And the Interesting Thing is on June 25

After Initial Hiccup, Israel-Iran Ceasefire Holds, President Rejects Intelligence Assessments Countering his “Obliteration” Narrative

A ceasefire between Iran and Israel appears to be holding, despite both sides accusing the other of violating the truce in the hours immediately after it was announced.

Here’s what we know this morning:

· Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a televised address on Tuesday, during which he described the ceasefire between Iran and Israel as a "historic victory." He said “victory will be remembered for generations. We removed two immediate existential threats - a nuclear threat and a ballistic missile threat. If we had not acted, we would soon be facing the danger of annihilation." Netanyahu said that the IDF "eliminated Iran's senior command", including three chiefs of staff, nuclear scientists, and other top officials. He has also hailed President Trump's involvement in the campaign. "Our friend President Trump has stood by us in an unprecedented way—under his direction the US military destroyed the deep-earth enrichment site at Fordo.” But he added that Israel would not take its foot off the gas. “If someone in Iran thinks they can rebuild the nuclear program, we will act in the same way,” he said. “I repeat: Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.”

· Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian addressed the country and claimed the country achieved a “historic victory” following the conflict that was “imposed” by Israel, according to the state-run news agency IRIB. He said that Iran would not violate the ceasefire, provided Israel also remained committed. “If the Zionist regime does not violate the ceasefire, Iran will not violate it. We are ready to pursue the Iranian nation’s rights at the negotiating table,” Pezeshkian said, seemingly referring to the indirect nuclear talks with the U.S. that have been suspended since the initial Israeli attacks on June 13. Pezeshkian said that despite their problems and complaints, the Iranian people “once again showed they are united against the enemy,” which he said “was a heavy blow to the adversaries”

· The president told reporters on Air Force One en route to the NATO summit that he does not want to see regime change in Iran. “I don’t want it. I’d like to see everything calm down as quickly as possible. Regime change takes chaos and ideally, we don’t want to see so much chaos. So, we’ll see how it goes.” Trump floated the prospect of “regime change” in Tehran on Sunday, posting on Truth Social, “if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”

· The president and administration officials are aggressively pushing back against an initial Defense Intelligence Agency assessment—first reported by CNN, but subsequently confirmed by other news outlets—concluded that U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites inflicted only limited damage and delayed Tehran's nuclear program by roughly three to six months. According to three defense officials, key components—such as advanced centrifuge cascades and stockpiles of highly enriched uranium—remained largely intact beneath the rubble. The assessment is preliminary and could change, the reports noted, but the findings directly contradict public statements by the president and senior administration officials who have attempted to cast the strikes as “complete obliteration.

· The president took to Truth Social to vent in all caps in case anyone was unsure about his feelings on the leaked report: “FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY. THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC!”

· Administration officials understood the assignment. In a blustery response, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt labeled the DIA assessment “flat-out wrong” and blamed an “anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community” for leaking what was classified as a “top secret” document to CNN. She defended both President Trump and the U.S. fighter pilots, insisting that “everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration” of the sites in question. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told The Hill: “Based on everything we have seen—and I’ve seen it all—our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons. Our massive bombs hit exactly the right spot at each target—and worked perfectly. The impact of those bombs is buried under a mountain of rubble in Iran; so, anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the President and the successful mission.”

· The president at a NATO press avail said that the damage to Iranian nuclear sites from missile strikes “was severe,” though he also acknowledged that the available intelligence on the matter was inconclusive. “The intelligence was very inconclusive, the intelligence says we don’t know. It could’ve been very severe. That’s what the intelligence suggests.”

· Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei confirmed the country’s nuclear facilities were “badly damaged” in American strikes over the weekend. Speaking to Al Jazeera, Baghaei refused to go into detail but conceded that the airstrikes had been significant. “Our nuclear installations have been badly damaged, that’s for sure,” he said.

· Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. told NBC News Tuesday that it was “very early to jump into conclusions” about the damage to Iran’s nuclear program. “We have to wait for the assessments,” the ambassador, Danny Danon, said. “I’m sure that the U.S. have their own intelligence. I think it will take some more time to look at the results,” he said. “But one thing is for sure, Iran is not a threat today to Israel, to the Middle East, to the stability of the world order.”

· The White House, looking to provide third party affirmation of the president’s frequent refrain that Iran’s nuclear program was devastated by U.S. airstrikes, this morning distributed a statement from the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. “The devastating US strike on Fordo destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable…We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program, has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years,” the statement said.

· The 12-day war between Israel and Iran has cost at least 610 lives in Iran, according to figures released Tuesday by the country’s Health Ministry. The Human Rights Activists News Agency, a Washington-based rights group that monitors Iran, says the death toll is at least 974. In Israel, 28 people were killed in total, the prime minister’s office said in a statement Tuesday.

· The classified briefings on Iran for House and Senate lawmakers that were scheduled Tuesday afternoon have been abruptly cancelled, angering Democrats who have criticized the Trump administration for failing to provide key details about this past weekend’s strikes. "It's outrageous. It's evasive. It's derelict," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on the Senate floor. “There is a legal obligation for the administration to inform Congress about precisely what is happening. What are they afraid of? Why won't they engage Congress in critical details?" The Senate briefing was pushed to Wednesday, a move that will enable Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to attend. The House briefing has been postponed until Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson said on X.

· Iran continues to maintain that it will not give up its nuclear program and in a vote underscoring the tough path ahead, the Associated Press reports that Iranian parliament agreed to fast-track a proposal that would effectively stop the country’s cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations watchdog that has been monitoring the Iranian nuclear program for years. Ahead of the vote, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf criticized the IAEA for having “refused to even pretend to condemn the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities” that were conducted on Sunday.

· According to The Financial Times, Iran’s parliament approved a plan to suspend its commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation (NPT) Treaty, voting 221-1 (with one abstention), but the plan stopped short of a full withdrawal from the treaty.

And the interesting thing is, in a letter to House and Senate leadership on Monday, the president said that the Iranian sites bombed by the U.S. housed a "nuclear weapons development program," even though U.S. spy agencies have said no such program existed. On March 25, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard delivered to congress the U.S. Intelligence Community’s (IC) conclusions on, among other things, the threat posed by Iran and its possible development of a nuclear weapon. “The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” she told the committee bluntly. Gabbard was echoing an assessment that U.S. intelligence agencies have been making since 2007. The president dismissed the assessment prior to Sunday’s airstrikes, telling reporters on Air Force One, “I don’t care what she said.” In subsequent remarks, the president said “my intelligence community is wrong.”

Federal Reserve Chair Tells House Financial Services Committee the Economy is in “Solid Position,” in No Rush to Cut Interest Rates

In his semi-annual appearance before the House Financial Services Committee to provide an update on U.S. monetary policy, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told the committee that the central bank is in no rush to lower interest rates as officials wait for more clarity on the economic impact of the president’s tariffs. “The effects of tariffs will depend, among other things, on their ultimate level,” Powell said in his prepared remarks. “For the time being, we are well positioned to wait to learn more about the likely course of the economy before considering any adjustments to our policy stance.”

Several committee members pressed Powell on the timing of potential rate cuts. He declined to specify whether the Fed would move at its July meeting, emphasizing instead that the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is “well positioned to wait to learn more about the likely course of the economy” before altering its stance. He noted that June and July inflation readings should reveal the extent to which higher tariffs are feeding into consumer prices, and that if pass-through price increases prove “less than we think, that will matter for our policy” decisions.

Republican lawmakers, echoing President Trump’s calls, urged Powell to accelerate rate cuts. Committee Chair French Hill (R-AR) and Reps. Bill Huizenga (R-MI) and Mike Lawler (R-NY) pressed him on why other central banks have eased policy while the Fed holds rates steady. Powell responded that a strong labor market and resilient growth counsel against undue haste, and he reiterated the Fed’s commitment to let incoming data—not political pressure—dictate the timing of rate adjustments.

Pressed about the president’s frequent public criticisms, Powell maintained the Fed’s independence, declaring, “We always do what we think is the right thing to do, and we live with the consequences.” He refused to be drawn into partisan disputes, emphasizing that the Fed’s focus remains squarely on its dual mandate rather than on political narratives.

On the U.S. dollar’s international role, Powell dismissed concerns that recent volatility in the Treasury market had undermined the currency’s status. He called narratives of dollar decline “premature and a bit overdone,” affirming that the dollar’s “prime role in the global financial system remains intact” and that global investors continue to view U.S. assets as a safe haven.

Committee members also sought Powell’s views on fiscal policy and structural issues. While he declined to endorse specific tax or immigration legislation, as is standard fed policy, he warned that U.S. government borrowing has reached “an unsustainable path,” and admitted the tipping point for debt burden is unknowable. He further noted that recent immigration policy shifts have curbed labor force growth, even as labor demand moderates modestly.

And the interesting thing is, Chairman Powell’s testimony laid bare a stark divide within the FOMC over the timing of the next interest-rate cut. Two Fed governors appointed by President Trump—Michelle Bowman and Christopher Waller—argued that economic conditions now warrant a cut as soon as the July policy meeting. Meanwhile, ten FOMC members anticipate one or two reductions in 2025 and seven saw no need to lower rates at all in 2025, reflecting the biggest policy split among committee members in years.

On June 20, Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller became the first top Fed official to publicly push for a July rate cut in July, telling CNBC that any inflation spike from recent tariffs is likely "a one-time hit" and should not overly influence policy decisions. In a June 23 speech in Prague, Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman said she sees only “minimal impact” on inflation from President Trump’s recent tariff hikes. With headline inflation cooling and labor markets stable, Bowman said that she would support cutting the Fed’s policy rate at the July 29–30 meeting “if inflation pressures remain contained.” Both are seen as possible successors to Powell when his term expires next year.

The rift comes amid intense political pressure from the White House and Republican leaders, who have repeatedly demanded that the Fed ease borrowing costs to spur growth. At the same time, Powell and many policymakers remain wary of moving too soon, concerned that the influx of tariffs could reignite inflation and undo hard-won progress toward the Fed’s 2% price stability target. Financial markets have priced in the divide: futures traders currently assign roughly a one-in-three chance to a rate cut in July, but they see September as the more likely starting point for Fed easing.

The Fed Chair will testify before the Senate Banking Committee today.

President Loses Again in Ongoing Attacks on Harvard as Federal Judge Blocks Administration’s Attempt to Bar International Students

A federal judge in Boston has issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration’s effort to prohibit foreign nationals from studying at Harvard University, marking the latest legal setback in the White House’s escalating campaign against the school. U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs extended a temporary restraining order she first granted on June 5, preventing enforcement of the president’s June 4 proclamation that would have barred international students from entering the U.S. to attend Harvard for an initial six-month period and empowered the State Department to revoke existing student visas.

In her 24-page ruling, Judge Burroughs stressed the case “is about core constitutional rights that must be safeguarded: freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of speech,” warning that the administration’s “misplaced efforts to control a reputable academic institution” threaten those foundational liberties. She wrote that targeting Harvard over its refusal to overhaul governance, curriculum, or campus speech on demand “threatens these rights” and unfairly punishes foreign students “with little thought to the consequences to them or, ultimately, to our own citizens.”

Harvard, which enrolls nearly 6,800 international students—about 27% of its total population—filed the lawsuit in May after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem abruptly revoked the university’s certification under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP). That action, Noem asserted without presenting concrete evidence, was necessary because Harvard allegedly fostered “violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party” on campus. The Trump Administration has also frozen roughly $2.5 billion in federal research grants, threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, and launched multiple investigations into the university’s practices.

And the interesting thing is, The New York Times this week detailed how sweeping federal funding cuts by the Trump administration have imperiled dozens of critical research programs at Harvard, jeopardizing the work of hundreds of scientists and threatening long-standing studies that underpin public health, environmental policy, and cutting-edge technology. According to the Times, the administration has rescinded nearly one-third of Harvard’s active federal grants—amounting to more than $2.4 billion across agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Departments of Defense and Energy, and other research arms. Many of these awards were midstream, with multi-year commitments still under way. The abrupt terminations have sent shockwaves through labs and classrooms, halting experiments, pausing clinical trials, and throwing graduate students and postdoctoral fellows off payroll.

Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health has been among the hardest hit, as every one of its more than 130 federal grants has been terminated, jeopardizing pivotal work on tuberculosis, cancer, Alzheimer’s, HIV, and other pressing public-health challenges. At the Harvard Medical School, more than 350 individual awards were yanked, upending research into everything from Alzheimer’s genetics to novel cancer therapies.

A project to understand how genes are expressed and regulated is in its 25th year of federal funding. An early discovery used yeast cells to reveal how different steps are coordinated in the formation of messenger RNA, a mechanism later confirmed in human cells by researchers at other universities. Today, 20 years later, several companies are testing potential cancer treatments built on that knowledge.

Without researchers at Harvard or other universities doing this foundational work, it’s not clear who would. The government doesn’t have the expertise. Companies don’t have the luxury of time. And this same research would cost far more outside academia, where it runs on graduate students working long hours at relatively low cost.

CDC Vaccine Panel Meets for First Time Since RFK Jr. Ousted Experts in Favor of Anti Vaccine Allies

The first meeting of the CDC’s reconstituted Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices kicks off today after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this month fired all 17 members of the panel and replaced them with a smaller selection of his own like-minded anti vaccine allies.

A former leader of an anti-vaccine group co-founded by Kennedy, Lyn Redwood, is slated to give a presentation on thimerosal, a preservative used in some multidose flu shots that has long been a target of the anti-vaccine movement. Redwood is a registered nurse, and the slides of her presentation, posted Tuesday on the agency website, show that she plans to argue that “removing a known neurotoxin from being injected into our most vulnerable populations is a good place to start with Making America Healthy Again.”

Health agencies, including the CDC, have long said that thimerosal is safe. And it has also been largely removed from childhood vaccines. The CDC website says there is “no evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines, except for minor reactions like redness and swelling at the injection site.”

And the interesting thing is, the committee is meeting over the objections of Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Patty Murray, (D-WA) the current and former chairs of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, who have both called for the meeting to be postponed over concerns about the credibility of new committee members.

That’s all for today. See you back here again tomorrow!