{"id":200822,"date":"2026-02-18T16:59:03","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T16:59:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/live-updates-u-s-and-iran-wrap-nuclear-talks-pritzker-to-take-aim-at-data-centers-nbc-news\/"},"modified":"2026-02-18T16:59:03","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T16:59:03","slug":"live-updates-u-s-and-iran-wrap-nuclear-talks-pritzker-to-take-aim-at-data-centers-nbc-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/live-updates-u-s-and-iran-wrap-nuclear-talks-pritzker-to-take-aim-at-data-centers-nbc-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Live updates: U.S. and Iran wrap nuclear talks; Pritzker to take aim at data centers – NBC News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Members of the House Oversight Committee are deposing billionaire Lex Wexner in their investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein case.
<\/span>President Donald Trump has ordered a military buildup in the Middle East as his administration discusses Iran's nuclear program with Tehran.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Mandel Ngan \/ AFP – Getty Images<\/span>
Stephen Colbert took on his own network again last night, pushing back against CBS\u2019 statement regarding his unaired interview with a Democratic candidate for Senate.
Holding up the company\u2019s statement on a piece of paper, Colbert joked: \u201cNow this is a surprisingly small piece of paper, considering how many butts it\u2019s trying to cover.\u201d
The statement came after\u00a0Colbert claimed Monday<\/a>\u00a0that CBS had pushed him not to air an interview he had done with Texas state Rep. James Talarico, who is running for U.S. Senate. Colbert, who is parting ways with CBS in May, said the company had been worried about possible legal action from the Trump administration.
Read the full story here.<\/em><\/strong><\/a>
WASHINGTON \u2014 A coalition of health and environmental groups sued the Environmental Protection Agency today, challenging its determination last week that revoked a scientific finding that has been the central basis for U.S. action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change<\/a>.
The rule finalized by the EPA last week rescinds a 2009 government declaration known as the endangerment finding that determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. The Obama-era finding is the legal underpinning of nearly all climate regulations<\/a> under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet.
The repeal eliminates all greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and trucks, and could unleash a broader undoing of climate regulations on stationary sources such as power plants and oil and gas facilities, experts say.
Read the full story here.<\/strong><\/a>
The Vatican will not participate in Trump\u2019s\u00a0\u201cBoard of Peace\u201c<\/a>\u00a0initiative, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican\u2019s top diplomatic official, said yesterday while adding that efforts to handle crisis situations should be managed by the United Nations.
Pope Leo, the first U.S. pope and a critic of some of Trump\u2019s policies, was invited to join the board in January.
Under Trump\u2019s Gaza plan that led to a fragile ceasefire in October, the board was meant to supervise Gaza\u2019s temporary governance. Trump thereafter said the board, with him as chair, would be expanded to tackle global conflicts. The board will hold its first meeting in Washington on Thursday to discuss Gaza\u2019s reconstruction.
Read the full story here.<\/em><\/strong><\/a>
An 18-year-old man was arrested yesterday after he rushed toward the U.S. Capitol wearing tactical gear and carrying a loaded weapon. Police say the teenager, Carter Camacho, backed down when confronted by Capitol police, but they found more ammunition, a Kevlar helmet and a gas mask in his car. NBC\u2019s Ryan Nobles reports for “Today.”
Radio Free Asia\u00a0has resumed broadcasts to people in\u00a0China, its CEO said, after Trump administration cuts last year largely\u00a0forced the U.S.-funded outlet to cease operations.
Radio Free Asia and its sister outlets, including\u00a0Voice of America, for years had been financed with funding approved by Congress and overseen by the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Last year\u00a0their grants were terminated over allegations of wasting taxpayer money and anti-Trump bias, a move critics decried as ceding ground to China<\/a> and other U.S. adversaries.
\u201cWe are proud to have resumed broadcasting to audiences in China in Mandarin, Tibetan, and Uyghur, providing some of the world\u2019s only independent reporting on these regions in the local languages,\u201d the news organization’s president and CEO Bay Fang wrote yesterday in a\u00a0post on LinkedIn<\/a>.
Fang said the ability to restart the broadcasts was \u201cdue to private contracting with transmission services,\u201d without providing details.
Read the full story here.<\/em><\/strong><\/a>
The Trump administration said Japan was moving forward with its first three projects<\/a> as part of $550 billion it pledged to invest in the United States in exchange for lower tariffs.
In a statement<\/a> late last night, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced a 9.2-gigawatt natural gas power facility in Ohio that he said would be one of the largest of its kind of the world, as well as a crude oil export facility along the U.S. Gulf Coast and a synthetic diamond grit facility in Georgia. He said the projects, which together are worth almost $36 billion, would create thousands of American jobs.
Under a trade agreement the two countries reached in July, Japan pledged to invest $550 billion in the U.S. in exchange for a U.S. tariff rate of 15%, lower than Trump had earlier threatened.
\u201cThe scale of these projects are so large, and could not be done without one very special word, TARIFFS,\u201d Trump said in a social media post.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who was reappointed by lawmakers today after a landslide election win<\/a> last week, is set to visit the White House next month.
House Oversight Committee lawmakers will depose billionaire Les Wexner in Ohio today as part of their investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The deposition comes after the Justice Department unredacted<\/a> part of a 2019 FBI document that included a reference to Wexner as a co-conspirator. An FBI email from the same year also said there was \u201climited evidence regarding his involvement.\u201d
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has said that Wexner’s name appears in the Epstein files thousands of times.
A legal representative for Wexner said his team was told in 2019 that he wasn’t a co-conspirator or a target of the investigation. Wexner fully cooperated with the government, the representative said.
Wexner, who had a financial relationship with Epstein that dated to the 1980s, has said he cut ties after Epstein was accused of sexually abusing minors in Florida. Wexner said that he later discovered Epstein “had misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family.\u201d
The House Oversight Committee voted in January<\/a> to subpoena Wexner.
A senior U.S. official yesterday revealed what he said were new details of an\u00a0underground nuclear test blast<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0China<\/a>\u00a0allegedly conducted in June 2020.
Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Yeaw told an event at the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington that a remote seismic station in\u00a0Kazakhstan<\/a>\u00a0measured an \u201cexplosion\u201d of magnitude-2.75 located 450 miles away at the Lop Nor test grounds in western China on June 22, 2020.
\u201cI\u2019ve looked at additional data since then. There is very little possibility I would say that it is anything but an explosion, a singular explosion,\u201d said Yeaw, adding that the data were not consistent with mining blasts.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said the allegation about China conducting a nuclear test was \u201centirely unfounded\u201d and an attempt \u201cto fabricate excuses for resuming\u201d U.S. nuclear testing.
Read the full story here.<\/em><\/strong><\/a>
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is expected\u00a0today\u00a0to call for a two-year suspension of tax incentives offered to develop data centers amid growing scrutiny over their rapid expansion and impact on\u00a0communities.\u00a0
Pritzker plans to advocate for a policy shift in his State of the State\u00a0and budget address\u00a0in Springfield under a proposal first shared with NBC News.\u00a0
At the center of the plan is a two-year pause, effective July 1, on Illinois\u2019\u00a0data center tax credit program.\u00a0Pritzker will\u00a0instruct key state agencies to study the impact of existing data centers on the state\u2019s energy grid and consumers and\u00a0analyze the financial impact the centers have had on the economy.\u00a0Specifically, the governor\u2019s office said it is trying to make sure the centers are financially sustainable over time, protect consumers from soaring energy costs and ensure fair allocation of resources.\u00a0
Read the full story here<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.
The United States and Iran have reached an understanding on the \u201cguiding principles\u201d in\u00a0nuclear talks<\/a>, Tehran\u2019s foreign minister said yesterday, though he cautioned that work still needs to be done to reach an agreement and head off the threat of an American military attack.
\u201cI believe we made good progress,\u201d said Abbas Araghchi, the head of the Iranian delegation in Geneva. \u201cThe path toward an agreement has started but we will not reach it quickly,\u201d he told state media after hours of indirect talks, adding that the two sides would separately work on draft texts before a new round of negotiations.
Vice President JD Vance gave a mixed review of the talks today in an interview with Fox News.
\u201cIn some ways, it went well. They agreed to meet afterwards,\u201d Vance said. \u201cBut in other ways, it was very clear that the president has set some red lines that the Iranians are not yet willing to actually acknowledge and work through. So we\u2019re going to keep on working it.\u201d
Read the full story here.<\/em><\/strong><\/a>
NBC News<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Members of the House Oversight Committee are deposing billionaire Lex Wexner in their investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein case.President Donald Trump has ordered a military buildup in the Middle East as his administration discusses Iran's nuclear program with Tehran.\u00a0Mandel Ngan \/ AFP – Getty ImagesStephen Colbert took on his own network again last night, pushing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":200823,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-200822","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-us","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}