标签： North America

After weeks of behind-the-scenes diplomatic engagement amid escalating cross-border strikes, negotiators from the United States and Iran have hammered out a tentative agreement to extend an existing fragile ceasefire between the two nations for 60 days. However, the preliminary deal still faces a critical final hurdle: formal sign-off from the top leadership of both countries, a step that remains unresolved as of Wednesday.

The breakthrough comes at a moment of rapidly escalating tensions in the Persian Gulf region. Just hours before news of the tentative deal emerged, the U.S. carried out new airstrikes on targets in southern Iran overnight. In response, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) confirmed it had launched a retaliatory strike against an American air base located in the broader Middle East region. This back-and-forth attack cycle has left the original ceasefire on the brink of collapse in recent days, with both Tehran and Washington repeatedly accusing one another of violating the fragile truce.

Multiple anonymous U.S. sources familiar with the negotiations confirmed the tentative deal to BBC reporters, noting that U.S. President Donald Trump has not yet moved to approve the agreement. Per the sources, the draft framework also includes a provision to open formal negotiations on Iran’s controversial nuclear program, a file that has been a core point of contention between the two countries for decades and that the U.S. has long sought to curtail.

On Wednesday, Iranian state media published partial details of what it described as an unofficial 14-point draft memorandum of understanding (MOU) underpinning the deal. The reported terms call for Washington to lift its existing naval blockade of Iranian ports, withdraw all American military forces from areas adjacent to Iran’s borders, and restore unimpeded non-military commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Under the draft, control over vessel management and routing through the strategic waterway would be shifted to a joint oversight of Iran and Oman.

The Strait of Hormuz is one of the most critical global energy chokepoints: roughly 20 percent of the world’s total crude oil and liquefied natural gas shipments pass through the channel daily. Recent disruptions to traffic through the strait have already sent ripples through global energy markets, disrupting the international fuel trade and pushing up energy prices in many regions.

The White House rejected the Iranian state media report in a sharp, concise statement Wednesday, dismissing the purported leaked MOU draft as “a complete fabrication.” During a regularly scheduled cabinet meeting the same day, Trump struck a hard line on the negotiations, saying Iran was “negotiating on fumes.” The president also insisted that his current strategy of military pressure against Iran would remain completely unaffected by the upcoming November U.S. midterm elections, adding that he is not yet satisfied with the terms of any proposed deal on the table.

Late last week, both diplomatic teams had signaled that tangible progress was being made toward a final agreement, sparking widespread speculation that a formal announcement of a ceasefire deal was imminent. That speculation has now been put on hold as both sides await final leadership decisions on the tentative framework.

A major new development has emerged in the long-running legal battle between former President Donald Trump and writer E. Jean Carroll, with the U.S. Department of Justice launching a criminal investigation into whether Carroll committed perjury during her high-profile civil cases against Trump, multiple major U.S. media outlets have confirmed. Carroll, a one-time magazine columnist who successfully secured two civil defamation and sexual assault judgements against Trump, is now at the center of a federal probe focused on her testimony about outside funding for her legal actions against the former president.

The inquiry centers on a 2022 deposition where Carroll stated she had not received any external financial support for her lawsuits against Trump. Court documents filed by Trump’s legal team in 2023 later revealed that Reid Hoffman, co-founder of professional networking platform LinkedIn, had contributed to covering a portion of Carroll’s legal fees and case-related expenses.

This revelation was already challenged during the appeal process for Carroll’s first successful lawsuit against Trump. In a 2024 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that Carroll had plausibly testified she had forgotten about the limited external funding arranged by her legal counsel, noting that the writer was not personally involved in decisions around who covered her litigation costs. The court upheld the original $5 million judgement against Trump in that first case, which stemmed from a jury finding Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation in 2023.

That first case centered on Carroll’s allegation that Trump assaulted her in the dressing room of a New York City department store in the mid-1990s. The defamation claim arose from a 2022 Truth Social post where Trump denied the allegation entirely. A second civil trial in 2024 resulted in an additional $83 million defamation judgement against Trump, over comments he made in 2019 claiming Carroll fabricated the assault claim to boost book sales. Trump has repeatedly denied all accusations from Carroll, and has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the first 2023 judgement, with a promise to challenge the second ruling as well.

According to sources cited by CBS News, the new criminal investigation is being led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois. CNN, which first broke news of the probe, noted that while Carroll’s deposition took place in New York, Hoffman’s non-profit organization is based in Chicago, placing the matter within the Northern District of Illinois’ jurisdiction.

In a notable procedural development, sources confirmed that Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney during the appeals of the Carroll cases, has recused himself from the new investigation to avoid a conflict of interest. The BBC has reached out to the DOJ, Carroll’s legal representation, and Hoffman’s non-profit for official comment on the probe, and as of publication no official statements have been released from any of the parties.

This new investigation comes as Trump, who returned to the presidency in 2025, has repeatedly called for the DOJ to pursue criminal prosecutions against a long list of his political and personal adversaries, a push that has sparked widespread debate over the independence of federal law enforcement in the current political climate.

On a Tuesday post to his social media platform, former President and 2024 candidate Donald Trump launched a fierce verbal attack on state leaders pushing for regulation of the fast-growing prediction market industry — a sector where members of his own family hold direct financial stakes. In the post, Trump labeled regulators in Illinois, New York and other states pursuing oversight of the platforms as “scum”, and argued that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) should hold exclusive federal authority over all prediction market rules. Calling the emerging space a “major industry”, Trump emphasized the need for federal protection of the sector, echoing the position staked out earlier this year by CFTC chair Mike Selig, who said the agency would block all state-level restrictions on prediction market operations.

Critics have widely labeled the Trump administration as one of the most openly corrupt in modern U.S. history, and political opponents immediately seized on the social media post as proof of improper self-dealing. Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who co-sponsors federal legislation to ban prediction markets from accepting wagers on government actions, called Trump’s comments damning evidence of systemic corruption tied to the industry.

“Trump and his family are making tons of money off these new prediction markets—and so of course he is leading the charge against consumer protections and for preferential regulatory treatment of his companies,” Murphy explained. The lawmaker’s comments reference clear public ties between the Trump family and the prediction market sector: the New York Times reported one month prior that Trump’s publicly traded media company launched its own proprietary prediction market product in 2025, while Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., sits on the advisory board of Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market platform. Prosecutors have also linked Polymarket to improper, well-timed bets placed by a former U.S. soldier on political events, raising questions about the platform’s vulnerability to exploitation.

The backlash to Trump’s comments extended quickly to Democratic governors leading states that have moved to crack down on prediction markets, which critics argue are often unregulated gambling operations disguised as financial exchanges to evade state gaming laws. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker responded directly to Trump’s social media post, noting that his state had already moved to ban insider trading tied to online prediction markets. “The most corrupt president in our nation’s history wants to make sure states like ours can’t regulate prediction markets so his family and administration can keep profiting,” Pritzker wrote.

The conflict over prediction market regulation is already playing out in the federal courts: the Trump administration, which has sidelined federal regulators that raised ethical and legal concerns about the sector, has already filed lawsuits against Illinois and multiple other states over their regulatory efforts. Watchdog groups have joined the fight against the Trump administration’s position, with progressive financial reform organization Better Markets filing an amicus brief this week in support of Tennessee’s regulatory push against major prediction market platforms including Kalshi.

Dominick Freda, legal director of Better Markets, argued that Congress never authorized the CFTC to act as a national gambling regulator, nor did it intend to legalize widespread unregulated gambling across the U.S. “The CFTC continues to waste its resources and focus on cheerleading these unpoliced, unregulated casinos when it should focus on its real job: regulating the multi-trillion-dollar commodities and derivatives markets,” Freda said. He added that stable commodity and derivatives regulation is critical to protecting American consumers from volatile prices for essential goods ranging from gasoline to groceries, and that state governments have long held the responsibility of regulating gambling to protect the public. “The CFTC should leave gambling regulation to Tennessee and the other states whose laws and regulations have protected the American public for decades, and must be allowed to continue to do so,” Freda concluded.

Escalating military tensions in the Middle East have taken a fresh turn, after the United States military launched targeted strikes against an Iranian military installation near Bandar Abbas, a strategically critical port city that overlooks the Strait of Hormuz, the world’s most vital energy shipping chokepoint.

US Central Command (Centcom), the military body overseeing American operations across the Middle East, confirmed that alongside the ground strike, its forces intercepted and destroyed four one-way attack drones launched by Iran that it said presented an active threat to shipping and military assets in the Strait of Hormuz area. The strike on the Bandar Abbas ground control station was timed to disrupt the launch of a fifth drone, Centcom said. Local Iranian media reported hearing multiple loud explosions east of the city, though no immediate official casualty or damage reports have been released from Tehran.

The new military action comes at a delicate moment: a shaky, unenforced ceasefire has been in place between Washington and Tehran, while slow-moving negotiations drag on to end a three-month war that has crippled commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and sent global energy prices soaring to multi-month highs. Centcom has framed its latest operations as “measured, purely defensive, and intended to preserve the existing ceasefire” rather than escalate conflict.

Speaking during a White House cabinet meeting on Wednesday, US President Donald Trump doubled down on his administration’s negotiating posture, saying Iran was “negotiating on fumes” and insisting that his war strategy would remain unchanged regardless of the upcoming November midterm elections. “Maybe we have to go back and finish it, maybe we don’t,” Trump told reporters, adding that the United States remains “not satisfied” with the progress of talks – a shift from his optimistic tone over the weekend, when he claimed a peace deal with Iran had been “largely negotiated.”

Trump also used the meeting to press Gulf Cooperation Council nations to join the Abraham Accords, the US-brokered framework normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel. Israel joined the US in launching the current conflict against Iran on February 28, and is simultaneously engaged in a separate active war with Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon. The president has issued repeated threats to reinitiate large-scale bombing campaigns across Iran if Tehran refuses to accept US negotiating terms.

This is the second round of US strikes on Iranian soil in a single week. Earlier this week, Centcom confirmed a prior set of what it called “self-defense” strikes targeting southern Iran on Monday, which hit Iranian missile facilities and small boats that American officials said were preparing to lay naval mines in the region. Those strikes, Centcom said, were carried out to protect American troop assets from imminent threats posed by Iranian military forces.

Tehran has rejected Washington’s framing of the strikes, condemning both rounds as “a grave violation of the ceasefire” and vowing that it “will not leave any act of hostility unanswered.” Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the country’s elite ideological military force, said Tuesday it had shot down an American drone and opened fire on a US fighter jet and a second unmanned aerial vehicle that penetrated Iranian sovereign airspace, though the statement did not specify a date for the alleged incident. The IRGC reaffirmed that Iran retains the “legitimate and definite” right to launch reciprocal retaliation for any US violation of the existing ceasefire agreement.