West Ham’s miserable Premier League campaign continued with a defeat at Leeds on Friday which ensured their worst start to a season for 52 years.
The result was their third consecuitve defeat under new manager Nuno Espirito Santo, who remains winless since replacing Graham Potter in September.
The Hammers, who sit 19th in the table, have recorded just one win this season and ironically it arrived against Nottingham Forest, when Nuno was in charge at the City Ground.
A dismal return of just four points in total represents West Ham’s joint-worst at this stage of a league campaign, with the club replicating that tally in the second tier in 1932-33 and 1973-74, when they finished bottom.
Having been appointed with the task of making sure West Ham don’t suffer a relegation that would leave them outside the top flight for the first time since 2011-12, Nuno, who took a point in his first match against Everton, is struggling to find answers.
“There is many problems in our club unfortunately. It is not up to us to hide ourselves behind the problems. Everyone has to be alive and to do much more and be in the right position,” said the Portuguese.
“We were not dealing with our defensive situations and I felt like we needed a striker to hold the ball, so maybe that’s not the greatest from me.
“These kind of mistakes are unacceptable in the Premier League.”
Nuno, also the first West Ham boss to fail to record a win from any of his first four Premier League games since Manuel Pellegrini in September 2018, added: “There is quality there, there is time, but nothing will happen if we don’t change.
“We must change our attitude, we must change the way we approach things, we must commit ourselves better, prepare better, work harder.
“All the things – that is the reality. We don’t expect things to change by themselves. Realising we have time can be a mistake if we don’t change things around quickly.”
WASHINGTON — Democratic lawmakers took a significant risk this week by choosing to fight the Trump administration over the extension of healthcare credits.
A stalemate over the matter led to the federal shutdown on Tuesday night, when Democrats denied Republicans the votes needed to continue funding the government, forcing hundreds of thousands of federal workers into furloughs or to work without pay.
It’s a gamble for a party facing its lowest approval numbers since the Reagan era — and a calculated risk Democratic leaders felt feel compelled to take.
“I am proud to be fighting to preserve healthcare for millions of people, ” Sen. Adam Schiff of California said in an interview Wednesday. “I think this is a very necessary fight.”
The healthcare tax credits are set to expire at the end of the year, and if Democrats are unsuccessful in securing an extension as part of a shutdown deal, then premiums for millions of Americans are expected to skyrocket, Schiff said.
“There’s really not much that can be done to mitigate these dramatic health premium increases people are going to see unless the president and Republicans are willing to work with us on it,” he said.
Entering the shutdown, polls indicated the country was split over who would be to blame, with 19% of Americans faulting Democrats and 26% charging Republicans, according to a New York Times poll. A plurality of respondents — 33% — said both parties were responsible.
Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, a Democrat and the Senate minority leader, is leading the charge with his worst favorability numbers among his home state residents in over 20 years — and with the highest disapproval ratings of any congressional leader, according a recent Pew survey.
Schumer faced widespread ridicule from within his party in March after reversing course during the last government funding deadline, choosing then to support the Trump administration’s continuing resolution proposal.
That showdown came at the height of an aggressive purge by President Trump of the federal workforce. A government shutdown would only enable more mass firings, Schumer said at the time.
But the current shutdown is already giving Trump administration officials license to resume mass layoffs, this time specifically targeting Democratic states and priorities.
“We’d be laying off a lot of people who are going to be very affected,” Trump said in the hours before the shutdown, adding: “They’re going to be Democrats.”
On Wednesday, Russ Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and a longtime advocate of concentrated presidential power, wrote on social media that $8 billion in “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda” would be canceled to 16 Democratic-majority states, including California, Washington, Oregon and Hawaii.
Hours earlier, the Trump administration had frozen roughly $18 billion for infrastructure projects in New York City pending a review that Vought said would “ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republicans at a news conference Wednesday discussing the shutdown.
(Mariam Zuhaib / Associated Press)
Seeing these actions, Schiff worries about further punitive measures against California.
“California, I’m sure, won’t be far behind in the kind of vindictive actions of the president,” he said.
At a White House press briefing Wednesday afternoon, Vice President JD Vance denied that the administration was planning to structure layoffs based on politics.
“We’re going to have to make things work, and that means that we’re going to have to triage some certain things,” he said. “That means certain people are going to have to get laid off, and we’re going to try to make sure that the American people suffer as little as possible from the shutdown.”
Vance placed the blame squarely on Schumer and other Democrats, saying repeatedly that Democrats had shut down the government because Republicans refused to give billions of dollars in healthcare funding to immigrants in the country illegally. Immigrants without legal status are not eligible for any federal healthcare programs, including Medicaid and health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
“To the American people who are watching: The reason your government is shut down at this very minute is because, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans — and even a few moderate Democrats — supported opening the government, the Chuck Schumer-AOC wing of the Democratic Party shut down the government,” the vice president said.
Vance said policy disagreements should not serve as the basis for keeping hostage essential services that Americans need. But before those discussions can happen, the government must be reopened.
“I’d invite Chuck Schumer to join the moderate Democrats and 52 Senate Republicans. Do the right thing, open up the People’s Government, and then let’s fix healthcare policy for the American people,” he said.
Some senators, including Democrat Ruben Gallego of Arizona, are exploring a bipartisan offramp from the crisis, including a potential continuing resolution that would reopen the government for roughly a week to provide room for negotiations.
While that option is on the table, less than 24 hours into the shutdown, some Democrats think a short-term solution is contingent on Trump being willing to negotiate with Democrats in good faith.
“It really just depends on whether the president decides he’s going to try to resolve this conflict and negotiate,” Schiff said. “Until he makes that decision that he wants the shutdown to end, it will continue.”
Vance described two categories of demands from congressional Democrats: those acting in good faith who want to make sure the administration engages in a conversation about critical issues such as healthcare, and those who refuse to reopen the government until every demand is met.
“We just write those people off because they’re not negotiating in good faith — and frankly, we don’t need it,” he said, noting that three senators who vote Democratic — John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), and Angus King (I-Maine) — had already broken ranks to vote to fund the government.
“Three moderate Democrats joined 52 Republicans last night,” he said, adding: “We need five more in order to reopen the government, and that’s really where we’re going to focus.”
THE HAGUE — President Trump’s gamble in bombing Iran offers significant rewards if it succeeded in destroying Tehran’s nuclear program — and historic risks if it did not. He will get credit for success only if he acknowledges the consequences of failure.
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‘You were a man of strength’
Rep. Greg Casar, a Democrat from Texas, and other lawmakers hold a news conference outside the Capitol on Wednesday.
(Bloomberg)
There are critics of Trump’s decision to order strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend. A segment of the president’s base is worried about another military entanglement in the Middle East, and a contingent of Democrats are concerned that he operated outside his constitutional authorities to wage war. But majority support exists on a bipartisan basis across Washington and among U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East for the president’s military actions, which was on display at the NATO summit in The Hague this week.
“You were a man of strength, but you were also a man of peace,” NATO’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, told the president as they met in the Netherlands, “and the fact that you are now also successful in getting the ceasefire done between Israel and Iran, I really want to commend you for it — I think this is important for the whole world.”
At a cocktail reception in the center of the old city, where haunting Ukrainian music played in the nearby town square, Democratic senators emphasized their hope that Trump’s military strikes prove to be an operational success.
“If we have in fact either taken out Iran’s nuclear program,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, sitting alongside Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, “or badly set it back, in ways that mean that they’re not going to get a nuclear weapon anytime soon, I think that is a good thing.”
And former President Biden’s secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken, also expressed hope that the strikes succeeded, despite criticizing the resort to military action in the first place. “Now that the military die has been cast,” he wrote in the New York Times, “I can only hope that we inflicted maximum damage.”
For two decades, Republican and Democratic presidents alike have warned of peril to the region and the world if Iran were to obtain nuclear weapons — but also of Tehran’s ability to rest comfortably at the threshold of that weapons capability, in a Goldilocks position that allows them to enjoy the strategic benefits of nuclear statehood without incurring the costs.
For more than a decade, a consensus of national security and intelligence experts in Washington has assessed that Iran made a strategic decision to park itself there, holding that capability like a sword of Damocles over the international community as it fueled militant organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, undermining U.S. interests and regional stability.
Whether or not Tehran was preparing to “break out” toward a warhead, Trump’s military action was an effort to remove that years-old threat and change the strategic paradigm — a move that has won praise from European leaders and Democrats who have grown weary of decades of diplomacy with Iran that barely moved the needle.
A 2015 nuclear agreement between six world powers and Tehran was designed to oversee Iran’s nuclear capabilities. But the deal allowed Iran to maintain its domestic enrichment program, and had provisions under which caps on its enrichment capacity would expire starting this year.
“There is no reason to criticize what America did at the weekend,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said this week. “Yes, it is not without risk. But leaving things as they were was not an option either.”
‘That hit ended the war’
Yet the risks of failure are significant.
Trump’s predecessors feared that strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, regardless of their tactical success, could give Tehran the political justification to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and openly pursue nuclear arms, driving its program further underground and out of sight. In the worst-case scenario, enough of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure could remain intact for Tehran to race to a bomb within days or weeks.
“In war-gaming the military option during my time in the Biden administration, we were also concerned that Iran had or would spread its stockpile of uranium already enriched to just short of weapons grade to various secure sites and preserve enough centrifuges to further enrich that stockpile in short order,” Blinken wrote. “In that scenario, the Iranian regime could hide its near weapons-grade material, greenlight weaponization and sprint toward a bomb.”
A preliminary report on the U.S. raid, called Operation Midnight Hammer, from the Defense Intelligence Agency lends credence to those concerns. The low-confidence assessment, largely based on satellite imagery of Iran’s bombed sites at Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan, indicates that its core nuclear capabilities remain intact after the strikes despite the U.S. deployment of exceptionally powerful “bunker-buster” weapons, according to one official familiar with its findings. The Trump administration has acknowledged the authenticity of the assessment, first reported by CNN.
Satellite imagery captured days before the U.S. strike at Fordo also showed a line of trucks at the site, raising concerns that some of its enriched uranium had been removed at the last minute — a fear that Israeli officials have acknowledged to The Times.
The Defense Intelligence Agency is only one of 18 such federal agencies that will examine the operation’s success, and the Israelis will conduct their own review. But the reaction from Trump and his team to the leaked report suggests they view anything but success as a political liability that must be publicly denied.
“That hit ended the war,” Trump told reporters in The Hague, blasting the reporters who broke the story as “idiots” seeking to “demean” the pilots who conducted the mission. “We had a tremendous victory, a tremendous hit.”
“What they’ve done is they’re trying to make this unbelievable victory into something less,” he said.
The president’s resistance to the possibility of failure, or of only partial success, in the military operation could hamper the response to come. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, on Wednesday described the strikes as a moment that reinforced his government’s determination to pursue “nuclear technologies.”
“The aggression of Israel and the United States will have a positive impact on Iran’s desire to continue developing its nuclear program,” Araghchi said. “It strengthens our will, makes us more determined and persistent.”
Pressed by another reporter on whether the preliminary assessment was correct, Trump replied, “Well, the intelligence was very inconclusive,” indicating he had concluded the operation was a success before the intelligence community had completed its work.
“The intelligence says we don’t know it could have been very severe, that’s what the intelligence says,” he added. “So I guess that’s correct, but I think we can take that we don’t know — it was very significant. It was obliteration.”
‘It was a flawless mission’
It would not be the first time the Trump administration has politicized a U.S. intelligence assessment. But the Israeli government, which sees existential stakes in Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons, may be less likely to exaggerate the impacts of the operation, acutely aware of the consequences of a grave intelligence failure for its security.
An initial Israeli assessment tracks with the president’s view that the nuclear program has been in effect destroyed.
“The devastating U.S. strike on Fordo destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable,” the Israel Atomic Energy Commission said in a statement, pushed by the White House on Wednesday. “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.”
“This achievement can continue indefinitely,” the statement continued, “if Iran does not get access to nuclear material.”
On Wednesday, an Israeli official told The Times that its initial assessment of the damage would be supplemented by additional intelligence work. “I can’t say it’s a final assessment, because we’re less than a week after,” the official said, “but that’s the indication we have now.”
Still, just like in the United States, multiple organizations within Israel’s national security apparatus are expected to weigh in with assessments. The Mossad, Israel’s main intelligence agency, has yet to complete its review of the operation, an Israeli official said.
A spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry also said Wednesday that its nuclear installations were “badly damaged” by the U.S. strikes. But it remains unclear whether Iran was able to move fissile material and enrichment equipment to another facility before the strikes occurred — or whether it had previously hidden material in reserve, anticipating the possibility of an attack.
All of those pressing questions, to Trump and his aides, are the chatter of critics.
“It was a flawless mission,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in The Hague. “Flawless,” Trump replied, nodding in approval.
Tensions soar at UN as Iran, allies condemn US military action, while US, Israel reject censure.
The United Nations Security Council has convened an emergency session following US-led strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, prompting sharp rebukes from several member states and renewed calls for a ceasefire in the Middle East, as allies Israel and the US lauded the attack.
Russia, China and Pakistan have proposed a resolution demanding an “immediate and unconditional ceasefire”, according to diplomats familiar with the draft circulated on Sunday. While the proposal does not explicitly name the United States or Israel, it condemns the attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities. A vote has not yet been scheduled.
To pass, the resolution requires the backing of at least nine members and no vetoes from the five permanent members — the US, UK, France, Russia and China, which makes it a non-starter since the US will not censure itself.
Speaking to the Council, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned the region stood “on the brink of a deadly downward spiral.”
“The bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities by the United States marks a perilous turn in a region that is already reeling,” Guterres said. “We now risk descending into a rathole of retaliation after retaliation. We must act – immediately and decisively – to halt the fighting and return to serious, sustained negotiations on the Iran nuclear programme.”
Acting US ambassador Dorothy Shea defended the military action, stating that Washington had moved to dismantle Iran’s enrichment capacity in order to protect both its citizens and allies.
“The time finally came for the United States, in defence of its ally and our own interests, to act decisively,” Shea told the chamber. “Iran should not escalate… any Iranian attack, direct or indirect, against Americans or American bases will be met with devastating retaliation.”
Iran’s Ambassador Ali Bahreini said the Israeli and US attacks on Iran did not come about “in a vacuum”, adding that they are the result of “politically motivated actions” of the US and its European partners.
He said the US “decided to destroy diplomacy” and pointedly made it clear that the Iranian military will decide on the “timing, nature and scale” of its response.
Meanwhile, Israel’s UN envoy Danny Danon said the attacks had made the world “a safer place”, rejecting calls for condemnation. “That’s for the Iranian people to decide, not for us,” he said when asked whether Israel supported regime change in Tehran
China’s ambassador Fu Cong condemned the US strikes and urged restraint. “We call for an immediate ceasefire,” he said. “China is deeply concerned about the risk of the situation getting out of control.”
Russia’s UN envoy Vasily Nebenzya described the attacks as yet another sign of Washington’s disregard for global norms. “The US has opened a Pandora’s box,” he said. “No one knows what catastrophe or suffering will follow.”
Pakistan’s ambassador Asim Iftikhar Ahmad also condemned the US bombing, calling it deeply troubling. “The sharp rise in tensions and violence as a result of Israeli aggression and unlawful actions is profoundly disturbing,” he said. “Pakistan stands in solidarity with the government and brotherly people of Iran during this challenging time.” This came the day after Pakistan suggested US President Donald Trump be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump’s announcement that American forces had “obliterated” Iran’s key nuclear sites marked the most significant Western military action against Tehran since the 1979 revolution.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, told the Council that while the scale of underground damage remains unclear, impact craters were visible at the Fordow enrichment site. The entrances to tunnels at Isfahan appeared to have been struck, while Natanz — long a target of Israeli sabotage — had been hit again.
Iran has castigated Grossi for being complicit in paving the way for Israel and the US to attack it.
The United Nations nuclear watchdog’s Board of Governors approved a resolution declaring Iran was not complying with its commitment to international nuclear safeguards the day before Israel launched its initial attack on June 13.
