epstein findings of his administration. Trump promised to release the Epstein files during the election, but he now denies they are. The fallout is explained by Soraya Lennie.

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, teased a radical change in his position on Russia’s conflict with Ukraine on July 14. Trump announced that he would send significant air defense units to Ukraine, whose cities are currently receiving an onslaught of more than 100 Russian drones and missiles every day. Trump even allegedly spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about what kind of offensive equipment Kyiv needed to directly attack Moscow, according to leaks from the White House.

Trump threatened a 100 percent “secondary tariff” on Russian oil if the Kremlin doesn’t agree to a ceasefire by September 3 with the most explicit sanction threat to date. Trump’s sly rhetoric, however, is far from moving the dial. His claims that he struck Moscow have been refuted by Russian officials. Putin’s aerial assault may be lessened, but delivery of them in the same way that Trump allegedly stated will take many months.

Markets have not been affected by Trump’s threat to impose sanctions, despite the fact that it would be a move to try to block the third-largest oil producer in the world.

However, it should not surprise Trump that he has changed his mind about Russia. Trump’s opinion of important US strategic interests is fundamentally different from Putin’s, despite the apparent personal affinities with Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding Ukraine and Russia.

Putin wants to export Russian gas, but Trump wants to export more of it because he no longer has access to the pipeline in Europe. Trump cares about Greenland because he recognizes the value of future Arctic shipping routes, and its rival Arctic shipping route, which is crucial to keeping the support of China. Trump wants to seize the same amount of mineral resources as Putin and Putin can for Russia.

After agreeing to a long-term strategic alignment with Washington regarding those minerals, Trump’s longstanding hostility toward Zelenskyy, a legacy of his first impeachment scandal, which resulted from an attempt to extort money from Zelenskyy, was eased after he admitted to failing in his inaugural pledge to resolve the conflict within a day, which he now admits was an exaggeration.

Trump has acknowledged that Putin hasn’t been engaging in honest negotiations, albeit with a delay. No progress was made in Kyiv and Moscow’s peace talks in May or June, with both parties appearing to appease Trump and try to persuade him to support their positions.

Putin’s increased demands may have contributed to Trump’s realization that during those negotiations, he may have increased his demands. He added that Russia would need a “buffer zone” in northern Ukraine in addition to insisting on the occupation of all of the southern and eastern Ukrainian regions, which he claims to have annexed, even though they were never completely occupied.

For two reasons, Trump’s change has so far had a muted impact. First, because his initial warning about the Russian oil tariff is untrue. Trump has been very cautious about rising oil prices, or even their potential rise. He publicly decried the subsequent spike in oil prices following his June strikes on Iran.

However, it’s also doubtful that the secondary tariff threat will work by itself. Venezuelan exports declined after Trump threatened to target Venezuelan oil exports at the end of March, but since then, as Beijing has increased its purchases. There is little chance Beijing, Russia’s largest oil buyer, will care about a similar threat to Russian production, especially since it is currently in the middle of its own tariff dispute with Trump, which has already caused him to threaten tariffs even above 100%.

Despite having 83 of the chamber’s 100 members support it, Trump’s decision to play for his time with his threat is likely to stymie the passage of a Senate bill that would put additional sanctions on Russia. Trump’s leadership in the Senate and the House is cautious about being pressured into speaking out on the matter, as Trump does. He wants almost universal authority and deference in his party’s policymaking.

Despite his claims that the US’s funding and equipment are higher than the US’s before Trump’s second term, it will continue to be US funding and technology that determine Kyiv’s ability to withstand or turn the tide. Trump has gotten Europe to agree to pay more for supporting Kyiv, despite his claims that it was earlier. And it will take time to get Ukraine’s forces to use new weapons.

Trump will need to alter his strategy as well. The US cannot defeat Russia by increasing economic pressure alone, which could force Putin to take seriousness in negotiations. Washington’s conflict with its allies and partners only makes things worse.

Trump may not have much of a chance of persuading Russia to halt Russian oil production, but such restrictions could sway India into a different course of action. Prior to the full-scale invasion, New Delhi was a largely uninteresting buyer of Russian oil, and now has its second-largest market, where 40% of India’s imports are now coming from Russia.

Hardeep Singh Puri, the country’s minister of petroleum, stated last week that it would not alter its strategy. He emphasized that New Delhi has adhered to previous restrictions, including the oil price cap, which the Biden administration and G7 allies created in 2022 to allow Russian oil to flow freely but only to limit its profits there. Similar to Trump, who is currently adamant about market disruption, with Biden’s Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen even saying that the structure was intended to secure oil “bargains” for India and other developing nations.

However, the minister did point out that New Delhi could change its strategy if there was a global agreement to change how it deals with Russian oil.

Trump will need to embrace a multilateral approach if he wants to make credible threats against Moscow.

Some procedures are simple to follow. Brussels and Westminster have taken the lead in pursuing Russia’s “shadow fleet,” which aims to evade sanctions and the price cap, and develops new sanctions proposals, including those that include changes to the oil price cap to further lower it when prices are low, in part because Trump’s administration has so far resisted additional sanctions. Trump should quickly ratify both European Union sanctions, which were reached on July 18 and the second on July 18.

A secondary tariff or other sanctions on Russian oil customers would also have a much higher chance of working if Europe could be persuaded to do so.

Trump can also blacklist Novatek, Russia’s main LNG exporter, to stop Russia from increasing its additional liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. Europe has yet to make that move, preferring to focus solely on a gradual end to its purchases by the end of the year. However, earlier US sanctions on Russian LNG projects have proved much more difficult to evade because the LNG tanker market is much smaller than the oil market.

Putin’s war and all the sanctions he has imposed on Russia’s economy have finally caused the country’s economy to struggle. Russian banks reportedly having preliminary discussions about the terms of state bailouts.

However, in the midst of all this pain, Russia asserts that it has finally seized a town in the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine, a claim Kyiv refutes and is still unsubstantiated. Trump’s resistance to Ukrainian attacks on the Kremlin’s energy assets could significantly affect the outcome of the conflict.

Trump may have reaffirmed his position on Russia, but whether it goes beyond rhetoric will depend on his willingness to cooperate with allies and partners and bear the costs associated with doing so.