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Thirty-nine people taken near Magamin Diddi village in Maradun municipality, north-west Zamfara state, police sayArmed bandits in north-west Nigeria abducted dozens of villagers whom they invited to a meeting about potential peace negotiations, authorities and residents said on Monday, highlighting the region’s worsening security.According to local police, 39 people were seized on Sunday during a meeting in the forest near Magamin Diddi village in the Maradun municipality of north-west Zamfara state. But some residents and officials believe the number of those abducted could be as high as 50. Continue reading...

President Donald Trump's abrupt walkout on "Meet the Press" over the weekend shows his second term is "already finished," an analyst revealed on Monday. Following his mid-interview exit from NBC's Kristen Welker, Trump appears to have given up amid mounting frustration, according to MS NOW political analyst Matthew Bartlett. And while he maintains his control over the Republican Party, he has lost his standing among voters who question his economic priorities and policies."In the year and a half since Trump’s return, it seems everything has changed — except the economy," Bartlett wrote. "It is very hard to say that the president’s second act has improved the lives or financial status of many, unless of course your last name is Trump. His second administration has been a historic misread of a political mandate, and a tragic mistake of a presidency."Trump has lost touch with what voters are concerned about, Bartlett argued."The president has lost all credibility on the economy, the No. 1 priority of the American public," Bartlett wrote. "He has lost control over ending the war. The administration is rudderless. Trump is enamored with being president, yet wants nothing to do with the job. His Cabinet members turn their attention from serving the people to appeasing their boss. Many top officials now hold their jobs in an acting capacity — not just in title but in their emphasis on performance for an audience of one."The political focus will now shift to the 2026 midterm elections and then the 2028 presidential election."In a matter of months, attention will soon move from the White House to the campaign trail, and even successful presidents struggle to keep the spotlight off their potential successors," Bartlett wrote. "Candidates from both parties will have a chance to define themselves and offer their ideas on everything from artificial intelligence to taxes to war and peace. America’s next act will be written not in the Oval Office or the halls of Congress, but in the town halls and events across America.""Meanwhile, the second Trump administration is already a lost cause at home and abroad. He has made himself a lame duck president, and is getting lamer every day," Bartlett added.

Kim Jong-un welcomes Chinese leader on visit to renew relations strained amid Pyongyang’s closeness with RussiaXi Jinping has arrived in North Korea for a two-day trip, his first in nearly seven years, as China’s leader looks to revitalise ties with his junior ally.Footage published by China’s Xinhua state news agency showed an Air China plane carrying Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, touching down at Pyongyang’s Sunan international airport. Continue reading...

A former Israeli diplomat reacted in real time to a social media post by President Donald Trump on the latest developments in the Iran war.The 79-year-old president demanded "Israel and Iran must immediately stop 'shooting,'" and former Israeli consul general Alon Pinkas appeared minutes later on CNN to offer his analysis of the extremely short Truth Social post."This is something you would expect from the president to say, you know, the diplomatic lingo of show restraint, exercise caution, patience, and so on. It's clear that he, President Trump, had to make this statement, but basically what the statement is saying, you know, the underlining, the underlining logic of it is that 'this is not my war anymore, I, President Trump, this is not my war anymore – this is between Israel and Iran, and I'm not part of this, I'm pursuing negotiations to get a deal. Good deal, bad deal, mediocre deal, we could discuss this.'""Yeah, he's basically saying to Mr. Netanyahu, you're on your own, and he's basically saying to the Iranians, 'Well, 'you're not necessarily going to have a deal if you keep on shooting,'" Pinkas added. "But the bottom line is this: 'I'm not involved in this.'"Trump has been pressing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop attacks on Lebanon to give him space to pursue a deal with Iran to end the war, but he has ignored the president's warning and Israel and Iran have traded strikes over the weekend in the worst escalation since a truce in April."Netanyahu and Trump have a different political calculus," Pinkas said. "Trump is saying, 'I want to end this war and I can rein in Israel, and I and I will tell them what to do, and they will do what I tell them, and I call the shots,' etc., etc. Netanyahu, on the other hand, has defied Trump three times in the last three weeks with breaking violating the cease fire in Lebanon, with attacking the Dacia, which is the quarter the neighborhood, the area in Beirut where mostly is centered despite Trump's warnings and again last night when Iran launched a barrage of missiles. Trump called on Netanyahu to show restraint and exercise restraint and and not retaliate, and three times Netanyahu defied him.""Netanyahu is speaking to a domestic audience," he added. "He's got an election in two or three months, either in September or October, three or four months. So Netanyahu wants to brag that I stood up to the American president and came to national security and came to the defense of Israel. I stood up, and only I could do this. What Mr. Trump is doing in stating more than once that he calls the shots and Netanyahu will have no choice but to accept he's talking not necessarily about the ceasefire, but about a a framework or a provisional or a memorandum type of deal with Iran." - YouTube youtu.be

Anthony Scaramucci, who served as White House Communications Director for 11 days in 2017 before being fired, is back with unsolicited but specific advice for anyone who has to deal with his former boss — and he has a case study.In a video clip posted to X this week, Scaramucci laid out three rules: never take Trump's call on his terms, don't respond when he comes at you, and tell people you're ready for a fight. "Elbows up," he said. "When you do that with him, he comes towards you. My advice is you gotta push and shove with Trump. If you're overly kowtowing to him and laying down, forget it — never gonna work."Then he got specific. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Scaramucci said, executed the strategy perfectly after winning his election earlier this year. Carney didn't call Trump to celebrate. He waited. "Trump was like, 'What the hell is going on?'" Scaramucci said. When Trump's team finally reached out, Carney set conditions: address him as Prime Minister, issue a communiqué after the call, and acknowledge Canada as a sovereign nation — not a "51st state." If Trump started "his bulls---," Carney wasn't taking the call, Scaramucci said."That's what Carney did, and the meeting went quite well," Scaramucci added. "Because Mark Carney knows how to forecheck in hockey. You have to forecheck Donald Trump."The advice is consistent with what Scaramucci has been saying publicly since his brief and chaotic stint in the Trump White House, where he was hired by one chief of staff and fired by the next before he had officially started the job. He has since become one of Trump's more colorful Republican critics — and, apparently, an informal coach for anyone else who has to sit across the table from him.Three quick things for anyone dealing with Trump.1. Never take the phone call on his terms.2. Don’t respond when he comes at you.3. Tell people — elbows up, I’m ready for the fight.When you do that, he comes toward you.Push and shove with Trump and he respects it. Lay… pic.twitter.com/EHjbjZC34B— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) June 6, 2026

The New York Times on Saturday added significant new detail to a bombshell report first published by NBC News — and covered by Raw Story — revealing that the Pentagon has raised its counterintelligence threat assessment for Israel to "critical," its highest level.The most striking addition: a senior U.S. official's characterization of what Israel has been doing. The aggressiveness of Israeli intelligence collection on top Trump administration officials, the official told the Times, has been "unhinged."The Times also identified the specific American officials Israel is believed to have targeted: Steve Witkoff, Trump's chief Iran negotiator; Elbridge A. Colby, the Pentagon's top policy official; and Colby's deputy for Middle East policy, Michael P. DiMino IV.The paper also reports American personnel in Israel found that software to intercept their communications had been installed on their phones.That last detail underscores what officials described as a self-inflicted vulnerability. Senior Trump officials have routinely conducted national security business on personal cellphones, flown on private aircraft, and declined embassy staffing support abroad — habits that make them easy targets, according to the new report."The tendency of some senior Trump administration officials to fly on private aircraft, to conduct national security business on their personal phones and to reject staffing from U.S. embassies abroad made them especially vulnerable targets," a former senior official told the Times."Other current officials also acknowledged the use of personal cellphones by top American officials have made them easy targets for eavesdropping," the Times states.Israel's threat designation now stands higher than any other U.S. ally and higher than some adversaries, the report notes. The Pentagon declined to comment. The White House called the account false. Israel's embassy said Israel "does not gather intelligence on American entities, let alone U.S. government officials."

An amused Democratic strategist and an appalled Republican Party strategist agreed on MS NOW that Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, hurt both her own image and damaged the Trump administration with a decision to boast about the purchase of an island when Americans can’t fill their gas tanks.In a clip from the David Senora podcast earlier in the week, the woman known as the first daughter expressed her joy at discovering the 1,400-acre luxury Mediterranean island off the coast of Albania where she and her husband Jared Kushner hope to build a resort.“For me, it feels more like a challenge than anything else. The culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live, and trying to really build something that’s a tangible manifestation of that,” she joyously recalled.After watching the clip with MS NOW’s Alex Witt, former House Speaker John Boehner adviser Maura Gillespie has a few critical things to say. “I just don't, I don't understand why she would go out and do an interview about this,” she began. “I mean, it comes across so tone deaf. She's not a, you know, leader or an elected official, but she obviously is the president's daughter.”“And by doing these interviews — I wonder, who's their PR person? Who is their press person?” she asked. “Meghan [Hayes] and I both did columns for officials and people who are in government positions or positions of power, and I just don't understand who advised her to do this or why she thought this was a good idea.” “I don't think she's striking the right balance,” she continued with a laugh. “I think that when people are struggling to pay for their groceries and gas, talking about taking a boat, which I'm assuming is a yacht, to do a nice swim in the Mediterranean Sea, I mean, it's just really tone deaf.”Democratic communications expert Hayes then piled on.“She used words that ‘the opportunity became available for us to do this,’ which I think says to the American people, this is corruption,” she observed. “They worked with the government, they made deals, and it just spells more corruption by the Trump family. I mean, I've been to Albania, it's gorgeous, I understand why you would want to do something, a development there, but not in this way, not in this time. It's just completely tone deaf and it just feels [like] more corruption from the Trump family.” - YouTube youtu.be

Donald Trump is confronting a bitter irony as he seeks to extricate himself from the Iran war he initiated: reaching a peace agreement may require exactly the kind of financial concessions to Tehran that he spent years attacking the Obama administration for making.According to Wall Street Journal reporting, the central obstacle to resolving the conflict is Tehran's insistence on immediate access to frozen assets—a demand that has created a "politically hazardous" trap for the president.The political trap is inescapable. Any Trump decision to release Iran's frozen assets would inevitably invite comparisons to the Obama administration's 2016 nuclear accord, which Trump repeatedly vilified as "the dumbest deal perhaps I've ever seen in the history of deal-making." During a 2016 presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump specifically attacked the $1.7 billion in cash the U.S. sent to Iran, quipping it was "enough to fill up this room."As the Journal notes, this past spring Trump vowed to negotiate a "FAR BETTER" deal than Obama's—a promise that now appears increasingly hollow as negotiations drag on via mediators between Washington and Tehran.Iran's demands are reportedly substantial and non-negotiable, seeking $12 billion upfront and an additional $24 billion over a 60-day negotiation period to be triggered by an initial agreement. Access to tens of billions in frozen U.S. sanctions funds is described as "a critical demand for any deal," offering immediate economic relief to Iran's deeply damaged economy.Meanwhile, Trump continues to threaten renewed military action while simultaneously predicting imminent breakthroughs—even as sporadic fighting continues across the Persian Gulf region. The Iran war itself has become deeply unpopular domestically, adding urgency to Trump's desire for a resolution.Richard Nephew, a former top State Department sanctions official, suggested a potential workaround that might minimize political exposure. "The fastest thing they could do is to quietly remove sanctions on Iranian pots of money being held in Qatar, Oman and Iraq because it's a relatively small, discrete amount of money that is more controllable given where it's located," Nephew told the Journal.Yet even this limited option carries significant political risk given Trump's own past denunciations of Obama-era financial arrangements with Iran.