Vice-president\u2019s claim US-Iran conflict is not war draws ridicule from Democrat Ro Khanna. Plus, iconic feminist Gloria Steinem dies aged 92<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t already get First Thing in your inbox? Sign up here<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n Good morning. The US vice-president, JD Vance, has responded to claims<\/a> that an American strike was responsible for killing four people, including a child, at a wedding celebration in southern Iran by saying that \u201csometimes things happen\u201d. The deaths were reported by the Iranian Red Crescent, which operates independently of Tehran and is treated by most international monitors as a credible source on casualty figures.<\/p>\n In a further comment, described by the congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, as \u201cgaslighting\u201d, the vice-president said the conflict between the US and Iran, which has stretched into a seventh month and caused the deaths of 18 US service members, was not presently \u201ca war\u201d. Iranian authorities have put the overall death toll from US and Israeli strikes in the thousands, figures outside observers, including US-based monitoring groups, have broadly corroborated.<\/p>\n What did <\/strong>Vance say?<\/strong> At a White House press briefing he said: \u201cI will say that the Iranian state media has not been a very good scribe about what\u2019s happened in the conflict thus far, so I\u2019m extremely skeptical of this. What I can say with 100% confidence is that, unlike the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the US never targets civilians in combat. We never will do that. We never have done that, and unfortunately, obviously, sometimes things happen\u201d. Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to blow up Iran\u2019s civilian infrastructure.<\/p>\n What is happening with US military leadership? <\/strong>Trump on Thursday named Adam Telle as the acting army secretary<\/a> after the departure of Daniel Driscoll amid widespread reports of tensions with the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. Telle is currently the assistant secretary of the army for civil works.<\/p>\n What has the House decided about university boycotts of Israel? <\/strong>The House has passed a Republican-backed bill<\/a> that would penalize universities that participate in boycotts of Israel. \u201cThis legislation is about a simple principle: our colleges and universities should not discriminate against Israel,\u201d said Tim Walberg, the Republican chair of the House education committee. Thirty three Democrats broke with the rest of their party to vote in favor. It now goes to the Senate for consideration.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Vice-president\u2019s claim US-Iran conflict is not war draws ridicule from Democrat Ro Khanna. Plus, iconic feminist Gloria Steinem dies aged 92 Don\u2019t already get First Thing in your inbox? Sign up here Good morning. The US vice-president, JD Vance, has responded to claims that an American strike was responsible for killing four people, including a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}