Donald Trump has been accused of “playing a very dangerous game” with Iran and risking dragging the US into a new war in the Middle East that could have “devastating” consequences.
The warning came from Hamid Baeidinejad, Iran’s ambassador to the UK, with the acting US defence secretary Patrick Shanahan tabling plans to send 120,000 troops to the region if needed as tensions soar between the two nations over economic sanctions and an increased American military presence in the Persian Gulf.
A commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Maj Gen Hossein Salami, later warned the nation is “on the cusp of a full-scale confrontation with the enemy”.
Meanwhile, President Trump has signed an executive order declaring a national emergency that will ban American companies from using telecommunications equipment made by foreign firms posing a national security risk to the US.
The move – thought to be aimed at China’s Huawei – comes as tensions flare between the two countries, with Beijing and Washington failing to find consensus on trade and tariffs after months of negotiations.
In a statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the emergency declaration by the president is”part of his commitment to protecting the information and communications technology and services of our Nation.”
In the latest US immigration news, the Trump administration is planning to redirect Transportation Security Administration staff to the Mexico border, the TSA said Wednesday.
“TSA, like all DHS components, is supporting the DHS effort to address the humanitarian and security crisis at the southwest border.
TSA is in the process of soliciting volunteers to support this effort while minimising operational impact,” TSA spokesman James Gregory said in a statement.
The announcement came as Donald Trump spoke at the annual Peace Officers’ Memorial Service in Washington DC, where he denounced illegal immigration across the US-Mexico border.
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Donald Trump has been accused of “playing a very dangerous game” with Iran and risking dragging the US into a new war in the Middle East that could have “devastating” consequences.
The warning came from Hamid Baeidinejad, Iran’s ambassador to the UK, with the acting US defence secretary Patrick Shanahan and hawkish national security adviser John Bolton reportedly tabling plans to send 120,000 troops to the region if needed as tensions soar between the two nations over economic sanctions and an increased American military presence in the Persian Gulf.
The US recently dispatched an aircraft carrier and B-52 bombers in a show of force, prompting accusations that Washington was engaging in "psychological warfare" from Tehran. Baeidinejad called this a "serious miscalculation", also denying Iranian involvement in the "sabotage" of rival oil tankers belonging to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Norway, which has further ramped up tensions.
Both US secretary of state Mike Pompeo and Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have denied their side is preparing for conflict. "We fundamentally do not seek war with Iran," Pompeo said at a press conference with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday.
Having said on Monday "It's going to be a bad problem for Iran if something happens", President Trump was more measured yesterday, refuting the suggestion he was readying ground forces: "Would I do that? Absolutely. But we have not planned for that. Hopefully we're not going to have to plan for that. If we did that, we'd send a hell of a lot more troops than that."
But members of the international community are not convinced.
"We are very worried about the risk of a conflict happening by accident, with an escalation that is unintended really on either side but ends with some kind of conflict," British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt told reporters in Brussels. "What we need is a period of calm to make sure that everyone understands what the other side is thinking."
Here's more from our diplomatic editor Kim Sengupta.
A British general has downplayed the threat of war in the region, only to then find himself rebuked by US Central Command.
"No, there's been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria," said major general Chris Ghika, a senior officer in the US-backed coalition fighting Isis. Speaking in a video conference from coalition headquarters in Baghdad, Ghika told reporters at the Pentagon that the coalition monitors the presence of Iranian-backed forces "along with a whole range of others because that's the environment we're in."
"There are a substantial number of militia groups in Iraq and Syria, and we don't see any increased threat from any of them at this stage," he added.
Late in the day, in a rare public rebuttal of an allied military officer, US Central Command said Ghika's remarks "run counter to the identified credible threats" from Iranian-backed forces in the Middle East. In a written statement, Central Command said the coalition in Baghdad has increased the alert level for all service members in Iraq and Syria.
"As a result, [the coalition] is now at a high level of alert as we continue to closely monitor credible and possibly imminent threats to US forces in Iraq," the statement read.
Here's Andrew Buncombe's report.
The US State Department has just ordered all non-emergency government staff to leave Iraq urgently amid escalating tensions with neighbouring Iran.
Here's the latest from Chris Baynes.
All this and the trade war with China rumbles on.
Trump - the billionaire business genius who lost a whopping $1.17bn (£897m) in the 1980s - started the fight by increasing tariffs on more than 6,000 Chinese consumer goods to 25 percent or $200bn (£153bn).
Beijing has since retaliated as promised by increasing tariffs on $60bn (£46bn) of American goods, an increase of 10 percent to 20-25 percent on items from alcohol and clothing to liquefied natural gas.
Trump has in turn threatened to impose tariffs on a further $300bn (£232.4bn) of Chinese goods but hopes to meet with Xi Jinping at the upcoming G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, to resolve a situation he is now seeking to downplay it as "a little squabble".
Here's Chris Riotta with the latest.
Yesterday the president argued on Twitter that America's "great Patriotic Farmers" would ultimately benefit from the stand-off.
But those same farmers are reportedly already bearing the brunt of lower prices and the loss of access to key overseas markets.
The price of soybeans has dropped below $8 (£6.20) a bushel for the first time since 2008 as a result of the current trade feud, which comes as many Midwestern farmers are facing rampant flooding at the height of planting season.
This follows the national net farm income dropping by more than $9bn (£9.9bn) or 12 percent in 2018 as a result of the President Trump's trade tactics, which are slamming the door to key markets for their produce, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service.
The president's son, Don Jr, has now agreed to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee in accordance with the subpoena issued to him after agreeing a last-minute deal.
Junior has previously skipped out on two earlier appointments with the Republican-led committee, which is seeking to verify precisely what went down at the notorious Trump Tower meeting with influential Russians of June 2016 after the Mueller report contradicted his statements on the affair in 2017.
Chairman Richard Burr's subpoena - the first for a member of the Trump family - sparked an intra-party dispute and accusations Burr himself was playing along with the Democrats' "witch hunt", with criticism incoming from fellow Republican senators John Cornyn, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.
"It's really a tough situation because my son spent, I guess, over 20 hours testifying about something that Mueller said was 100 percent OK and now they want him to testify again," Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. "I don't know why. I have no idea why. But it seems very unfair to me."
President Donald Trump showcased his "America First energy policy" on Tuesday during a trip to Louisiana designed to highlight his administration's efforts to increase liquefied natural gas exports and boost the country's energy infrastructure.
Trump toured the outskirts of a $10bn (£7.7bn) export terminal that will liquefy natural gas (LNG) for storage and shipping. The process involves cooling gas vapor to a liquid state. Sempra Energy announced on Tuesday the plant has begun producing LNG and will begin shipping to global markets in the next few weeks.
"Under my administration we have ended the war on America energy and ended the economic assault on our wonderful energy workers," Trump said in a wide-ranging speech to workers in Hackberry,
He went on to call the Democrats' Green New Deal a "hoax", repeated his idiotic line about wind energy (still apparently refusing to understand the concept of battery power storage) and mocked his 2020 rivals.
"I'm looking at the competition. You sort of dream about competition like that, you know?" he said.
Beto O'Rourke is "falling fast", Trump told his captive audience, and Bernie Sanders has "got a lot of energy. But it's energy to get rid of your jobs".
Trump's evident fascination with the "monster, beautiful pieces of art" he saw around him making up the industrial landscape was also mighty weird and resulted in this preposterous tweet recapping his day.
But it was this guy's socks - and the resulting photo - that were surely the true highlight of the day.
With regard to the president's potential 2020 challengers, Elizabeth Warren came out with a superb attack on arguably the real source of Trump's power - Fox News - after refusing their invitation to appear at a town hall event, branding the right-wing broadcaster "a hate-for-profit racket that gives a megaphone to racists and conspiracists".
And speaking of Fox, here's their latest line of attack on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Outnumbered pundit Dagen McDowell says AOC's looks are all the "obsession" with her amounts to in an unbelievably catty and depressingly reductive segment.
"Beauty fades, stupid's forever," she said.
Now to several enormous stories we haven't had time for so far.
Alabama’s state Senate passed a bill on Tuesday by 25-6 to outlaw nearly all abortions, creating exceptions only to protect the mother’s health, as part of a multi-state effort to have the US Supreme Court reconsider a woman’s constitutional right to a termination.
The state's House of Representatives had already passed this hugely regressive bill - which makes no allowances for unwanted pregnancies arising from cases of rape or incest - and it will now land on the desk of Republican governor Kay Ivey to sign or veto as she sees fit.
The president’s attorneys urged US district judge Amit Mehta to revoke subpoenas issued by the House Oversight and Reform Committee yesterday, in a bid to block the panel getting hold of Trump’s tax records via his longtime accountant, Mazars USA.
William Consovoy, one of Trump’s lawyers, said during his argument he did not believe Congress could investigate matters of corruption in relation to the president, telling the judge: “I don’t think that’s the proper subject of investigation as to the president.”
Judge Mehta was reportedly left "incredulous".
Here's Clark Mindock with more on attorney general William Barr's decision to appoint Connecticut's attorney, John Durham, to investigate alleged spying on the Trump campaign in 2016 from within the Obama-era Justice Department.
Trump Tower is now apparently one of New York’s least-desirable luxury buildings, according to new figures, the latest hammer blow to the president's titanic ego.
Remember Trump's US-Mexico border wall? It's being built straight through a national monument and a wildlife refuge.
The Department of Homeland Security again waived environmental and dozens of other laws to allow more than 100 miles of barriers to go up along the southern border in California and Arizona.
Funding will come from the Defence Department following the emergency declaration that President Trump signed this year after Congress refused to approve the amount of border wall funding he requested.
Barriers will go up at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a vast park named after the unique cactus breed that decorates it, and Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, which is largely a designed wilderness home to 275 wildlife species. The government will also build new roads and lighting in those areas in Arizona.
Environmental advocates who have sued to stop the construction of the wall say this latest plan will be detrimental to the wildlife and habitat in those areas.
"The Trump administration just ignored bedrock environmental and public health laws to plow a disastrous border wall through protected, spectacular wildlands," said Laiken Jordahl, who works on border issues at the Center for Biological Diversity.
At Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, row after row of cacti decorate 516 square miles of land that once saw so much drug smuggling that over half the park was closed to the public. But illegal crossings in that area dropped off significantly in the past several years, and the government in 2015 reopened the entire monument for the first time in 12 years.
While Arizona has seen an increase in border-crossers over the last year, most are families who turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents. The number of drugs that agents seize in the state has also dropped significantly.
But the government is moving forward with more border infrastructure.
The waivers the department issued on Tuesday are vague in their description of where and how many miles of fencing will be installed. The Center for Biological Diversity says the plans total about 100 miles of southern border in both Arizona and California, near Calexico and Tecate.
In Arizona, construction will focus on four areas of the border and will include the replacement of waist-high fencing meant to stop cars with 18 to 30-foot barriers that will be more efficient at stopping illegal crossings.
The government has already demolished refuge land in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and construction is set to begin any day. On one section of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, crews have used heavy construction equipment to destroy a mix of trees, including mesquite, mulberry and hackberry. Those trees protect birds during the ongoing nesting season.
According to plans published last year, the cleared land will be filled in and a concrete wall will be installed, with bollards measuring 18 feet installed on top.
After months of public outcry, Congress forbade US Customs and Border Protection from building in the nearby Santa Ana wildlife refuge or the non-profit National Butterfly Center. But it didn't stop money from going to wall construction in other refuge lands, nor did it stop the government from building in otherwise exempted land due to the emergency declaration, said Marianna Trevino Wright, the butterfly center's director.
"They're going to have to protect us in every single spending bill going forward, and they have to protect us against the state of emergency," Wright said. "And this administration has made it clear... that they don't want any exemptions."
Here's Olly Carroll writing from Moscow on Mike Pompeo's attempts to reset the administration's relations with Russia post-Mueller.
Yikes! Sergei Lavrov looks like Captain America's Nazi nemesis the Red Skull in the press shot below.
Fellow 2020 candidate Beto O'Rourke, who was singled out for abuse by the president in Louisiana yesterday, has said he regrets launching his campaign with an appearance on the cover of Vanity Fair.
He told ABC's The View: “It reinforces that perception of privilege. And that headline that said I was born to be in this, in the article I was attempting to say that my calling is in public service. No one is born to be president of the United States of America, least of all me.”
Ahmed Baba for Indy Voices here argues that South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham's conversion from Trump denier to zealous convert and leading apologist personifies the plight of a craven Republican Party in thrall to the cult of the president.
During Trump's presidential campaign, Graham called him a “jackass", a “kook", a “bigot", and said Trump was "unfit for office." He also called the president a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot" who "doesn't represent" the GOP.
How times change.
Here's Lindsey Graham stirring it up by relating the Don Jr subpoena to their new favourite conspiracy about Joe Biden, who allegedly intervened in Ukraine in 2016 to have a top prosecutor removed who was investigating a company his own son Hunter was a board member of.
