Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, denied that he is in talks with Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s real-estate pal turned chief diplomat, and accused the US of leaking false claims that the two are in direct contact to calm panicked markets.
After Trump claimed that he had spoken to a former US president who told him that he approved of his attack on Iran, all four living former presidents denied having spoken with Trump about Iran.
Trump publicly revealed details about a Republican congressman’s “terminal” diagnosis that could have left him “dead by June”, prompting Mike Johnson, speaker of the House, to say: “That wasn’t public.”
The appointment of a controversial slate of vaccine advisers by Robert F Kennedy Jr likely violated federal law, a federal judge ruled, and all votes taken by the committee over the past year have been stayed.
Gregory Bovino, the US border patrol chief and frequent Fox News guest who was the face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts until the killing of two protesters in Minneapolis by federal agents, said he will retire within weeks.
Trump, who once mocked the gestures of a New York Times reporter with a congenital condition that limits his ability to move his joints, claimed that the governor of California’s dyslexia means that he is “dumb”.
Updated
Iran's foreign minister says US is lying that he is in talks with Witkoff 'to mislead oil traders'
Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, denied on Monday that he is in talks with Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s real-estate pal turned chief diplomat, and accused the US of leaking false claims that the two are in direct contact to calm panicked markets.
After Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News reported on Monday that Araghchi had ignored personal messages from Witkoff last week aimed at resuming negotiations, a US official told Axios that the two were in contact.
“My last contact with Mr. Witkoff was prior to his employer’s decision to kill diplomacy with another illegal military attack on Iran,” Araghchi wrote on X. “Any claim to the contrary appears geared solely to mislead oil traders and the public.”
Earlier on Monday, Araghchi also used Elon Musk’s social media platform to warn Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, that his comments that US forces would show Iranians “no quarter” in battle were an inducement to war crimes.
“When the U.S. Secretary of War declares ‘no quarter’, he doesn’t project strength. He conveys moral bankruptcy and ignorance about law of armed conflict,” Araghchi wrote. “We advise him to review the Hague Convention and Rome Statute of the ICC, unless he aspires to join Netanyahu as war criminal.”
Speaking about Iran at the Pentagon on Friday, Hegseth said: “We will keep pressing. We will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.”
As Dan Maurer, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and judge advocate, wrote for Just Security on Saturday:
“No quarter” is a war crime:
a. As law of armed conflict experts Michael Schmitt and John Tramazzo have explained, “no quarter” is “an order that there shall be no survivors, a threat to conduct operations on that basis, or fighting in that manner” (emphasis in the original). To command, threaten, or practice that “no quarter” be given to one’s enemies in battle is to simply say to subordinates: “do not accept surrender;” this implies killing every combatant regardless of their expressed desire to surrender and become a prisoner of war.
b. Such orders, threats, and fighting have been long recognized under customary international law (see here and here), the Hague Convention (art. 23, Annex to Convention IV, 1907) and the Geneva Convention’s Additional Protocol I (art. 40) as absolutely prohibited.
