Israel targets Iran’s security forces and leadership as Iran presses attacks across the region

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By JON GAMBRELL, DAVID RISING and SAMY MAGDY

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The United States and Israel hit Iran’s capital and other cities in multiple airstrikes on Wednesday, the fifth day of the war with Iran. Israel targeted the Iranian leadership and security forces as the Islamic Republic responded with missile barrages and drone attacks on Israel and across the region.

Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard issued its most-intense threat yet as the war escalated, saying it was prepared for the “complete destruction of the region’s military and economic infrastructure.”

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Tehran residents woke to dawn blasts, and Iranian state television showed the ruins of building in the center of the capital. The Shiite seminary city of Qom and multiple other cities were also targeted.

With fighter jets roaring overhead, those still in Tehran looked anxiously to the skies. One man, who ran a clothing shop, said he didn’t know what to do.

“If I leave the city, how am I supposed to earn money and survive?” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

The Israeli military said one of its F-35 stealth fighter jets shot down a piloted Iranian Air Force YAK-130 fighter over Tehran on Wednesday. It also said Israeli air defenses were activated to intercept Iranian missiles fired at targets around the country, and explosions were heard around Jerusalem.

The tempo of the strikes on Iran was so intense that authorities postponed the mourning ceremony for Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the conflict, according to Iranian state television.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s Defense Ministry said NATO defenses intercepted a ballistic missile launched from Iran before it entered Turkey’s airspace. And an Iranian naval frigate sank off the coast of Sri Lanka. Authorities there rescued 32 people, though others died, Sri Lankan officials said.

It was not immediately clear what happened to the ship, which Sri Lankan authorities identified as the IRIS Dena, and is armed with heavy guns, surface-to-air missiles, anti-ship missiles and torpedoes and can carry a helicopter. The U.S. military said earlier it had already destroyed 17 Iranian vessels and that its goal was sinking “the entire navy.”

US Embassies and oil in the crosshairs

With Iran’s stranglehold on tanker movement through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which about a fifth of the world’s oil is shipped, Brent crude prices hit $84 a barrel, up more than 15% since the start of the conflict and at its highest price since July 2024.

Global stock markets have been hammered over worries that the spike in oil prices may grind down the world economy and sap corporate profits.

Iran has also attacked regional infrastructure. Saudi Arabia said Wednesday its Ras Tanura oil refinery, one of the world’s largest, was again targeted after an unsuccessful drone attack on it earlier in the week. The kingdom’s oil ministry said the latest attack did not cause any damage and supplies were not affected.

The American Embassy in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. Consulate in the United Arab Emirates came under drone attacks Tuesday, and the U.S. State Department said Wednesday it had authorized non-emergency government personnel to evacuate the kingdom.

U.S. Navy Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, said Iran has launched more than 500 ballistic missiles and 2,000 drones so far.

“We’ve already struck nearly 2,000 targets, with more than 2,000 munitions. We have severely degraded Iran’s air defenses and destroyed hundreds of Iran’s ballistic missiles, launchers and drones,” Cooper said in a prerecorded message shared online Wednesday.

Five days into a war that U.S. President Donald Trump suggested could last a month or longer, more than 1,000 people have been killed in Iran, including some Trump said he had considered as possible future leaders of the country.

Both sides are unrelenting in attacks

Air sirens sounded in the morning across the island kingdom of Bahrain, home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, and Qatar’s Ministry of Defense said Iran launched two ballistic missiles against it. One hit Al-Udeid Qatari Base but didn’t cause casualties.

Lebanon was hit in multiple strikes and Israel said it’s retaliating against Hezbollah militants after the Iran-backed group fired on Israel. More than 50 people have been killed in Lebanon and more than 300 wounded, according to the Health Ministry.

Iranian-linked militant groups in Iraq have also been launching attacks.

Israeli military spokesman Brig. Gen Effie Defrin reported a decline in launches from Iran as the country’s military capabilities are degraded. In airstrikes overnight, the Israeli military said it hit a missile storage and production plant in Isfahan.

The spiraling nature of the war raised questions about when and how it would end. Trump’s administration has offered various objectives, including destroying Iran’s missile capabilities, wiping out its navy, preventing it from obtaining a nuclear weapon and ensuring it cannot continue to support allied armed groups.

Israel presses attacks on Iranian forces and leadership

While the initial U.S.-Israeli strikes killed Khamenei and Trump urged Iranians to overthrow their government, senior administration officials have since said regime change was not the goal.

Trump on Tuesday seemed to downplay the chances of the war ending Iran’s theocratic rule, saying that “someone from within” the Iranian regime might be the best choice to take power once the U.S.-Israel campaign is finished.

Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, said Wednesday on X that whoever Iran picks as the country’s next supreme leader, he will be “a target for elimination.”

The Israeli military also said it hit buildings in Tehran associated with the Basij, the all-volunteer force of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard that conducted the bloody crackdown on protesters in January that killed thousands and saw tens of thousands detained in the country.

Iran’s judiciary chief, Gholam Hosseini Mohseni Ejehei, threatened Wednesday anyone who supports the U.S.-Israeli campaign, saying on Iranian state television that they are “on the enemy’s side and must be dealt with on revolutionary, Islamic principles and in accordance with the time of war.”

Iran’s leaders are scrambling to replace Khamenei, who ruled the country for 37 years. It’s only the second time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that a new supreme leader is being chosen. Among those considered as possible candidates is Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of the late ayatollah.

Defrin, the Israeli military spokesman, said the military struck a building in the Iranian city of Qom on Tuesday where clerics were expected to meet to discuss selecting a new supreme leader. He said the army was still assessing whether anyone was hit.

The semiofficial Fars and Tasnim news agencies, both believed to be close to the Guard, said Wednesday there was no meeting there at the time of the attack.

Hundreds have died, including children

The U.S.-Israeli strikes have killed at least 1,045 people, Iran’s Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs said Wednesday, saying it represented the number of bodies so far identified and prepared for burial.

Eleven people in Israel have been killed since the conflict began.

Kuwait, which had previously reported a single death, said Wednesday that an 11-year-old girl was killed by falling shrapnel as Kuwaiti forces were intercepting “hostile aerial targets.” In addition, three people were killed in the United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain.

Six U.S. Army Reserve soldiers were killed Sunday in Kuwait.

Rising reported from Bangkok, and Magdy from Cairo. Associated Press writer Elena Becatoros in Athens, Greece; Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv, Israel; Bassem Mroue in Beirut; Elaine Kurtenbach in Bangkok; Simina Mistreanu in Taipei, Taiwan, and Giovanna Dell’Orto in Miami contributed to this report.

Kirill Kaprizov passes Marian Gaborik as Wild’s top goal scorer

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It started to feel like superstar winger Kirill Kaprizov might never score again.

He failed to bury multiple chances on Tuesday night at Grand Casino Arena while the Wild rolled to a 5-1 win over the Tampa Bay Lightning. It was an uncharacteristic performance from the 28-year-old Russian. He hit the post so many times over the course of 60 minutes that he started to wonder to himself, “What’s going on?”

Maybe former Wild winger Marian Gaborik made a deal with the hockey gods before the game with Kaprizov on the precipice of leapfrogging him to become the franchise’s all time leading goal scorer.

Not even divine intervention could stop the most prolific goal scorer to ever wear the Wild sweater from rewriting the record books.

As the slowly game wound to a close with the result well in hand, Kaprizov casually flicked a backhanded shot into an empty net.

It officially marked the 220th goal of his career.

No player has ever had more for the Wild.

“It’s good,” Kaprizov said with a smile after the game. “You always want more.”

As much as he’s tried to downplay the idea of passing Gaborik to become the franchise’s leading goal scorer, Kaprizov understands why the conversation itself has carried so much fan fare.

Not that he’s feeling satisfied. He knows he has to keep putting the puck into the back of the net in order for the Wild to get to where they want to go.

“Now it’s done,” Kaprizov said while shifting back to serious. “Just need to keep going.”

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Amanda Cats-Baril: Warrantless home searches sparked the Revolution – now ICE wants to bring them back

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In 1761, James Otis Jr., a 36-year-old lawyer, ignited an early spark of the American Revolution when he resigned his post as Massachusetts Advocate General to represent merchants challenging the British use of overly broad warrants. Though he lost the case, his speech electrified the colonies: John Adams later wrote that Otis’s argument was the moment when “the Child Independence was born.”

That struggle over arbitrary warrants is no longer a historical footnote, now that the federal government is reviving the very practice Otis condemned. An internal ICE memo dated May 12, 2025, authorizes agents to enter homes solely on the basis of an “administrative warrant,” without prior judicial approval. The memo acknowledged that this marked a departure from historic ICE practices but claimed that DHS had “recently determined that the U.S. Constitution… (did) not prohibit relying on administrative warrants.”

Counter to Supreme Court precedent

In early January, ICE agents were documented forcibly entering homes on the basis of administrative warrants alone. The flagrant violation of a key constitutional right — the Fourth Amendment’s “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” — happened in plain sight. Even today’s conservative Supreme Court reaffirmed in January the “strong presumption against warrantless intrusions into the home” (Case v. Montana).

Rather than backing away from these practices, the administration has now publicly doubled down. On Feb. 4, the Department of Homeland Security issued a lengthy statement defending the use of administrative warrants and rejecting the claim that ICE is violating the Fourth Amendment.

DHS asserted that judicial warrants are unnecessary for immigration arrests and suggested that undocumented individuals are not entitled to the same constitutional protections — a position that runs directly counter to decades of Supreme Court precedent. Congressional Republicans have echoed this stance, calling any proposal to require judicial warrants a “non‑starter.” Far from retreating, the government is entrenching itself.

Born from our Revolution, the Fourth Amendment

In the leadup to the American Revolution, British officials used general warrants, known as writs of assistance, that allowed for the search of any property without the need to show probable cause. This practice outraged the American colonists, who believed that general warrants enabled tyranny by empowering officers to enter homes and businesses at will.

The Fourth Amendment was adopted specifically to prevent arbitrary searches, seizures, and intrusions into one’s home. Its protections reflect an intentional transition away from general, unlimited writs to specific, judicially approved warrants.

Born from the Revolution, the Fourth Amendment is a cornerstone of American governance. If ICE agents are being told they may disregard this foundational principle and violate the Fourth Amendment, we should all be alarmed. But let there be no confusion — an internal government memo should not be used to override our Constitution.

Like the British ‘writs of assistance’

The administrative warrants that ICE claims give them the authority to enter homes ironically resemble the warrants used by the British. Writs of assistance were open‑ended search warrants granted to British customs officers to search for smuggled goods; they were not limited by time, person, or location, and no probable cause was required. This meant that the British could use these writs at their will, without supervision or oversight.

The specificity requirements built into the Fourth Amendment — particularity and probable cause — are key to protecting people from searches that are too broad or arbitrary. The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that these requirements are intended to prevent general exploratory searches, an emphasis that has shaped modern American law enforcement practices.

Different kinds of warrants, like arrest warrants (for people) and search warrants (for property), ensure proper procedures are employed based on the government’s specified interest and authority. The use of administrative warrants to carry out immigration arrests is not new, but these warrants have traditionally been understood to authorize only the arrest of a specific individual — not to allow officers to enter private homes or businesses without consent.

A clear departure

The leaked ICE memo, however, sanctions a clear departure from constitutionally bound practices. These administrative warrants authorize agents to enter a home without consent and, if necessary, by force, regardless of the presence or identity of persons inside.

As such, while ICE claims that administrative warrants are used only to enforce final removal orders, those orders are issued against individuals, not households. When ICE forcibly enters a household using an administrative warrant, they are violating the Fourth Amendment rights of everyone in that home, even those not listed in the removal order.

In addition to probable cause and specificity requirements, the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant to be signed by a neutral judge or magistrate to ensure an independent check on law enforcement. Judges determine whether there is sufficient evidence to support probable cause and ensure that the warrant’s scope is narrowly focused to permit only minimal incursions on people’s rights. Judicial oversight functions as an essential check on government power.

ICE’s administrative warrants, by contrast, are procedural forms approved internally by immigration authorities with no independent judicial review. This brings us closer to the very tyranny we sought to escape when we founded our country.

If we would not tolerate officers forcibly entering our homes without cause during the Revolution, we must certainly reject this conduct today when it is expressly prohibited by our Constitution.

Reference to the American Revolution here is not intended as a history lesson; rather, it reminds us that the use of general warrants was one of the foundational grievances that animated our Constitution and the founding of our country. Americans across the colonies who had little else in common agreed that the warrants used by the British would not be tolerated in the new United States of America. Even then, the sanctity of the home and the right to privacy were seen as core American principles, shared across the political spectrum.

That consensus has not changed. Standing up for our constitutional rights and shared American principles is not political.

Our founders knew why government power must be limited

Our Constitution was intentionally written, born out of lived experiences of tyranny and authoritarianism. Our founders understood that placing limits on government power — especially when it comes to the privacy of the home — was fundamental to ensuring democracy and preventing tyranny. The current government’s attempts to ignore the Fourth Amendment fly in the face of our constitutional democracy and disregard the very foundations of our national ethos.

Today, as DHS publicly defends practices that erode judicial oversight and Congress refuses to impose even the most basic guardrails, we are confronted with a stark question: Will we allow the very abuses that sparked the American Revolution to be revived under the banner of immigration enforcement? The answer will determine not only how we treat the most vulnerable among us, but whether we still recognize the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. The Fourth Amendment was written to restrain government power in moments exactly like this.

Our willingness to defend it now will reveal whether we still believe in the promise our founders fought to secure.

Amanda Cats-Baril is project manager and content strategist for the Meeting the Moment initiative of Lawyers Defending American Democracy. She wrote this column for The Fulcrum, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news platform covering efforts to fix our governing systems.

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Lisa Jarvis: What adults get wrong about girls and autism

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For decades, autism was believed to overwhelmingly affect boys. Yet a big new study out of Sweden provides perhaps the best evidence yet that girls aren’t less likely to be autistic — they’re just less likely to be diagnosed young.

Researchers looked across 35 years of health records for nearly 2.8 million people (an incredibly complete window into their lives thanks to Sweden’s universal health care system). They found that whether it was 2025 or 1995, boys under 10 were three to four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism than girls. But by adulthood, the gap had nearly disappeared.

The study might have looked at kids in Sweden, but it points to a global problem: Too many autistic girls are being missed during childhood.

That’s a critical time when social supports and interventions could help them learn to more easily navigate their world. On a more basic level, going unidentified means they are left until adolescence or even adulthood without a fundamental understanding of themselves.

Why do so many autistic girls fly under the radar? Child psychologists have a few theories. For starters, some of the traits of autism are expressed differently in girls than in boys. They often are milder — for example, girls with autism are more likely to hold eye contact and have an easier time with communication.

And although they may express strong interests, they tend to line up with things neurotypical girls are drawn to — say, Taylor Swift or makeup or animals, explains Conner Black, associate director of the Child Mind Institute’s Autism Center.

Those subtle differences make autistic traits easy to miss, even by pediatricians and therapists. That’s in part because girls don’t tend to display some of the big externalizing behaviors, like aggression or tantrums, that people tend to associate with autism in boys, Black says.

In recent years, experts have particularly focused on girls’ ability to “mask” or “camouflage” their autism traits. More so than boys, the desire to blend in is strong in young girls, and might be even more powerful in autistic girls, says Gina Rippon, a British neurobiologist whose recent book, “The Lost Girls of Autism,” chronicles the ways science has overlooked girls with autism.

That can be exhausting and impossible to keep up full-time. Girls might not display challenging behaviors at school but still melt down the moment they get home, Black says. That mismatch was illustrated in a 2024 study that found striking differences between teachers and parents’ perceptions of autism traits — things like having trouble interpreting body language or understanding social mores. Teachers viewed boys as having significantly more traits than girls — and consistently said girls had fewer traits than their parents identified.

Camouflaging might allow girls to navigate the early elementary school years, when there’s a lot of predictability. But the tactic starts to fall apart around middle school. “All of a sudden, the whole social environment becomes much more complex, much more unpredictable, much more pressurized, particularly for adolescents,” Rippon says. “The scaffolding that they’ve kind of built up to protect themselves is no longer fit for purpose.”

As the social dynamics of middle school set in — surely every adult has vivid memories of those difficult years — autistic girls might start to struggle. That doesn’t necessarily mean their autism suddenly becomes apparent to caregivers and clinicians; rather, they might start to be diagnosed with other conditions, like ADHD, depression, anorexia or self-harm. Those diagnoses can mean more years where their autism is missed — one study found an ADHD diagnosis can delay an autism diagnosis by nearly three years on average.

That delay can subject girls to treatments for other conditions that, though intended to help, can make life harder. Conventional eating disorder interventions, for example, might not be appropriate for someone with autism, Rippon notes. That’s because for some, the driver for an eating disorder has less to do with body image and more to do with sensory hypersensitivity or the need for rigid eating rituals.

Too many girls are missing out on early supports that could help them navigate life — not to mention missing out on the opportunity to have a deeper understanding of who they are and how their brain works. As robust research like the study out of Sweden makes it increasingly clear that autism is nearly as common in girls as in boys, there’s so much work to do to better meet girls’ needs.

That starts with simply studying girls more. Despite growing recognition over the last decade or so that autistic girls deserve more time, attention and research dollars, there are still glaring knowledge gaps that need to be filled. A big one is developing better diagnostic tools to capture the subtle traits of autism in girls when they are young, especially when girls are camouflaging those traits.

Teachers could use more education, too, to recognize the less obvious traits that might be showing up in their classrooms. Parents, meanwhile, are in the best position to advocate for their child, and pediatricians, therapists and educators should do a better job listening when parents are describing what they’re seeing at home.

None of this is to suggest that boys don’t deserve less; it’s simply that girls shouldn’t be left to struggle. The goal should be to get to a place where every child has the support they need to live their happiest, healthiest life.

Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.

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