Category: Americas

One of the two Iranian footballers who decided to stay back in Australia said “everything will be fine” as they joined a training session at their professional club in Brisbane.
This followed a wave of reversals by their Iranian teammates who had initially sought asylum in Australia but later chose to return to Tehran.
The women's A-League club, Brisbane Roar, shared the first pictures of the two remaining Iranian footballers who joined a training session wearing the Queensland team's colours.
Fatemeh Pasandideh and Atefeh Ramezanisadeh are the two remaining members from the group of seven who first sought asylum and sparked a diplomatic row between Iran and Australia after Tehran blamed Canberra for “psychological” pressure on the women.
open image in gallery(AP)”Everything will be fine,” Pasandideh, 21, posted with a peace sign emoji on Instagram alongside Jill Ellis, FIFA’s head of football.
The update came as the rest of Iran’s soccer delegation left Malaysia bound for O..

Iran’s regime will likely remain in power, US intelligence has said, despite over two weeks of US-Israeli attacks on the country.
While dozens of top Iranian military and intelligence leaders have been killed in the war, including the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, officials believe that the regime is still clinging onto control.
As the war enters a third week, at least 2,000 people have been killed with no end in sight despite widespread damage to Iran’s military installations and naval capability.
Though Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have vowed to pound Iran with missiles until regime change is achieved, a “multitude” of intelligence reports provide “consistent analysis that the regime is not in danger” of collapse, a source close to US intelligence told The Washington Post. Rather, they said it “retains control of the Iranian public”.
They noted that ⁠the situation on the ground is fluid and that the dynamics inside Iran could change.
open image in galleryThe regime..

The Israeli strike on the healthcare centre was so huge that it felt like an earthquake. Without warning, the missile tore through the four-storey building in southern Lebanon, punching open concrete floors, eviscerating every wall, and gouging out a multistorey crater in the ground.
The dozen medics based there, whose job it was to respond to the injured across 20 nearby villages, were finishing dinner. There was nowhere to hide.
“The bodies were everywhere, in pieces,” says Ali Shaimi, 51, a first responder with the Hezbollah-linked Islamic Health Authority, which ran the centre. He is speaking to The Independent beside the skeletal remains of the building, which is still partly on fire and sending acrid, choking smoke into the air.
Describing the attack as like an “earthquake”, he says he rushed to tend to the wounded, only to realise there were none.
Abbas Hijazi, 36, another rescuer who was in a building across the street when the explosion happened, said the force of the blast sm..

At least 12 Palestinians, including a pregnant woman, two boys, and eight police officers, were killed in Israeli airstrikes across the Gaza Strip on Sunday, according to hospital authorities.
Among the casualties, a morning strike on a residential property in the Nuseirat urban refugee camp in central Gaza claimed the lives of four individuals. A couple in their thirties, their 10-year-old son, and a 15-year-old neighbour were killed, with the woman reportedly pregnant with twins, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital confirmed.
A neighbour, Mahmoud al-Muhtaseb, described the suddenness of the attack, stating: “We were sleeping and got up to the strike of a missile. The strike was strong,” adding, “There was no prior warning.”
Later on Sunday afternoon, a separate Israeli strike targeted a police vehicle on the Salah al-Din route at the entrance to the central town of Zawaida. This attack resulted in the deaths of eight police officers, including Colonel Iyad Ab Yousef, a senior police official in..

Major UAE port hit in drone strike after Trump claims key oil island ‘obliterated’President Donald Trump says he is not ready to make a deal with Iran because “the terms aren’t good enough yet”, according to a new interview with NBC.
The US leader said American forces had “totally demolished” military targets on Iran’s critical Kharg Island but suggested he might continue bombing it “just for fun”.
It comes as Israel launched “wide-scale” strikes on Iran overnight as the raging war between the countries entered its third week.
Residents of several neighbourhoods in southern Lebanon and Beirut were also ordered to evacuate by Israel on Sunday ahead of the latest wave.
An Israeli attack on a factory in Isfahan killed 15 workers, according to Iranian media.
On Saturday, the US-backed country targeted heavily armed checkpoints across Iran, according to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Writing on Truth Social on Saturday, Trump called for “many countries” to send warships to the a..

An Israeli airstrike in the war-torn Gaza Strip on Sunday killed at least four Palestinians, including a young boy and his pregnant mother, according to hospital authorities.
The strike targeted a house in Nuseirat, an urban refugee camp in central Gaza, resulting in the deaths of a couple and their son, as confirmed by the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
A fourth fatality was transported to the Awda hospital, also in Nuseirat. The Israeli military has yet to issue a comment regarding the incident.
These deaths mark the latest casualties among Palestinians in the coastal enclave since an October ceasefire agreement aimed to halt the more than two-year conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
While the most intense fighting has subsided, the ceasefire has been punctuated by almost daily Israeli fire.
open image in galleryA young boy and his pregnant mother died after an Israeli airstrike, according to hospital authorities (AP)Israeli forces have conducted repeated airstrikes and f..

President Donald Trump’s invocation of the 25-year-old bombing of an American warship as part of his justification for launching a massive bombing campaign against Iran could hamper long-running Pentagon efforts to finally bring the alleged terrorists accused of perpetrating the terror attack to justice.
On two occasions over the nearly two weeks since the Defense Department launched Operation Epic Fury against targets across Iran, Trump has claimed Tehran was responsible for the October 2000 bombing of U.S.S. Cole, a grisly attack that killed 17 U.S. Navy sailors and left 37 others injured.
When he announced the start of the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign in the early hours of Feb. 28, Trump claimed Tehran “knew and [was] probably involved” with the Cole attack, and he repeated the allegations during a press conference on Monday when he insisted that Iran had been “involved very strongly” in the attack.
Yet according to the very government he leads — including a blue-ribbon commission’s ..

Four of the six crew members aboard the U.S. KC-135 Stratotanker refueling aircraft that went down in western Iraq on Thursday have been confirmed dead, U.S. Central Command officials have said.
This brings the number of U.S. service members killed in the conflict to 11.
Rescue efforts are continuing, and the circumstances of the incident are under investigation, the officials said, although the aircraft’s loss was not due to either hostile or friendly fire.
Officials believe that a collision in midair may have caused the crash, The New York Times reported.
The identities of the service members are currently being withheld until 24 hours after their next of kin have been informed.
It was earlier reported that the plane went down following an “incident” involving another U.S. plane at approximately 2 p.m. ET Thursday.
open image in galleryRescue efforts are continuing and the circumstances of the incident are under investigation, the offiicials said, although the loss of the aircraft ..

A US Air Force refuelling aircraft crashed in western Iraq during a mission linked to the ongoing war with Iran, according to military officials.
“Rescue operations are ongoing,” the officials said, adding that they were trying to establish the full details of the incident.
“US Central Command is aware of the loss of a US KC-135 refuelling aircraft,” Centcom, which runs US military operations in the Middle East, said in a statement.
“The incident occurred in friendly airspace during Operation Epic Fury, and rescue efforts are ongoing.”
However, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of armed factions backed by Iran, said it was responsible for downing the aircraft.
The group said in a statement it had shot down the aircraft “in defence of our country’s sovereignty and airspace”.
Centcom said “two aircraft were involved in the incident. One of the aircraft went down in western Iraq, and the second landed safely”.
“This was not due to hostile fire or friendly fire,” it adde..

Elon Musk’s disciples in his so-called Department of Government Efficiency were embedded across federal agencies with a mandate to fire thousands of public employees and radically cut federal spending.
When Musk deployed DOGE into the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provides vital financial support to research and arts programs, Musk’s staff abruptly choked off more than 1,400 grants, eliminating tens of millions of dollars in public funding within less than a month.
More than 10 hours of newly released video testimony from January uncovers how two DOGE operators relied on ChatGPT and their own largely uninformed judgments to make sweeping decisions about funding for a range of programs and projects — and the people who rely on them.
The depositions, stemming from a lawsuit from the Modern Language Association, the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Historical Association, included testimony from two young DOGE officials, Justin Fox and Nathan Cavanaugh..