It was a closely held, urgent meeting. Iran was pondering a response to President Trump’s letter seeking nuclear negotiations. So the country’s president, as well as the heads of the judiciary and Parliament huddled with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, last month, according to two senior Iranian officials familiar …
The Americans were in a hurry. Adam Boehler, a senior U.S. official, wanted Hamas to agree to the release of the last living American Israeli hostage in Gaza so that President Trump could announce his freedom during a speech to Congress. The two sides were still haggling as Mr. Trump …
Ukrainian and U.S. officials on Tuesday held a second session of negotiations in Saudi Arabia to discuss a possible limited cease-fire, a day after Russian and American delegations held similar discussions that lasted more than 12 hours. Kyiv and Moscow have been holding separate U.S.-mediated talks in Riyadh, the capital …
President Trump’s intensifying conflict with the federal courts is unusually aggressive compared with similar disputes in other countries, according to scholars. Unlike leaders who subverted or restructured the courts, Mr. Trump is acting as if judges were already too weak to constrain his power. “Honest to god, I’ve never seen …
Only a few years ago, Washington was calling Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over its headline-making human rights violations. Western business leaders canceled investments in the kingdom. Celebrities and sports stars took flack for doing events there. With its oil and its regional clout, however, Saudi Arabia proved too useful for …
When President Trump announced his proposal for the United States to take ownership of Gaza on Tuesday, he shocked even senior members of his own White House and government. While his announcement looked formal and thought-out — he read the plan from a sheet of paper — his administration had …
At his seaside office complex in Doha on Wednesday evening, the Qatari prime minister thought he had a deal. Hamas’s negotiators, led by a burly former lawmaker, had left the prime minister’s office, having given up on an 11th-hour demand that was the last major obstacle to a cease-fire in …