Trump's sweeping tax-cut, spending bill clears first US Senate hurdle
The US Senate narrowly advanced President Donald Trump's, sweeping tax-cut and spending bill on Saturday, during a marathon weekend session marked by political drama, division and lengthy delays, as Democrats sought to slow the legislation's path to passage, Reuters reported.
Lawmakers voted 51-49 to open debate on the 940-page megabill, with two of Trump's fellow Republicans joining Democrats to oppose the legislation that would fund the president's top immigration, border, tax-cut and military priorities.
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Gulf Today
2 hours ago
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Trump betrayed the diplomatic effort, says Iranian FM
Tehran: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has dismissed US President Donald Trump's declaration that their countries would re-engage in nuclear negotiations in the coming week. 'If our interests require a return to negotiations, we will consider it. But at this time, no agreement or promise has been made, and no talks have taken place.' Araghchi made the point that they were negotiating when Israel launched its June 13th unprovoked attack on Iran. Trump followed up last weekend by striking three Iranian nuclear sites with bunker buster bombs with the intention of finishing off Iran's nuclear programme. Araghchi accused Trump of betraying the diplomatic effort to resolve differences. While Trump claimed the US had "obliterated" Iran's main nuclear sites, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Grossi said the sites had been seriously damaged but suggested that Iran should be able to enrich uranium "in a matter of months." According to CNN, the Trump administration could encourage Iran to resume talks by offering $20-30 billion to establish a civilian nuclear energy programme without Iranian enrichment of its own nuclear fuel. The finance, it is said, could be provided by the Gulf countries, naturally not the US. The administration would also ease sanctions and unfreeze Iranian assets in foreign banks. While such a speculative deal has been deliberately leaked and widely reported, it is unlikely to materialise. It looks like "pie in the sky," as the saying goes. Tehran is unlikely to reject a return to talks, but Iran is still assessing its military, political, and diplomatic losses from Israel's 12-day war and US strikes on its nuclear sites. Iran has to lay down its own conditions and decide when the atmosphere is propitious before re-engaging. Iran has laid down two red lines: low level uranium enrichment must continue on Iranian soil and Iran will not discuss its ballistic missile programme which Iran argues is essential for self-defence. Trump seeks to cross these red lines by eliminating both domestic enrichment and missiles. Trust has not characterised Iranian-US relations since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini over-threw Washington's ally Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in early 1979 and, radical "students" seized control of the US embassy in Tehran and held staff for 444 days. They were not freed until Ronald Regan had taken over the US presidency from Jimmy Carter. Unfortunately, this gesture did not clear the way for the restoration of relations due to US rejectionism. The blow of losing the Shah, compounded by the humiliation of the embassy occupation made the US, particularly Congress, testy and unforgiving and easily influenced by domestic and Israeli anti-Iran hawks. Iranian popular trust in the US was undermined during the decades-long the rule of the shah who developed Iran's economy and carried out modernising social reforms but ruled with an iron fist. His tool was his intelligence agency Savak which allied with the US Central Intelligence Agency and Israel's Mossad. The shah put Iran firmly in the Western camp during the Cold War with the Soviet Union and adopted pro-Israel policies. Iranian resentment continues over the 1953 US-British coup against popularly elected Prime Minister Mossadegh who nationalised the Anglo-Iranian oil company. Resentment intensified when in 1954, the shah reached a deal giving Western countries control of Iran's oil industry. He also allowed US companies to play a dominant role in trade and Iran's domestic markets. This was exploited by the Iranian opposition, especially Khomeini who mounted his "revolution" from exile in France. He returned to Tehran in early 1979 after the shah had fled to the US. After several years of turmoil, Khomeini installed the cleric-dominated model of governance A decade after the fall of Shah, Iran's President Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989-1997) tried and failed to reconcile with the US and the West. He was followed by Mohammed Khatami (1997-2005) who in 1999 launched his "Dialogue of Civilisations" which he hoped would achieve this end. One effort in this campaign was a Cyprus conference attended by US scholars, policy makers, influential Iranians, and foreign correspondents. While Khatami's call for dialogue failed to change Washington, one result of this conference was the creation of the website Gulf 2000 which continues to provide platform for information and comment on Iran, the Gulf and the region. Khatami was succeeded by erratic hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013). His hostile attitude toward the US and the West gave a boost to the powerful anti-Iran lobby in Washington, which was heavily influenced by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who had tried for three decades to drag the US into a war with Iran. The landmark 2015 agreement limiting Iran's nuclear programme in exchange for lifting sanctions was negotiated during the presidency of reformist Hassan Rouhani (2013-2021). Iran carried out its commitments under the Obama administration deal and secured some relief from sanctions which had crippled its economy. At that time, IAEA chief Grossi said Iran's nuclear programme was "primitive." The deal restricted enrichment to 3.67 per cent for civilian power plants, reduced its stockpile, compelled Iran to export enriched uranium above the limit, and compelled Iran to use old model centrifuges for enrichment. Iran was subjected to the most stringent and invasive regime of monitoring and inspections ever imposed on any country. However, in 2018, Trump aborted the deal and proclaimed1,500 sanctions, disrupting the process of reconstituting US-Iran relations. Iran responded in 2019 by enriching uranium to 20 and 60 per cent, amassing a large stockpile, building advanced centrifuges, and curbing IAEA monitoring, Hardliners in the Iranian clerical establishment engineered the 2021 election of Ebrahim Raisi who reverted to an anti-US stance until he died in a helicopter crash in 2024. Iran again swung to the reformist faction by electing Masoud Pezeshkian as president who had pledged to clinch a new nuclear agreement. Having failed to restore relations with the US, which remains Iran's chief antagonist on the global scene, Tehran has cultivated ties within the region. This process was expanded by the 2023 restoration of Saudi Iranian relations and promised the stability Gulf countries require to pursue economic and social advancement. This has been jeopardised by Israel's war on Iran and US military and political intervention.
Gulf Today
2 hours ago
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Term limits won't fix what's wrong with Congress
David M. Drucker, Tribune News Service Support for imposing term limits on the US Congress is gaining steam, with at least half a dozen state legislatures approving resolutions urging a cap on service in the House of Representatives and the Senate. It stands to reason. Congress' job approval ratings are perennially in the tank, and a fresh Quinnipiac University poll reveals more of the same. In the survey, Republicans, who control both chambers, received positive marks from just 32% of registered voters. Democrats fared even worse, garnering a meager 21% approval rating. Many Americans across the political spectrum believe term limits would invigorate Capitol Hill, forcing older lawmakers to make way for new faces, loosening the stranglehold of politics and donors on lawmaking and enabling policy outcomes more responsive to their priorities. They're wrong — especially on that last part. Rather than making members of the House and Senate more responsive to the voters, term limits would shift power from veteran, experienced lawmakers to unelected staffers, executive branch bureaucrats and K Street lobbyists, none of whom would be subject to term limits. Just ask longtime political operatives in California, who have watched firsthand the impact of term-limits on the state legislature. Early in my career, I was a statehouse reporter in California, covering a legislature that limited assembly members to three, two-year terms and senators to two, four-year terms. Reform was minimal; political jockeying to reach the next elected position was rampant; and the work product generally was mediocre because novice lawmakers who didn't know what they were doing quickly assumed committee chairmanships and political leadership. Rob Stutzman, a veteran Republican operative in Sacramento, describes it as a 'transfer of institutional power' from elected officials to unelected government professionals and lobbyists. The experience was failure enough that in 2012 Californians approved Proposition 28, a voter initiative that overhauled term-limits. To solve the myriad problems created by letting inexperienced lawmakers govern the state with America's largest population and biggest economy, voters agreed to extend the years of service allowed in either chamber of the legislature to a dozen years (six, two-year terms in the assembly and three, four-year terms in the senate). But there was a trade-off. To sell voters on increasing the number of assembly and senate terms politicians can serve, the total years they are permitted to serve in the legislature overall were reduced from 14 to 12. And that means many of the governing pitfalls Proposition 28 aimed to address have lingered. 'Senior committee staff consider themselves members since they feel they know more than these neophyte legislators,' said David Louden, a Republican operative who previously served as chief of staff to four members of the California legislature. These legislative aides 'end up driving the policy of the committee, as opposed to the legislator,' he added. But cautionary tales about the potential downsides of terms limits have failed to dissuade voters from their firm belief that limits on Congressional service are the antidote for what ails the House and Senate. Over 80% of Americans support Congressional term limits. That would require a constitutional amendment. As political writer John Fund reports for National Review, six legislatures — Indiana, Louisiana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee — have approved resolutions 'calling for an Article V convention to impose term limits on Congress,' with Arizona and Ohio poised to do the same. (A convention would only be triggered if 34 states passed such a resolution.) Meanwhile, there also is support for congressional term limits brewing in Congress. Freshman Senator Dave McCormick and fifth-term Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, both Republicans from Pennsylvania, have jointly proposed amending the Constitution to put a ceiling on congressional service. Their plan would limit senators to two, six-year terms and House members to six, two-year terms, so that no politician could spend more than a dozen years in either chamber. To encourage support for the measure, McCormick and Fitzpatrick would exclude members who were elected before the 2022 midterm elections. 'Our Founding Fathers never imagined that Congress would become an institution filled with career politicians who stay on well past retirement age,' McCormick said in a statement. The senator's point about politicians who stick around beyond the standard retirement age is particularly resonant in a political era with so many elderly political leaders — a development that has left many Democratic, Republican and independent voters hungry for new leadership. On this front, Stutzman pointed out that California's term-limits law has been effective. 'At a time when the US Senate is as old as it's ever been, term limits in California have certainly led to a younger legislature,' he said. 'There were certainly decades-long incumbents that were finally forced to move on once term limits took effect.' My opposition to congressional term-limits notwithstanding, I get the appeal. Roughly a dozen years before I took up political reporting, in the fall of 1990, I voted for Proposition 140, implementing term-limits on the California legislature. Get the career politicians out, I figured. Get imaginative industry professionals with real-world skills in. They would go to Sacramento and focus on good governance and solving problems, I thought, because constitutionally constrained tenures would free them from worrying about reelection. Then, in the winter of 2003, I started covering the statehouse and saw the consequences of my vote up close. It had only made things worse. I can only imagine what would happen in Washington, especially with presidents who take a rather expansive view of their executive powers.
Gulf Today
2 hours ago
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Nvidia insiders sold over $1 billion in stock amid market surge, reports Financial Times
Nvidia insiders sold over $1 billion worth of company stock in the past year, with a notable uptick in recent trading activity as executives capitalize on surging investor interest in artificial intelligence, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. More than $500 million of the share sales took place this month as the California-based chip designer's share price climbed to an all-time high, the report said. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, started selling shares this week for the first time since September, the SEC filing showed. Nvidia's stock hit a record on Wednesday, and the chipmaker reclaimed the crown as the world's most valuable company after an analyst said the chipmaker was set to ride a "Golden Wave" of artificial intelligence. Its latest gains reflect the U.S. stock market's return to the "AI trade" that fueled massive gains in chip stocks and related technology companies in recent years on optimism about the emerging technology. Nvidia declined to comment on the FT report. Reuters could not immediately confirm the report. Nvidia's shares have rebounded over 60% from their closing low on April 4, when Wall Street was reeling from President Donald Trump's global tariff announcements. U.S. stocks, including Nvidia, have recovered on expectations the White House will reach trade deals to soften the tariffs. Reuters
