By PAUL WISEMAN, AP Economics Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits dipped to 245,000 last week, hovering at historically low levels, the Labor Department said Wednesday.

U.S. jobless claims ticked down from 250,000 the week before. Economists had expected last week’s claims to match that at 250,000.

The four-week average of claims, which smooths out week-to-week volatility, rose to 245,500, the highest since August 2023.

The number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits the week of June 7 slid to 1.95 million.

Weekly unemployment claim are a proxy for layoffs and mostly have stayed within a healthy band of 200,000 to 250,000 since the economy recovered from a brief but painful COVID-19 recession in 2020, which temporarily wiped out millions of jobs.

In recent weeks, however, claims have stayed at the high end of range, adding to evidence that U.S. job market is decelerating after years of strong hiring. So far this year, employers are adding a decent but far from spectacular 124,000 jobs a month, down from an average 168,000 last year and an average of nearly 400,000 from 2021 through 2023.

The hiring slowdown is partly the drawn-out result of 11 interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve in 2022 and 2023. But Trump’s aggressive and often-erratic trade policies — including 10% taxes on imports from almost every country on earth — are also weighing on the economy, paralyzing businesses and worrying consumers who fear they’ll mean higher prices.

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Carl Weinberg of High Frequency Economics is worried that claims remain elevated compared with recent years, when employment has remained very low by historical standards.

“We believe firms have been ‘hoarding’ workers to ensure that they don’t lay off skilled and trained workers by mistake, especially with the labor market still very close to full employment,” Weinberg wrote. “With uncertainty still high … companies have remained hesitant about layoffs. That may be changing.”

The Fed, satisfied that an inflation was coming down, cut rates three times last year. But the central bank has turned cautious in 2025, worried that Trump’s tariffs will rekindle inflationary pressures. The Fed is expected to leave rates unchanged as it wraps up a two-day meeting Wednesday.

By JOSEPH KRAUSS, JON GAMBRELL and JULIA FRANKEL

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran’s supreme leader on Wednesday rejected U.S. calls for surrender in the face of blistering Israeli strikes and warned that any military involvement by the Americans would cause “irreparable damage” to them, in recorded video aired by state TV.

It was the second public appearance by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei since the strikes began, and came a day after U.S. President Donald Trump demanded “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” in a social media post and warned Khamenei that the U.S. knows where he is but has no plans to kill him, “at least not for now.”

Trump initially distanced himself from Israel’s surprise attack on Friday that triggered the conflict, but in recent days has hinted at greater American involvement, saying he wants something “much bigger” than a ceasefire. The U.S. has also sent more military aircraft and warships to the region.

‘The Iranian nation is not one to surrender’

Khamenei dismissed the “threatening and absurd statements” by Trump.

“Wise individuals who know Iran, its people, and its history never speak to this nation with the language of threats, because the Iranian nation is not one to surrender,” he said. “Americans should know that any military involvement by the U.S. will undoubtedly result in irreparable damage to them.”

A state TV anchor had read Khamenei’s statement earlier, before the video was aired. Iran followed a similar sequence in releasing an earlier statement from the supreme leader, perhaps as a security measure. His location is not known.

His voice echoed as he sat in a room with beige curtains. An Iranian flag and a portrait of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who Khamenei succeeded in 1989, hung behind him.

An Iranian official had earlier Wednesday warned that U.S. intervention would risk “all-out war.”

Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei did not elaborate, but thousands of American troops are based in nearby countries within range of Iran’s weapons. The U.S. has threatened a massive response to any attack.

Another Iranian official said the country would keep enriching uranium for peaceful purposes, apparently ruling out Trump’s demands that Iran give up its disputed nuclear program.

Strikes in and around Tehran

The latest Israeli strikes hit a facility used to make uranium centrifuges and another that made missile components, the Israeli military said. It said it had intercepted 10 missiles overnight as Iran’s retaliatory barrages diminish. The U.N. nuclear watchdog said Israel had struck two centrifuge production facilities in and near Tehran.

The Israeli military said it also carried out strikes in western Iran, hitting missile storage sites and a loaded missile launcher.

Israeli strikes have hit several nuclear and military sites, killing top generals and nuclear scientists. A Washington-based Iranian human rights group said at least 585 people, including 239 civilians, have been killed and more than 1,300 wounded.

Iran has fired some 400 missiles and hundreds of drones in retaliatory strikes that have killed at least 24 people in Israel and wounded hundreds. Some have hit apartment buildings in central Israel, causing heavy damage, and air raid sirens have repeatedly forced Israelis to run for shelter.

Iran has fired fewer missiles as the conflict has worn on. It has not explained the decline, but Israel has targeted launchers and other infrastructure related to the missiles.

Casualties mount in Iran

The Washington-based group Human Rights Activists said it had identified 239 of those killed in Israeli strikes as civilians and 126 as security personnel.

The group, which also provided detailed casualty figures during 2022 protests over the death of Mahsa Amini, crosschecks local reports against a network of sources it has developed in Iran.

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Iran has not been publishing regular death tolls during the conflict and has minimized casualties in the past. Its last update, issued Monday, put the toll at 224 people killed and 1,277 others wounded.

Shops have been closed across Tehran, including in its famed Grand Bazaar, as people wait in gas lines and pack roads leading out of the city to escape the onslaught.

A major explosion could be heard around 5 a.m. in Tehran Wednesday morning, following other explosions earlier in the predawn darkness. Authorities in Iran offered no acknowledgement of the attacks, which has become increasingly common as the Israeli airstrikes have intensified.

At least one strike appeared to target Tehran’s eastern neighborhood of Hakimiyeh, where the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard has an academy.

Iran says it will keep enriching uranium

Israel says it launched the strikes to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, after talks between the United States and Iran over a diplomatic resolution had made little visible progress over two months but were still ongoing. Trump has said Israel’s campaign came after a 60-day window he set for the talks.

Iran long has insisted its nuclear program was peaceful, though it is the only non-nuclear-armed state to enrich uranium up to 60%, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. U.S. intelligence agencies have said they did not believe Iran was actively pursuing the bomb.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons but has never publicly acknowledged them.

Iran’s ambassador to Geneva, Ali Bahreini, told reporters that Iran “will continue to produce the enriched uranium as far as we need for peaceful purposes.”

He rejected any talk of a setback to Iran’s nuclear research and development from the Israeli strikes, saying, “Our scientists will continue their work.”

Israel welcomes first repatriation flights

Israelis began returning on flights for the first time since the country’s international airport shut down at the start of the conflict.

Two flights from Larnaca, Cyprus, landed at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport on Wednesday morning, said Lisa Dvir, an airport spokesperson.

Israel closed its airspace to commercial flights because of the ballistic missile attacks, leaving tens of thousands of Israelis stranded abroad. The conflict has disrupted flight patterns across the region.

Frankel reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat and Nasser Karimi in Iran, and Jamey Keaten in Geneva, contributed.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates  — Iran’s supreme leader on Wednesday rejected U.S. calls for surrender in the face of blistering Israeli strikes and warned that any military involvement by the Americans would cause “irreparable damage” to them, in recorded video aired by state TV.

It was the second public appearance by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei since the strikes began, and came a day after U.S. President Donald Trump demanded “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” in a social media post and warned Khamenei that the U.S. knows where he is but has no plans to kill him, “at least not for now.”

Trump initially distanced himself from Israel’s surprise attack on Friday that triggered the conflict, but in recent days has hinted at greater American involvement, saying he wants something “much bigger” than a ceasefire. The U.S. has also sent more military aircraft and warships to the region.

‘The Iranian nation is not one to surrender’

Khamenei dismissed the “threatening and absurd statements” by Trump.

“Wise individuals who know Iran, its people, and its history never speak to this nation with the language of threats, because the Iranian nation is not one to surrender,” he said. “Americans should know that any military involvement by the U.S. will undoubtedly result in irreparable damage to them.”

A state TV anchor had read Khamenei’s statement earlier, before the video was aired. Iran followed a similar sequence in releasing an earlier statement from the supreme leader, perhaps as a security measure. His location is not known.

His voice echoed as he sat in a room with beige curtains. An Iranian flag and a portrait of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who Khamenei succeeded in 1989, hung behind him.

An Iranian official had earlier Wednesday warned that U.S. intervention would risk “all-out war.”

Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei did not elaborate, but thousands of American troops are based in nearby countries within range of Iran’s weapons. The U.S. has threatened a massive response to any attack.

Another Iranian official said the country would keep enriching uranium for peaceful purposes, apparently ruling out Trump’s demands that Iran give up its disputed nuclear program.

Strikes in and around Tehran

The latest Israeli strikes hit a facility used to make uranium centrifuges and another that made missile components, the Israeli military said. It said it had intercepted 10 missiles overnight as Iran’s retaliatory barrages diminish. The U.N. nuclear watchdog said Israel had struck two centrifuge production facilities in and near Tehran.

The Israeli military said it also carried out strikes in western Iran, hitting missile storage sites and a loaded missile launcher.

Israeli strikes have hit several nuclear and military sites, killing top generals and nuclear scientists. A Washington-based Iranian human rights group said at least 585 people, including 239 civilians, have been killed and more than 1,300 wounded.

Iran has fired some 400 missiles and hundreds of drones in retaliatory strikes that have killed at least 24 people in Israel and wounded hundreds. Some have hit apartment buildings in central Israel, causing heavy damage, and air raid sirens have repeatedly forced Israelis to run for shelter.

Iran has fired fewer missiles as the conflict has worn on. It has not explained the decline, but Israel has targeted launchers and other infrastructure related to the missiles.

Casualties mount in Iran

The Washington-based group Human Rights Activists said it had identified 239 of those killed in Israeli strikes as civilians and 126 as security personnel.

The group, which also provided detailed casualty figures during 2022 protests over the death of Mahsa Amini, crosschecks local reports against a network of sources it has developed in Iran.

Iran has not been publishing regular death tolls during the conflict and has minimized casualties in the past. Its last update, issued Monday, put the toll at 224 people killed and 1,277 others wounded.

Shops have been closed across Tehran, including in its famed Grand Bazaar, as people wait in gas lines and pack roads leading out of the city to escape the onslaught.

A major explosion could be heard around 5 a.m. in Tehran Wednesday morning, following other explosions earlier in the predawn darkness. Authorities in Iran offered no acknowledgement of the attacks, which has become increasingly common as the Israeli airstrikes have intensified.

At least one strike appeared to target Tehran’s eastern neighborhood of Hakimiyeh, where the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard has an academy.

Iran says it will keep enriching uranium

Israel says it launched the strikes to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, after talks between the United States and Iran over a diplomatic resolution had made little visible progress over two months but were still ongoing. Trump has said Israel’s campaign came after a 60-day window he set for the talks.

Iran long has insisted its nuclear program was peaceful, though it is the only non-nuclear-armed state to enrich uranium up to 60%, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. U.S. intelligence agencies have said they did not believe Iran was actively pursuing the bomb.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons but has never publicly acknowledged them.
Iran’s ambassador to Geneva, Ali Bahreini, told reporters that Iran “will continue to produce the enriched uranium as far as we need for peaceful purposes.”

He rejected any talk of a setback to Iran’s nuclear research and development from the Israeli strikes, saying, “Our scientists will continue their work.”

Israel welcomes first repatriation flights

Israelis began returning on flights for the first time since the country’s international airport shut down at the start of the conflict.

Two flights from Larnaca, Cyprus, landed at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport on Wednesday morning, said Lisa Dvir, an airport spokesperson.

Israel closed its airspace to commercial flights because of the ballistic missile attacks, leaving tens of thousands of Israelis stranded abroad. The conflict has disrupted flight patterns across the region.
___

Frankel reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat and Nasser Karimi in Iran, and Jamey Keaten in Geneva, contributed.

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Behind the strikes and counterstrikes in the current Israel-Iran war stands the clash of two strategic doctrines, one animating Iran and the other animating Israel, that are both deeply flawed. President Donald Trump has a chance to correct both of them and to create the best opportunity for stabilizing the Middle East in decades — if he is up to it.

Iran’s flawed strategic doctrine, which was also practiced by its proxy, Hezbollah, to equally bad result, is a doctrine I call trying to out-crazy an adversary. Iran and Hezbollah are always ready to go all the way, thinking that whatever their opponents might do in response, Hezbollah or Iran will always outdo them with a more extreme measure.

You name it — assassinate the prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri; blow up the U.S. Embassy in Beirut; help Bashar Assad murder thousands of his own people to stay in power — the imprints of Iran and its Hezbollah proxy are behind them all, together or separately. They are telling the world in effect: “No one will out-crazy us, so beware if you get in a fight with us, you will lose. Because we go all the way — and you moderates just go away.”

That Iranian doctrine did help Hezbollah drive Israel out of southern Lebanon. But where it fell short was Iran and Hezbollah thinking they could drive Israelis out of their biblical homeland. Iran and Hezbollah are delusional in this regard — Hamas too. They keep referring to the Jewish state as a foreign colonial enterprise, with no indigenous connection to the land, and therefore they assume the Jews will eventually meet the same fate as the Belgians in the Belgian Congo. That is, under enough pressure they will eventually go back to their own version of Belgium.

But Israeli Jews have no ‘Belgium’

But the Israeli Jews have no Belgium. They are as indigenous to their biblical homeland as the Palestinians, no matter what “anticolonial” nonsense they teach at elite universities. Therefore, you will never out-crazy the Israeli Jews. If push comes to shove, they will out-crazy you.

They will play by the local rules, and yes, those are not the rules of the Geneva Conventions. They are the rules of the Middle East, which I call Hama Rules — named after the Hama attacks perpetrated by the Syrian government of Hafez Assad in 1982, the aftermath of which I covered. Assad wiped out the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama by mercilessly leveling whole swaths of the city, whole blocks of apartments, into a parking lot. Hama rules are no rules at all.

Former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, both thought that they could out-crazy the Israeli Jews, that Israel would never try to kill them personally, that Israel was, as Nasrallah liked to say, a “spider web” that would just unravel one day under pressure. He paid with his life with that miscalculation last year, and the supreme leader probably would have as well if Trump had not intervened, reportedly, last week to stop Israel from killing him. These Israeli Jews will not be out-crazied. That is how they still have a state in a very tough neighborhood.

The fallacy of ‘once and for all’

That said, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of extremists running the Israeli government today are in the grip of their own strategic fallacy, which I call the doctrine of “once and for all.”

I wish I had a dollar for every time, after some murderous attack on Israeli Jews by Palestinians or Iranian proxies, the Israeli government declared that it was going to solve the problem with force “once and for all.”

There are only two ways to finish off this problem once and for all. One is for Israel to permanently occupy the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and all of Iran, as America did to Germany and Japan after World War II, and try to change the political culture. But Israel has no chance of occupying all of Iran, and it has occupied the West Bank for 58 years and still has not wiped out Hamas’ influence there — let alone secular Palestinian nationalism. That is because Palestinians are every bit as indigenous as the Jews in their homeland. Israel will never “once and for all them” into submission, unless they kill every last one.

The only way to even get close to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “once and for all” is by working toward a two-state solution. Which brings me to what Trump should do now regarding Iran. He says he still hopes “there’s going to be a deal.”

The threat of force, and support for two states

If he wants a good deal, he should declare that he is doing two things at once.

One, that he will equip Israel’s air force with the B-2 bombers and 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs and U.S. trainers that would give Israel the capacity to destroy all of Iran’s underground nuclear facilities unless Iran immediately agrees to allow teams from the International Atomic Energy Agency to disassemble these facilities and to have access into every nuclear site in Iran to recover all fissile material that Tehran has generated. Only if Iran completely complies with these conditions should it be allowed to have a civilian nuclear program under strict IAEA controls. But Iran will comply only under a credible threat of force.

At the same time, Trump should declare that his administration recognizes the Palestinians as a people who have a right to national self-determination. But to realize that, they must demonstrate that they can fulfill the responsibilities of statehood by generating a new Palestinian Authority leadership that the United States deems credible, free of corruption and committed both to effectively serving Palestinian citizens in the West Bank and Gaza and to coexisting with Israel.

Trump must also make clear, though, that he will not tolerate the rapid settlement expansion and one-state reality that Israel is now creating, which is a prescription for a forever war because Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza won’t disappear or “once and for all” give up their national identity and aspirations. (At the end of May the Netanyahu government approved 22 new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank — the largest expansion in decades — which is simply insane.)

To that end, Trump could also say that his administration will be committed to sponsoring peace talks for a two-state solution — with the Trump peace plan for a pathway toward two states from his previous presidency as the minimum starting point but not ending point. That, the parties themselves must negotiate directly.

Pairing force with diplomacy

To be ready to out-crazy the crazies has been a necessary condition for Israel to survive in the Middle East, but it is not a sufficient one. As the war in Gaza demonstrates, that strategy just begets more of the same. Even if it seems unfair at times, even if it seems naive at times, a peace-loving nation has to keep exploring alternatives and pairing force with diplomacy. It’s not only the best policy for Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians; it’s also the best way for Israel and America to isolate Iran.

As such, if Trump really wants to forge peace in the Middle East, which I believe he does, America must not become Netanyahu’s captive or Iran’s patsy. The United States has no interest in making Israel safe for messianic expansion or Iran safe for nuclear messianism. Trump must ignore the dangerous, knee-jerk isolationism of Vice President JD Vance. And he must eschew the equally foolish Netanyahu-can-do-no-wrong advice of GOP armchair generals and evangelicals. Neither serves U.S. interests or credibility in the region.

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Necessary conditions

The necessary but not sufficient conditions for peace in the Middle East that will allow America to reduce, but not end, its military presence there are that Iran be forced to draw a clear western border and stop trying to colonize its Arab neighbors and destroy Israel with a nuclear bomb; that Israel be forced to draw a clear eastern border and stop trying to colonize the whole of the West Bank; and that Palestinians be forced to draw clear eastern and western borders between Israel and Jordan and stop with the “river to the sea” nonsense.

This war has created the best opportunity in decades for a wise statesman to use what Dennis Ross, a longtime Middle East negotiator, calls in his new book, “Statecraft 2.0,” “coercive diplomacy.” Is Trump up to that? I really don’t know, but we’re going to find out real soon.

Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.