Experts say there are already sufficient US military assets in the Middle East to begin aerial bombing – key US politics stories from Thursday 19 February at a glance
Donald Trump has said it will be clear within “probably 10 days” whether he can reach a nuclear deal with Iran, as the US military buildup in the Middle East intensifies.
The US president, speaking at the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace in Washington DC, insisted Iran could not have a nuclear weapon and emphasised that “bad things will happen” if the country continued “to threaten regional stability”.
The White House envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Iranian officials in Geneva to discuss Iran’s nuclear enrichment programme, set back but not eliminated after US and Israeli bombing during the 12-day war last June.
After the diplomatic meeting, Iran promised to respond within two weeks to US demands that it abandon enrichment altogether in return for sanctions relief – roughly consistent with Trump’s mooted timeline.
However, last summer Trump gave himself two weeks to decide whether he would bomb Iran’s underground nuclear enrichment facility at Fordow, only to strike it with B-2 stealth bombers within a few days.
A second carrier strike group, led by the USS Gerald R Ford, is en route to the region. But experts say there are already sufficient US military assets in the Middle East to begin an aerial bombing campaign against Iran, potentially in conjunction with Israel, though it is less clear what this would achieve.
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The Trump administration is planning to build a 5,000-person military base in Gaza, sprawling more than 350 acres, according to Board of Peace contracting records reviewed by the Guardian.
The site is envisioned as a military operating base for a future International Stabilization Force (ISF), planned as a multinational military force composed of pledged troops. The ISF is part of the newly created Board of Peace which is meant to govern Gaza. The Board of Peace is chaired by Donald Trump and led in part by his son-in-law Jared Kushner.
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Federal investigators examined Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship with a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer who worked at the St Thomas airport to which Epstein regularly flew on his private planes before traveling by boat or helicopter to his private island, newly released documents reveal.
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The Trump administration is moving to arrest thousands of people already legally admitted to the US as refugees and detain them indefinitely for aggressive “rescreening”, a report published on Thursday said.
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Dozens of world leaders and national delegations will meet in Washington DC on Thursday for the inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, as major European allies declined to join the group and criticised the organisation’s murky funding and political mandate.
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Donald Trump changed his mind on supporting the Chagos Islands deal because the UK will not permit its airbases to be used for a pre-emptive US strike on Iran, the Guardian has been told.
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A large banner featuring Donald Trump’s face was hung on the exterior of justice department headquarters on Thursday in a physical display of the president’s efforts to exert power over the law enforcement agency that once investigated him.
Billionaires are “treading on very, very thin ice”, Bernie Sanders warned on Wednesday during a fiery speech in Los Angeles, imploring California voters to fight “grotesque” levels of economic inequality by approving a proposed tax on the state’s richest residents.
For nearly two decades, the US quietly funded a global effort to keep the internet from splintering into fiefdoms run by authoritarian governments. Now that money is seriously threatened and a large part of it is already gone, putting into jeopardy internet freedoms around the world.
Trump signed an executive order protecting production of glyphosate-based herbicides, such as Roundup, which some bodies and studies have linked to cancer and which are the subject of widespread US litigation.
An army veteran detained by federal immigration agents in southern California during his work commute in July has filed a lawsuit against the federal government.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on Wednesday 18 February 2026.