Inside the U.S. Strikes on Iran, and a Dangerous Heat Wave Spreads

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From the New York Times, it's the headlines.

I'm Michael Simon Johnson, in for Tracy Mumford.

Today's Monday, June 23rd.

Here's what we're covering.

The Middle East is on edge this morning with fears of a dangerously escalating conflict after the U.S.

attacked Iran over the weekend.

A short time ago, the U.S.

military carried out massive precision strikes on the three key nuclear facilities in the Iranian regime.

In a speech on Saturday night, President Trump said the U.S.

had joined Israel's attacks on the country and claimed the U.S.

military had, quote, totally obliterated multiple facilities that were part of Iran's nuclear program.

There's no military in the world that could have done what we did tonight.

Not even close.

There has never been a problem.

Just two days earlier, the White House had said there was a substantial chance of negotiating with Iran over the future of its nuclear program.

But the Times has since learned that at that point, Trump had all but made up his mind to launch strikes and military preparations were already underway.

When President Trump delivered a statement through the White House press secretary last Thursday that he was going to decide what to do about Iran within the next two weeks, mostly it was a misdirection to keep people's focus off the strike.

Maggie Haberman is a Times White House correspondent.

She says that the two-week statement was part of a broader effort to obscure the attack plan and make it seem less certain that it would happen at all.

That effort also included using at least one decoy bomber that headed west across the Pacific as a distraction on Saturday, while a primary group of B-2 bombers headed east toward Iran.

After 17 hours of non-stop flying, that group, escorted by fighter jets, entered Iranian airspace.

They then dropped more than a dozen 30,000-pound bombs on the site of an underground nuclear facility, while a nearby U.S.

submarine launched cruise missiles at other sites.

The full extent of damage to the facilities or any casualties is still unclear.

Now, administration officials have framed this as a one-off event and suggested that it can remain that way if Iran comes to the table to discuss curtailing its nuclear program.

However, the president late Sunday in the afternoon suggested he was curious about how regime change, something his administration officials had strongly insisted this was not about, might play.

Meanwhile, in Tehran, officials are publicly moving to project a sensor normalcy and try to downflay the damage on the nuclear sites.

But in my conversations with officials, the mood internally is pretty grim, and there's a lot of divisions within the government about how to respond.

Far Nazfasihi covers Iran for the Times.

She says that while Iran has retaliated forcefully to Israel's ongoing attacks, hitting back at the U.S., including the 40,000 troops and civilians working for the Pentagon in the Middle East, could be riskier.

You know, the U.S.

has toppled governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, right next door to Iran's east and west.

So the stakes are much higher for Iran in deciding to escalate with the U.S.

So we're hearing a range of views.

You know, hardliners were calling for not just attacking American military bases in the region, but Iran disrupting the flow of oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and specifically closing the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran controls.

Then there were calls for restraint, saying this is a really critical moment and we need to act with wisdom and not have a knee-jerk reaction that could make things worse.

We won't really know what Iran is going to do until the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, issues a statement.

But remarkably, Mr.

Khamenei is nowhere to be seen or heard.

He is hiding in a bunker.

They've suspended all all electronic communication to protect him against assassination.

You know, messages between Mr.

Khamenei and his commanders are handwritten or carried by a human messenger.

So, in this pivotal time, there is a sense of uncertainty hanging over Iranians right now.

On today's episode of The Daily, my colleague David Sanger has more details about the American strikes and what could come next in the conflict.

Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestine activist, has been released on bail after a federal judge had determined that his arrest was likely unconstitutional.

In his first interview since his release, Khalil told the Times that his arrest back in March by plainclothes immigration officers, quote, felt like a kidnapping.

Khalil, a Palestinian born in a Syrian refugee camp, is a permanent U.S.

resident who became a leader in the protest movement on Columbia's campus last year.

He was never accused of a crime, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that he was a foreign policy threat because he had contributed to the spread of anti-Semitism through his role in the protests.

In his interview with the Times, Khalil rejected that claim, saying that he was simply advocating for his people.

I was not doing anything anti-Semitic, he said.

I was literally advocating for an end of a genocide.

His three-month stint at a Louisiana detention center meant that he missed the birth of his son, and he told the Times that there was, quote, nothing in this world that would compensate me for the time I lost with my family.

Still, Khalil says his commitment to the pro-Palestinian cause is unwavering, and that President Trump's attempts to crack down on protesters had instead, quote, advanced the movement 20 years.

He said that while he was in prison, he'd received hundreds of letters from people saying that his arrest had inspired them to get involved in the movement.

Despite his release, Khalil's case is still making its way through immigration courts, and the government is still seeking to deport him.

It's about to get hot around here, and I mean so hot it can kill you.

That's not hype.

This is serious heat.

Don't exercise when it's really, really hot.

Across the central and eastern United States right now, a major heat wave is expanding, threatening millions of people with dangerously high temperatures.

That heat, which reached around 100 degrees in parts of the Midwest over the weekend, is expected to shift eastward.

By midweek, major cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

will be baking, and humidity may well push heat indexes to upwards of 115 degrees in some areas.

Meteorologists say this is being caused by a heat dome.

a high-pressure system that traps hot air like a lid on a pot.

Nighttime temperatures are also expected to remain high in cities, limiting the body's ability to cool down and increasing health risks.

In New York City, emergency management officials are sounding the alarm, warning that heat is, quote, the deadliest weather threat we face, and noting that over 500 residents die from heat-related causes each year.

Later in the week, a cold front is expected to bring some relief to the northeast, but the mid-Atlantic will likely face above-average temperatures into the weekend.

And finally,

here is our ride.

One of the first RoboTaxi rides here in Austin.

Can't wait.

In Austin, Texas, Tesla has launched a test of a self-driving car service it's calling RoboTaxi.

It's the first step towards CEO Elon Musk's promise of widespread autonomous ride hailing.

Here we go.

We're pulling in right now.

For now, the service is invite only and operates within specific areas of Austin, with safety monitors, i.e., human beings, sitting in the front passenger seat.

Tesla isn't the first company to roll out autonomous taxis.

Customized Jaguars, owned by the company Waymo, have been cruising the streets of San Francisco and other cities for several years now.

But Musk's goal is to eventually turn regular Tesla owners into robo-taxi operators, having their cars go out and drive people around on their own while their owners are at work or sleeping.

That would let Tesla owners earn extra cash, and Musk said it could bring in hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue to the company.

Tesla is launching its robo-taxi service at a critical time for the company.

Jack Ewing covers Tesla for the Times.

He says that the company has been struggling to make up for sales that plummeted after Musk became a controversial figure in President Trump's administration.

And it's trying to make good on its trillion-dollar stock valuation, which is largely based on Musk's promise that self-driving Teslas will soon be all over American streets.

But Jack says making robo-taxis as commonplace as, say, ordering an Uber is going to be a challenge.

Tesla is attempting something that technologically is much more ambitious than what Waymo is doing.

Waymo and the others are restricting their services to carefully mapped areas within certain cities.

Tesla's technology, according to Elon Musk, will be able to operate anywhere.

at least anywhere where they can get approval.

But that's much more difficult to achieve technologically, and many critics of the company have questioned whether it's actually safe and whether it can ever be made safe.

And on Austin's streets, the Robo-Taxi could be facing even more competition.

At least three other companies are testing autonomous vehicles in the city, including Volkswagen and Amazon.

Those are the headlines.

I'm Michael Simon Johnson.

We'll be back tomorrow.