04-01 01:36 · 中东,局势,AlJazeera,中东
Under pressure as domestic petrol prices soar, US president says no deal needed to end war on Iran.
Trump says US will be leaving Iran in two to three weeks
President Donald Trump has said the United States could stop attacking Iran within two to three weeks and that a deal is not necessary to end a war that has disrupted energy supplies and shaken the global economy.
His comments came as Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that no negotiations are going on with Washington despite direct and indirect exchanges of messages, nearly five weeks after the US and Israel began attacking Iran.
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Trump, who previously claimed that Iran was engaged in negotiations and “begging” for a deal, appeared to change his tune on Tuesday on the alleged diplomatic drive.
“Iran doesn’t have to make a deal, no,” he said when asked by reporters at the White House if successful diplomacy was a prerequisite for the US to wind down the conflict. He said the US would be “leaving very soon … maybe two weeks, maybe three.”
“When we feel that they are, for a long period of time, put into the Stone Ages and they won’t be able to come up with a nuclear weapon, then we’ll leave,” he said.
Iran has always maintained that its nuclear activities are peaceful and that it has never sought to produce a nuclear weapon.
Trita Parsi, a foreign policy expert on Iran at the Quincy Institute, told Al Jazeera that Trump’s statements should be treated with caution. He noted that it would not be “as easy for Trump to just walk out” of a conflict that has spread across the region and killed thousands of people – mostly in Iran and Lebanon, where Israel has launched a ground invasion in conjunction with aerial bombardment – including many civilians.
“Remember, at first they said that this war would be over in four days. Then, three weeks ago, they said it would take three weeks. Three weeks have passed, and now we hear that it’s two to three weeks,” Parsi said.
“The timeline just keeps on being extended because, at the end of the day, the United States is no longer in control of this war”, which has now turned into a “debacle”, he added.
“It would be much better for Trump to just end it as quickly as possible through real negotiations. Not these types of coercive measures that have been tried so far. Otherwise, three weeks from now, we’re likely going to hear that it’s going to take another three weeks.”
‘Go get your own oil!’
Trump’s comments came as domestic petrol prices jumped past an average of $4 a gallon (3.8 litres) as a result of Iran’s attacks on Gulf oil facilities and its continued squeezing of fuel supplies through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas passes.
But with the war hitting new levels of intensity, Trump has continued to lash out at allied countries that have refused calls for military help to secure freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.
In a post on Truth Social, the US president took aim at countries, “like the United Kingdom”, which have “refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran”, telling them to either buy US fuel or get involved in the rapidly escalating war.
“You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!” he said.
Earlier, US defence chief Pete Hegseth also highlighted the UK’s reticence about joining the war, saying that “last time I checked, there was supposed to be a big, bad Royal Navy that could be prepared to do things like that as well”.
UK Defence Secretary John Healey addressed the criticism, insisting during a trip to Qatar that his country remained a key ally of the US.
In a separate post on Truth Social, Trump had also hit out at France for being “VERY UNHELPFUL”, in particular in not letting “planes headed to Israel, loaded up with military supplies, fly over French territory”.
President Emmanuel Macron’s office noted that its position, including not authorising the use of French bases for attacks on Iran, had been clear from the get-go.
“We are surprised by this tweet. France has not changed its position since day one [of the conflict] and we confirm this decision,” it said.
Parsi said Trump was “trying to create a narrative of success” by saying that opening the Strait of Hormuz is not part of the US objective in the war on Iran. But at the same time, the US president has shown frustration that European countries are unwilling to help him reopen the important waterway.
“The US has the largest and most powerful navy in the world. If the US cannot do it, what difference can the French make and other Europeans going in?” he asked, pre
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04-01 01:36 · 国际,新闻,BBC,国际
The two-phase exercise - the world’s most ambitious - will see three million officials count every Indian.
Billion-plus people, three million officials, 33 questions - India begins huge census
Does your house have a concrete roof or a thatched one?
What is your main cereal? Do you have internet access - or just a basic mobile phone? And how many married couples live under your roof?
These are among the 33 questions that more than a billion Indians will be asked as the country launches the world's largest census on Wednesday, marking the first population count in more than 15 years.
The two-phase exercise, billed as the world's most ambitious of its kind, will see more than three million officials spend a year counting every person in India.
India's 16th census - the eighth since independence in 1947 - will also include caste data and is seen as crucial for policy, welfare delivery and political representation in the world's most populous country.
With more than 1.4 billion people, India overtook China in 2023, according to the United Nations Population Fund.
Yet, falling fertility and a median age of 28 mean it remains one of the world's youngest countries, with nearly 70% of its population of working age.
The last census was held in 2011, with the 2021 round delayed by the pandemic and later pushed back further due to administrative and electoral scheduling - the first time the decennial exercise missed its schedule.
The exercise will span 36 states and federally-administered territories, more than 7,000 sub-districts, over 9,700 towns and nearly 640,000 villages, with fieldwork carried out by enumerators and supervisors - typically schoolteachers, government staff and local officials.
For the first time, the census will be conducted digitally, with enumerators using mobile apps to collect and upload data.
Authorities have introduced self-enumeration, letting residents submit details online via a 16-language portal that generates a unique ID for verification by census workers.
There will be two phases of physical door-to-door surveys.
The first phase, known as the House Listing and Housing Census, will gather information on housing conditions, amenities and household assets.
The second phase - population enumeration - is scheduled for February 2027 and will collect detailed data on demographics, education, migration and fertility.
The initial rollout will begin in selected regions, including Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Delhi, Goa, Karnataka, Mizoram and Odisha.
In these areas, self-enumeration will run from 1 to 15 April, followed by a house listing and housing survey between 16 April and 15 May.
From its origins as a rudimentary headcount under colonial rule, India's census questionnaire has steadily expanded in scope, mirroring the state's changing priorities.
The first attempt in 1872 contained 17 questions and was essentially a house register - recording who lived where, along with basic markers such as age, religion, caste and occupation.
By 1881, when the first synchronous nationwide census was conducted, the template had stabilised around identity (name, gender, marital status), social markers (caste, religion, language) and rudimentary education and disability categories.
Over the next decades, questions on language, literacy and occupation were refined, adding secondary work and dependency details.
English proficiency - a colonial preoccupation - was one of 16 questions in the 1901 census.
A shift began with the 1941 census, when its 22-question schedule moved from "who you are" to also "how you live".
Fertility, employment status, economic dependency, migration and job search entered the frame, signalling a growing administrative focus on economic behaviour.
After independence, this widened further: the 1951 and 1961 rounds incorporated nationality, displacement (in the shadow of Partition), land ownership and more work categories.
From the 1970s onwards, the census took on a distinctly socio-economic lens.
Migration histories, duration of residence, fertility patterns and detailed employment classifications became standard.
In more recent decades, especially in 2001 and 2011, the census has tracked the modernising economy: commuting patterns, marginal versus main work, education attendance and increasingly detailed disability and fertility data.
That evolving lens is now extending to how households themselves are defined. In the latest census, a couple in a live-in relationship can be recorded as married if they consider their "relationship as a stable union" - signalling a quiet shift towards recognising changing social realities.
But as the scope of data collection has widened, so too have concerns around how such information might be used.
Some analysts say recent efforts to build databases - including the National Population Register (NPR) - and intensive revisions of electoral rolls have sharpened public anxieties around official counting, often linking it to questions of citizenship and inclusion.
"Although the census has nothing to do with citizenship, this can create anxiety, prompting some
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04-01 00:01 · AI,技术,HackerNews,AI
Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz
American taxpayers could be forgiven if recent events have left them wondering why the largest and most expensive Navy in the world is sitting well outside the Strait of Hormuz, watching powerlessly as the Iranians decide which ships they will allow to transit the waterway.
After all, they must wonder, why can’t the Navy simply blast the Iranians away and re-open the strait, sending life and the global economy back to normal?
Alas, the days of omnipotent U.S. sea power as a power projection instrument close to well defended shorelines are coming to an end. This change raises questions about the future of navies and the wisdom of investment in these extremely expensive instruments of national power. A brief review of American naval history shows how this shift came about — and casts doubt on whether Washington is ready for the future of naval war.
Past as prologue
At the beginning of the 20th century, aspirant powers like Germany and the United States saw navies as essential to achieving “great power status” and as important instruments to exert influence over friends and rivals alike.
Drawing upon this logic and the experiences of the once mighty British Royal Navy, the United States built the largest fleet in history drawing upon the era’s virtually unlimited industrial capacities. During World War II, America used its Navy to prosecute and decisively win the war in the Pacific against the Japanese, while also winning the U-boat war in the Atlantic that enabled moving the Army to Europe — and thereby prevented all of Europe from becoming part of the Soviet empire. (Without the U.S. Army's arrival, the Soviets may well have advanced past Germany and brought western Europe under their dominion, as many historians argue.)
Both of these victories decisively influenced the direction of the 20th century and the resulting consolidation of America’s global power and hegemony.
At the time, navies had the great advantage of being able to deliver land forces to virtually any shoreline in the world. America’s seemingly ubiquitous aircraft carriers also gave sea-borne forces striking power over several hundred miles along any shorelines to pound enemies at will.
This approach perhaps found its best expression during the Vietnam War. U.S. carriers spent much of the conflict 90 miles off the coast of Vietnam in an area dubbed “Yankee Station.” From there, U.S. forces launched air assaults that pummeled North Vietnam — albeit at great expense in lost pilots and hardware.
Dawn of the anti-access area denial age
In the 1990s, when the U.S. held a position of unquestioned global naval supremacy following the end of the Cold War, the Navy sailed it carriers into the Persian Gulf with impunity to help the Air Force police no-fly zones over Iraq and to indirectly assist in the enforcement of the United Nations trade embargo on Iraq.
Navy sailors flocked into ports in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar until late in the decade, when American intelligence detected active and ongoing construction work on Iran’s Abu Musa and Tunbs islands just inside the Strait of Hormuz, as well as on the coastline of Bandar Abbas, which border the strait. Upon closer examination, planners realized that Iran was installing anti-ship missiles into concrete and steel-reinforced bunkers, giving it the ability to easily target any ships passing near the strait. By the end of the 1990s, the Navy began reducing the transit of its carriers through the strait, and today those carriers are steaming well offshore outside the range of Iranian missiles.
The era of shore-based anti-access and area denial had arrived in the Persian Gulf. The balance between shore- and sea-based weapons had shifted in favor of shore-based weapons — particularly missiles. No more Yankee Stations were possible in areas where enemies had invested in arsenals of cheap, accurate cruise and ballistic missiles.
Iran’s steps to secure the Strait of Hormuz did not go unnoticed. The Chinese immediately grasped the implications of what Iran had accomplished and set about constructing its own “anti-Navy” system designed around missiles that could target U.S. Navy vessels that presumably would come to Taiwan’s aid in case of any cross-strait attack from the Chinese mainland. Today, China boasts various families of accurate ship-killing systems, notably the DF “Dong Feng” series of missiles that can track and target U.S. ships thousands of miles away while underway at sea. Many wargames today conclusively demonstrate that the United States Navy would take serious and perhaps unacceptable losses from these missiles in any war against China.
Back in the Persian Gulf today, the Navy grasps the reality of the circumstances, recognizing that it simply can’t sail into the strait without risk getting blown to smithereens by Iran’s missiles. Today, its carriers are stationed well outside the Gulf and the ranges of Iranian missiles.
These steps have imposed additional costs on war prosecutio
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04-01 00:01 · AI,技术,HackerNews,AI
I Traced My Traffic Through a Home Tailscale Exit Node
I set up Tailscale years ago but only used it for “reach my own devices” use cases. This week I finally set up a proper home exit node: a tiny dedicated LXC on my Proxmox box (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, basically just Tailscale).
To verify it worked, I pinged my home servers and they worked. But I wanted to
understand this deeper, so I turned to traceroute
.
The 7th hop is where the cogs in my brain began turning. That’s my home ISP. So this is like a VPN, right? Or is it different?
What is an exit node for?
Without an exit node, Tailscale sends traffic to my Tailscale devices, but normal web traffic goes out through my local network or ISP (exit nodes docs).
With an exit node enabled, my device changes its default internet path to a chosen device, which then sends traffic to the internet for me.
For internet traffic, an exit node behaves like a traditional VPN gateway, with a caveat: Tailscale isn’t always a VPN tunnel for all traffic, but the exit-node mode is.
Without an exit node, we just have discoverability for services that we have exposed on Tailscale. With an exit node, our device is effectively in a full-tunnel VPN mode for internet traffic.
The traffic to the exit node is encrypted, and websites we access see the exit node’s public IP, not the IP of the ISP we are currently connected to on our device.
Under the hood
Before getting into routing, I want to cover how Tailscale connects devices in the first place. I’ve been comparing it to a VPN, but Tailscale is really a mesh network with a control plane on top of WireGuard.
WireGuard by itself is mostly the data plane. Tailscale adds the control plane on top: identity/SSO, peer discovery, NAT traversal coordination, ACL distribution, route distribution (including exit node default routes), MagicDNS, and fast device revocation. We can run our own WireGuard tunnels, but then we’d have to build and operate most of that control-plane machinery ourselves.
When two devices connect, the flow looks like this:
- Both devices (client + exit node) authenticate to Tailscale’s control plane.
- Control plane shares each peer’s reachable endpoints (public/DERP candidates) and keys.
- Both peers send UDP packets to each other to do NAT hole-punching.
- If punch-through succeeds, they establish a direct WireGuard-encrypted path.
- If direct fails, they fall back to DERP relay (still end-to-end encrypted).
Imagine your phone in a cafe and your home server are both behind routers. NAT is like a front desk that tracks who went out, but does not let random outsiders walk in directly. Hole-punching tries to make both sides “step out” at the same time so their routers allow a path back in. If that timing or mapping fails, DERP acts as a neutral meeting point; it forwards ciphertext between peers but cannot decrypt it.
So the exit node connects by becoming a discovered peer and completing WireGuard
handshakes, not by me exposing a normal inbound VPN port. For exit nodes
specifically, the node advertises 0.0.0.0/0
and ::/0
to the control plane,
the control plane tells eligible clients, and the client chooses it. After that,
all internet traffic flows through the encrypted peer tunnel.
How routing changes on your device
At a route level, enabling an exit node usually does the following:
- Tailscale accepts the exit node’s advertised default routes (
0.0.0.0/0
and::/0
). - It installs policy routes so internet-bound traffic goes to the Tailscale
tunnel interface (
tailscale0
on Linux,utun
on macOS,Wintun
on Windows; different labels, same role). - It adds an “escape hatch” route for the exit node’s own public IP via your normal gateway, so the tunnel transport itself doesn’t loop.
- It either keeps or suppresses local LAN routes depending on
allow LAN access
.
A route is just a rule that says “for destination X, send packets to next-hop Y.” The default route is the catch-all rule for normal internet traffic. The “escape hatch” route keeps traffic to the exit node’s real public endpoint on your normal network path so the tunnel does not try to tunnel itself.
The OS-specific plumbing differs, but the user outcome is the same:
- Linux: Tailscale uses kernel policy routing (
ip rule
+ a separate route table) to steer default traffic totailscale0
, while exempting tunnel transport to avoid loops. - macOS / Windows: Tailscale uses the OS VPN framework (Network Extension on macOS, virtual adapter + route priorities on Windows). More of the steering is hidden behind the framework, but the result is the same: a VPN adapter with a default route that captures internet traffic.
How this compares to OpenVPN
Both Tailscale exit-node mode and OpenVPN achieve full-tunnel to one gateway, but the internal mechanics differ. On Linux, the difference is clearest:
- OpenVPN rewrites the main routing table so “almost all destinations” go to
tun0
(commonly using0.0.0.0/1
+128.0.0.0/1
), plus one escape route for the VPN server. - Tailscale uses
ip rule
+ a separate routing table, selecting traffic by poli
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04-01 00:01 · AI,技术,HackerNews,AI
OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation
OpenAI on Tuesday announced that it closed a record-breaking funding round at a post-money valuation of $852 billion.
The round totaled $122 billion of committed capital, up from the $110 billion figure that the company announced in February. SoftBank co-led the round alongside other investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and D. E. Shaw Ventures, OpenAI said.
OpenAI kickstarted the artificial intelligence boom with the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, and the company has since ballooned into one of the fastest-growing commercial entities on the planet. As of March, ChatGPT supports more than 900 million weekly active users, including more than 50 million subscribers.
"AI is driving productivity gains, accelerating scientific discovery, and expanding what people and organizations can build," OpenAI said in a release. "This funding gives us the resources to continue to lead at the scale this moment demands."
With the close of its latest funding round, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will be under pressure to justify his company's massive valuation, especially as it gears up for a potential IPO. The startup has been retreating from some hefty spending plans and shuttering certain features and products in recent months, including its short-form video app Sora, as it looks to rein in costs.
OpenAI said Tuesday that it's generating $2 billion in revenue per month. It made $13.1 billion in revenue last year. The company is still burning cash and is not yet profitable.
In February, OpenAI revealed $110 billion of commitments from some of its strategic investors that anchored its funding round. Amazon agreed to invest up to $50 billion in the startup, Nvidia invested $30 billion, and SoftBank invested $30 billion.
The additional $12 billion of capital that OpenAI raised came from a broader pool of investors. OpenAI said it extended participation to investors through bank channels for the first time and raised $3 billion from individual investors.
Microsoft, one of OpenAI's longtime partners, also participated, but OpenAI did not disclose the size of the company's investment in its Tuesday release. As of late last year, Microsoft had invested more than $13 billion in the startup.
"Moments like this do not come often," OpenAI said. "The capital being deployed today is helping build the infrastructure layer for intelligence itself. Over time, that value will flow back into the economy, to companies, to communities, and increasingly to individuals."
— CNBC's MacKenzie Sigalos contributed to this report.
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04-01 00:01 · AI,技术,HackerNews,大模型,AI
From 300KB to 69KB per Token: How LLM Architectures Solve the KV Cache Problem
This one leans more technical than our usual Sci-Fi Saturday fare. Stick with it, we get to the sci-fi by the end.
What KV Cache Actually Is
Someone types a forty-three-character question into ChatGPT, some throwaway query about dinner recipes or the capital of Mongolia. Before the first word of the response appears, those characters have been split into tokens, each token multiplied through billions of parameters to produce three vectors: a query, a key, and a value. The key-value pairs land in GPU memory, where they sit physically as bytes on a chip. That stored state is the model's awareness of the conversation, not a metaphor but a memory address.
The key-value cache exists for a practical reason. Without it, generating each new token would require reprocessing every previous token in the conversation from scratch. A 2,000-token exchange would mean re-reading the entire history 2,000 times. The KV cache eliminates that redundancy. Once a token's key-value pair is computed and stored, it stays. The next token only needs to attend to what's already cached. Computation drops from quadratic to linear.
Sebastian Raschka's LLM Architecture Gallery visualizes this mechanism across dozens of model families, and the numbers attached to each architecture make the weight tangible. GPT-2's KV cache costs 300 KiB per token in Raschka's comparison. That means a 4,000-token conversation occupies roughly 1.2 GB of GPU memory just for the cache, separate from the model weights themselves. Micron's engineering blog describes the KV cache as the point where "buzzword meets bottom line," and they're right. Every conversation has a physical cost measured in bytes, in watts, in cooling costs, in dollars per hour of GPU rental.
Your conversation weighs something and takes up space, and when the session ends, that space gets reclaimed and everything stored there vanishes.
How Memory Evolved
The way models handle their KV cache has changed four times in six years, and each change says something about what the designers thought was worth remembering. The numbers below come from Raschka's architecture comparisons.
GPT-2 (2019) used multi-head attention in its simplest form. Every attention head maintained its own independent set of keys and values. The cost: 300 KiB per token. Every head remembered everything in its own way, with no sharing and no shortcuts. As Raschka details in Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch), this was the straightforward design. Attention heads and memory were both cheap, so the design just remembered everything.
Llama 3 (2024) adopted grouped-query attention, or GQA, across all model sizes. Instead of giving every query head its own key-value pair, multiple query heads share the same keys and values. The result: 128 KiB per token. Less than half GPT-2's per-token cost with almost no quality loss. Raschka's ablation summary notes that GQA performs comparably to full multi-head attention on standard benchmarks. The insight was that many attention heads were learning redundant representations anyway. Sharing perspectives turned out to be nearly as good as having unique ones.
DeepSeek V3 (2024) pushed further with multi-head latent attention. Rather than caching raw key-value tensors, MLA compresses them into a lower-dimensional latent space first, then decompresses at inference time. The cache cost: 68.6 KiB per token, despite a 671B parameter model (only 37B active per token through mixture-of-experts routing). The memory is no longer raw but abstracted. And the DeepSeek V2 ablation studies showed that the compressed representation matched or slightly exceeded standard multi-head attention on several benchmarks. Lossy compression, performing as well or better than the uncompressed original.
Gemma 3 (2025) took yet another approach. It uses grouped-query attention but adds a sliding window: a 5:1 ratio of local-to-global attention layers, with local layers attending to only 1,024 tokens. Recent context stays in sharp focus. Older context passes through a narrow slit of global attention. The ablation results show almost no perplexity loss from this aggressive filtering. The model doesn't need to remember everything about everything. It needs to remember recent things well and old things approximately.
Meanwhile, an entirely different lineage of models asked whether the cache was necessary at all. State space models like Mamba (Albert Gu and Tri Dao, 2023) maintain a fixed-size hidden state that gets updated with each new token. No KV cache and no growing memory footprint. The tradeoff: the model has to decide what to compress in real time as information flows through, more like how a human processes conversation than how a library stores books. SSMs haven't displaced transformers at the frontier, but they represent the most radical answer to the memory problem: stop remembering and start filtering.
The progression across transformer architectures reads like a philosophy of mind condensed into engineer
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04-01 00:01 · AI,技术,HackerNews,大模型,AI
Show HN: 1-Bit Bonsai, the First Commercially Viable 1-Bit LLMs
The first commercially viable model with 1-bit weights. Requiring only 1.15GB of memory, 1-bit Bonsai 8B was engineered for robotics, real-time agents, and edge computing. It has a 14× smaller footprint than a full-precision 8B model, runs 8× faster, and is 5× more energy efficient, while matching leading 8B models on benchmarks. This results in over 10× the intelligence density of full-precision 8B models¹.
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04-01 00:00 · 中东,局势,AlJazeera,中东
Former agents say that they were fired for work on probe into Trump’s efforts to stay in power after 2020 election loss.
Three former agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that they were wrongfully fired in retaliation for their work in the United States.
The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday, marks the latest legal challenge against efforts under President Donald Trump to purge staff at the federal law enforcement agency.
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The three agents involved — Michelle Ball, Jamie Garman and Blaire Toleman — argue that their employment was terminated as a result of their work on an investigation into Trump’s efforts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.
Career agents at the FBI are nonpartisan employees. The three plaintiffs argued that agents should not be required to show “fealty to any political party, movement, or figure”.
“Serving the American people as FBI agents was the highest honor of our lives,” the agents said in a statement.
“We took an oath to uphold the Constitution, followed the facts wherever they led and never compromised our integrity. Our removal from federal service — without due process and based on a false perception of political bias — is a profound injustice that raises serious concerns about political interference in federal law enforcement.”
Each of the former agents had between eight and 14 years of experience at the FBI.
In their 48-page complaint, they explain they were abruptly fired in October and November in what they describe as a “retribution campaign” under the Trump administration.
The lawsuit explains they received termination letters, signed by FBI Director Kash Patel, that “baselessly accused them of ‘weaponizing’ their positions within the government”.
The three agents had been assigned to offer FBI support to an investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith, an independent prosecutor assigned to probe Trump’s actions.
As a result of that investigation, Trump was indicted in 2023 on charges he had taken part in an illegal effort to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
Smith eventually dropped that case, along with another focused on Trump’s retention of classified documents, after the Republican leader was re-elected for a second term in 2024. The Department of Justice has an internal policy prohibiting the prosecution of sitting presidents.
Smith also resigned his position before Trump took office in January 2025.
But since returning to the White House, Trump has faced criticism for allegedly seeking retribution against employees involved in policies he disagrees with.
“President Trump made clear that upon his return to office, he expected top officials in federal law enforcement to carry out his retribution,” Tuesday’s lawsuit asserts.
Nonpartisan members of both the FBI and Department of Justice who were involved in Smith’s work have seen their jobs cut in the aftermath of Trump’s inauguration.
But Tuesday’s class-action lawsuit (PDF) could pave the way for more agents fired for perceived disloyalty to return to their jobs.
By accusing the agents of “weaponising” the FBI, the lawsuit argues that the Trump administration not only damaged their individual reputations but those of all law enforcement officers in similar situations.
“This false and defamatory public smear impugned the professional reputation of Plaintiffs and the proposed class members, suggesting they were something other than faithful and apolitical law enforcement officials,” the lawsuit argues.
A group of 12 former FBI workers also sued the agency in December, alleging that they were wrongfully terminated for taking a knee during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020.
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04-01 00:00 · 中东,局势,AlJazeera,中东
In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera, Secretary of State Rubio said US war objectives would be achieved in ‘weeks’.
As the war on Iran enters day 32, US and Israeli air strikes continue across Iran, with powerful explosions reported in Tehran and Isfahan.
In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio said communication between Tehran and Washington is ongoing, mostly through intermediaries, adding US war objectives would be achieved in “weeks, not months”.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump has threatened to destroy Iran’s main oil export hub and energy infrastructure if no deal is reached soon.
In Iran
- Hormuz plan: State media reported that a parliamentary commission approved tolls on vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil and gas route effectively closed by the war.
- Trump threatens Kharg Island: Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s oil export hub of Kharg Island, oil wells and power plants if no deal is reached soon.
- Strikes on Tehran and Isfahan: Israel and the US continued with their bombardment, with powerful explosions reported in Tehran and Isfahan.
- Tehran sceptical of US talks: Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Vall said Iranian leaders are focused on the war effort as they deeply distrust the US, believing Washington is not genuinely ready for negotiations on ending the war.
- 87th wave of attacks: Iran’s latest wave of regional attacks – the 87th in a month – was launched by the country’s navy. Vall said it serves as a “very strong message to the US”, proving Washington’s claims of obliterating Iran’s naval forces to be untrue.
- IRGC confirms Tangsiri death: The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) confirmed the death of its naval commander, Admiral Alireza Tangsiri, who was killed in an Israeli strike recently.
War diplomacy
- Pakistan-China talks: Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar is visiting Beijing on Tuesday for talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, following the weekend meetings in Islamabad with top diplomats from Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Egypt.
- G7 ministers pledge action on energy: The Group of Seven economy and finance ministers said they were ready to take “all necessary measures” to stabilise the energy market.
- Egypt’s el-Sisi asks Trump to help stop war: “I say to President Trump: no one will be able to stop the war in our region, in the Gulf … Please, help us to stop the war, you are capable of it,” President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said in Cairo.
- UN slams Israel death penalty law: The UN rights chief has criticised the Israeli parliament’s approval of a “deeply discriminatory” new death penalty bill for Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks, warning that applying it on occupied Palestinian territory “would constitute a war crime”.
- NATO intercepts Turkiye-bound missile: NATO forces intercepted a missile fired from Iran towards Turkiye – the fourth since the start of the Middle East war.
- Paris ‘surprised’ by Trump remarks: French President Emmanuel Macron’s office said it was “surprised” by Trump’s criticism of France as “very unhelpful” after Paris refused to allow planes carrying military supplies to fly over its territory.
- Infantino on Iran: FIFA chief Gianni Infantino said that Iran “will be at the World Cup” and will play their group matches in the US as scheduled, despite the war.
In the Gulf
- Attack on Kuwaiti oil tanker: Iran launched a “direct and criminal” attack on the Al-Salmi, a fully loaded Kuwaiti oil tanker stationed at Dubai port.
- Missile interceptions in Saudi Arabia: Saudi Arabia says it intercepted at least eight ballistic missiles targeting Riyadh and the energy-rich Eastern province.
- Gulf leaders condemn escalation: During a summit in Jeddah, the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan jointly condemned Iran’s attacks on key civilian facilities.
- Regional alerts: The conflict’s spillover has put neighbouring states on high alert, with Bahrain activating sirens and urging its residents to head to the nearest safe place.
- Araghchi calls to ‘eject US forces’ from region: Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said it is “high time” for US troops to leave their bases in Gulf states.
In the US
- Rubio confirms indirect talks: Much of the communication between Tehran and Washington is indirect and through intermediaries, but messages and some direct contacts are continuing, Rubio told Al Jazeera.
- Hormuz: Rubio said the waterway will remain open regardless of Iran’s actions.
- US war aims ‘weeks, not months’: The state secretary said US war objectives could be achieved “in weeks, not months” and that it was on track after destroying Iran’s air force and much of its navy.
- US troops file complaints: More than 200 US soldiers have filed complaints regarding superior officers using religious rhetoric to justify the war.
- US supports Israeli law: The US State Department publicly supported Israel following the Israeli parliament’s approval of a law that allows the execution of Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks.
- ‘Decisive’ days: Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said on Tu
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04-01 00:00 · 中东,局势,AlJazeera,中东
Iran’s top diplomat Araghchi has told Al Jazeera that, despite contacts, Iran is not in negotiations with the US.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has confirmed that messages had been exchanged with the United States, either directly or through countries in the region, amid the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran.
During an interview with Al Jazeera, Araghchi said that the contacts with the US did not mean that Tehran was in negotiations with Washington.
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“I receive messages from [US special envoy Steve] Witkoff directly, as before, and this does not mean that we are in negotiations,” he said.
“There is no truth to the claim of negotiations with any party in Iran. All messages are conveyed through the Foreign Ministry or received by it, and there are communications between security agencies,” he said.
Araghchi explained that they have never had a “good experience” negotiating with the US, adding that one time years ago they secured a deal, only for the US to withdraw from it, alluding to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
“We do not have any faith that negotiations with the US will yield any results. The trust level is at zero”, he said, adding: “We don’t see honesty.”
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian also said on Tuesday that the US does not believe in diplomacy, as Iran was attacked twice during negotiations with Washington, our colleagues at Al Jazeera Arabic reported.
Pezeshkian, who held a phone call with European Council President Antonio Costa on Tuesday, also said that while his country has the “necessary will” to end the ongoing war, guarantees are required to “prevent repetition of the aggression”.
However, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told a press conference on the same day that while Washington wants to secure a deal to end the war and open up the Strait of Hormuz, they are prepared to continue “negotiating with bombs”.
In the Strait of Hormuz, Araghchi said the “reality” is that it lies within Oman’s and Iran’s territorial waters and is therefore ordinary to be used “strategically”.
“Only for the ships of those who are at war with us, this strait is closed. That is normal during war – we cannot let our enemies use our territorial waters for commerce,” he explained.
“Ships linked to other countries – because of security concerns, because of high insurance prices, or whatever other reason – they have decided not to use the Strait,” he said, adding that some of those countries have negotiated with them.
He said after the war, what becomes of the security of the waterway will be up to Oman and Iran to decide, but said that the strait could be a “peaceful waterway”.
Amid reports of a possibility of a US ground operation in the country, the Iranian official reiterated that Tehran was not scared.
“We are waiting for them,” he said, adding: “I don’t think they’d dare to do such a thing. There will be a lot of strength waiting for them.”
“We know very well how to defend ourselves. In a ground war, we can do it even better. We are completely ready to confront any sort of ground attack. We hope they do not make such a mistake,” Araghchi said.
The foreign minister also clarified to Al Jazeera that Tehran has not yet responded to the 15-point proposal that was sent by the US, “nor have we submitted any proposals or conditions.”
Reporting from Tehran, Al Jazeera’s Ali Hashem said that much of what Araghchi talked about was not new, but the significant update was the contact with Witkoff.
“The new piece of information is that he’s in touch directly with Witkoff and that there are some security discussions going on,” he said.
Last week, a senior diplomatic source told Al Jazeera that Iran had received a 15-point plan from the US that was aimed at ending the war.
The plan included proposals ranging from calls on Iran to commit to never acquiring a nuclear weapon to limiting its missile stockpile in both range and quantity.
Still, the Iranian foreign minister reiterated that Iran will only accept an end to all attacks in the region rather than a ceasefire.
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