Thursday, March 05, 2026
Satellite images show Iran school strike hit more buildings than earlier reported
Satellite images show Iran school strike hit more buildings than earlier reported
“The bombing of an Iranian elementary school that killed some 165 people, many of them schoolgirls, included more targets near the school than has been initially reported, a review of commercial satellite imagery by NPR has found.
The images suggest that the school was hit on Saturday as part of a precision airstrike on a neighboring Iranian military complex — and that it may have been struck as a result of outdated targeting information.
The new images come from the company Planet and are of the city of Minab, located in southeastern Iran. They show that a health clinic and other buildings near the school were also struck. Three independent experts confirmed NPR's analysis of the additional strike points.
The strike points "look like pretty clean detonation centroids," said Corey Scher, a postdoctoral researcher at the Conflict Ecology laboratory at Oregon State University.
"These certainly appear like detonation sites," agreed Scher's colleague, Oregon State associate professor Jamon Van Den Hoek.
Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at Middlebury College who specializes in satellite imagery, said the imagery was consistent with a precision airstrike.
The images show "very precise targeting," Lewis told NPR. "Almost all the buildings [in the compound] are hit."
A satellite image of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard compound taken on March 4, several days after an airstrike destroyed a school on the edge of the compound. The image reveals that half a dozen other buildings in addition to the school were struck.
Planet Labs PBC
Iranian state media said 165 people died in the bombing, which struck a girls' school. The school was located within less than 100 yards of the perimeter of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base, according to satellite images and publicly available information. The clinic was also located within the base perimeter, although both facilities had been walled off from the base.
Israel has denied involvement. "We are not aware at the moment of any IDF operation in that area," Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Nadav Shoshani told NPR on Monday. "I don't know who's responsible for the bombing."
At a press conference Wednesday morning, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the U.S. is looking into what happened at the school. "All I know, all I can say, is that we're investigating that," Hegseth said. "We, of course, never target civilian targets."
Given Minab's location in the southeastern part of Iran, Lewis believes it's more likely the U.S. would have conducted the strike than Israel. As one gets farther south and east in Iran, "a strike is much more likely to be a U.S. strike than an Israeli strike because of the type of munitions and the geographic location," he said.
Esmail Baghaei, the spokesman for Iran's Foreign Ministry, called the strike"deliberate" and said that the U.S. and Israel bombed the school in part to tie up Iranian forces in the region with rescue efforts. "To call the attack on the girls school merely a 'war crime' does not capture the sheer evil and depravity of such a crime," he said.
But Lewis said it's more likely that the strike was the result of an error. Satellite images show that the school and clinic buildings were both once part of the base. The school was separated from the base by a wall between 2013 and 2016. The clinic was walled off between 2022 and 2024.
Lewis believes it's possible American military planners had not updated their target sets.
"There are thousands of targets across Iran, and so there will be teams in the United States and Israel that are responsible for tracking those targets and updating them," he said. "It's possible that the target didn't get updated."
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to NPR's request for additional information about the strike.
NPR's Arezou Rezvani and NPR's RAD team contributed to this report.”
'Gringo go home': Mexico’s growing tourism backlash – video | Mexico | The Guardian
'Gringo go home': Mexico’s growing tourism backlash – video
Tourism in Mexico is at an all-time high, with foreign visitors lured by the country’s rich culture and low costs. The Guardian visits Oaxaca, a state synonymous with indigenous culture, where tourism has grown 77% since the pandemic and once private family rituals such as the Day of the Dead are now big international parties. But with this opportunity comes a growing backlash across the country, as local people struggle with a cost of living crisis that is exacerbated by the tourism industry’s exponential growth
Wednesday, March 04, 2026
Tuesday, March 03, 2026
Thousands in Iran Attend Burial of Children Killed in Bombing of School
Thousands in Iran Attend Burial of Children Killed in Bombing of School
“Thousands attended the funeral of 175 victims, many children, killed in an airstrike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran. The school, adjacent to a naval base, was destroyed in the attack, which is part of a larger conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran. The U.S. and Israel have not commented on the strike, but the U.S. Central Command is investigating reports of civilian harm.
There were students attending classes at the time that the school was destroyed. Some 175 people were killed by the attack on the girls’ elementary school.
Thousands of mourners filled the streets of a town in southern Iran on Tuesday during the funeral for victims of an airstrike on a girls’ elementary school, according to footage and images verified by The New York Times. The strike ranks among the deadliest attacks of the American-Israeli campaign against Iran.
The bombing of the school, which took place on Saturday, killed at least 175 people, many of them students attending class at the Shajarah Tayyebeh school, in the town of Minab, according to local health officials and Iranian state media. Several videos and images verified by The Times showed that at least half of the two-story building was destroyed in the explosion.
More than 800 people have been killed in the conflict across the Middle East since Saturday, when the United States and Israel launched their opening attacks on Iran, killing the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Iran responded with waves of retaliatory rocket and drone attacks against various countries in the region.
Before the funeral in Minab on Tuesday, workmen dug rows of graves at a cemetery about five miles from the elementary school, according to video footage verified by The Times.
The procession of mourners swarmed around a truck loaded down with coffins. Some people wailed in grief as others showered caskets with sweets and rose petals, according to videos verified by The Times. Aerial photographs showed mourners at the cemetery as the coffins were lowered into the graves. Videos showed the crowd engaged in prayer and chanting in support of the Islamic republic.
The school was next to a naval base belonging to Iran’s most powerful military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The school building was once part of the military site, satellite images reviewed by The Times show, but by 2016, the building had been walled off and was no longer connected to the base.
Neither the Israeli nor U.S. government has directly addressed the strike on the school. But the U.S. Central Command said on Saturday that it was “aware of reports concerning civilian harm” and was “looking into them.”
The strike on Shajarah Tayyebeh was one of two attacks that appeared to have hit schools on Saturday. Another strike appeared to have hit the Hedayat High School in Iran’s capital, Tehran, near 72nd Square in the district of Narmak, local media and rights groups said. Two students died in that attack, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which focuses on Iran.
Intentionally attacking a school, hospital or other civilian structure is a war crime, and indiscriminate strikes also violate international law. Even if schools are used for military purposes, the law requires armed parties to avoid or minimize harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Malachy Browne is enterprise director of the Visual Investigations team at The Times. He was a member of teams awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2020 and 2023.
Pranav Baskar is an international reporter and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.“
Texas Supreme Court stays order extending Dallas County voting by two hours
Texas Supreme Court stays order extending Dallas County voting by two hours
“The Texas Supreme Court stayed a Dallas County judge’s order extending voting hours at Democratic polling sites until 9 p.m. due to widespread confusion caused by a switch to precinct-based voting. The confusion stemmed from the GOP’s decision to hold a separate primary and the Secretary of State’s website not being updated with new precinct maps. The ruling means ballots cast after 7 p.m. will not be counted, potentially impacting the outcome of close elections.
A Dallas County judge had ordered Democrats get two extra hours to vote after confusion at polls. The Supreme Court stayed the order late Tuesday.
The Dallas County Elections offices pictured, Tuesday, March 3, 2026, in Dallas.
ElÃas Valverde II / Staff Photographer
Shortly before polls were set to close in Dallas County Tuesday, the elections department extended voting at Democratic polling sites upon a district judge’s order citing widespread confusion throughout the day.
However, late Tuesday the Texas Supreme Court put the order extending hours from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on hold, Dallas County elections administrator Paul Adams told The Dallas Morning News.
Ballots cast by Democrats in line after 7 p.m. would not be counted, Adams said.
Hundreds of voters were turned away from Dallas County polls when they arrived at what are typically universal voting sites but were rerouted to their assigned polling places due to a switch prompted by the county Republican Party.
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Violet Marquez was one of the voters turned away after the Texas Supreme Court blocked the order to keep polls open late.
Marquez, 45, tried to enter the MLK Branch Library in southern Dallas around 8:43 p.m. when poll workers informed her of the court ruling.
She was sent to the library after poll workers at another site determined her voting address was zoned for the library.
Several other voters were turned away at the same time. Voters were barely trickling into the site before it closed.
“I think it’s just another ploy to keep numbers swayed the other way,” Marquez said.
The GOP’s decision to hold a separate primary from Democrats this year required precinct-based voting on election day, a change from the countywide voting system that allowed residents to vote at any center regardless of their address.
The Dallas County Democratic Party petitioned a judge to extend the hours due to confusion throughout the day, according to executive director Brenda Allen. Judge Staci Williams granted the motion, citing “mass confusion” that caused the county elections website to crash, according to the order.
“We felt there was significant evidence of hundreds of voters being turned away and to not do anything on their behalf felt wrong,” Allen said.
The extension applied only to the 279 Democratic polling locations.
U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett and state Rep. James Talarico, both Democrats running for U.S. Senate, issued statements raising concerns about the confusion in Dallas and Williamson counties, which also reverted to election day precincts.
The local problem was compounded because the Secretary of State’s votetexas.gov website was not updated with Dallas County’s new precinct maps changed in December after state redistricting, according to Allen.
Some voters searching for their polling place on the state’s website were provided the wrong location. By Tuesday afternoon the state website was directing voters to use the Dallas County election’s search tool instead.
At a Tuesday evening news conference in the African American Museum of Dallas at Fair Park, Crockett outlined a range of concerns, including voters being turned away from polls, county websites crashing and more working voting machines for Republicans than Democrats.
“Listen, this may be a very close election,” Crockett said. “And it may hinge on who was allowed to vote or who wasn’t allowed to vote in Dallas County. But I’m here to say, regardless of whether it’s close or not: This is wrong.”
Standing beside Crockett, former U.S. Rep. and current congressional candidate Colin Allred said he was prepared to file a lawsuit for the extension before the judge’s order went through. Allred said their efforts are not to benefit their personal campaigns, but for the “right to vote in this state and the democracy that is at risk in this country.”
“This is bigger than just what’s happening in Dallas County or just the chaos that we’ve seen today,” he said. “It is a pattern, and one that we’re going to fight against.”
Allred said his fear is that the voters who were turned away won’t return to try again.
“A lot of the damage has been done,” he said. “This is an opportunity for us … to have a couple of extra hours to try and do what we can to rectify this, and to take this as an example of a fight that we have to have for November, because we cannot have a repeat of this.”
Before the Supreme Court overturned the voting extension, Democrat Voters who arrived after 7 p.m. were being given provisional ballots so there would be a way to track which ballots were cast as part of the extended polling hours, Solorzano said.
Around five Democratic voters cast provisional ballots after 7 p.m. on Tuesday at Esperanza “Hope” Medrano Elementary School in Dallas, according to Democratic election judge Perla Loza.
Loza, 38, who has been an election judge for more than a decade, said the extended period was “a little crazy” for workers after they were asked to stay late and then later told to close.
Loza said the order to close came in a message around 8:45 p.m. which said the Supreme Court had ordered polls be shut down. She added that they had to turn away one voter who arrived after that message was received.
After declining to comment on how election day was unfolding at noon, Republican Party Chair Allen West on Tuesday evening condemned the Democratic Party’s move to extend voting hours.
“The Democrats unprofessionally went behind the (Dallas County Election Department’s) legal counsel to acquire an order due to their own incompetence,” West said in a text message. “You can be coy and call it confusion but it doesn’t warrant the violation of their contract with the DCED.”
Crockett said the issues are a product of Republicans intentionally changing the voting process “to disenfranchise and confuse voters.”
“It is wrong for it to be done to anyone — a Democrat or a Republican,” she said. “But the Republicans didn’t even have enough sense or enough courage to go out there and try to get a court order on behalf of their constituents.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Dallas Morning News reporters William Tong and Nick Wooten contributed to this report.“
An Emboldened Israel Is Seizing Opportunities to Remake Region
An Emboldened Israel Is Seizing Opportunities to Remake Region
"With the war against Iran underway, and the U.S. military as a powerful ally, the Israeli government is seizing its chance to move against other adversaries.
For years, as it railed against Iran’s nuclear program, Israel seemed held in check from confronting Iran militarily. It feared that Hezbollah, Tehran’s political ally and proxy army in Lebanon, would respond on Iran’s behalf, unleashing its arsenal of thousands of missiles and rockets and raining hellfire down on Haifa and Tel Aviv.
Now, Israel and the United States own the skies over Iran and are steadily blowing up its ballistic missile infrastructure and arsenal.
And when Hezbollah joined the fight, however symbolically — with a single, relatively feeble volley of rockets and drones launched into northern Israel at about 1 a.m. Monday — Israel had the pretext it needed. It announced a much more significant and long-in-the-making counteroffensive, striking Hezbollah leaders in Beirut and throughout the country.
Emboldened by its partnership with the United States, feeling its own military strength, and sensing the weaknesses of its two fiercest adversaries, Israel is seizing the new war as an opportunity to pursue its own geopolitical agenda.
“We will end this campaign with not just Iran being struck, but with Hezbollah suffering a devastating blow,” the Israeli military’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, told division commanders on Israel’s northern border on Monday. He hinted at a long fight with Hezbollah, saying it would not end “before the threat from Lebanon is eliminated.”
This is also a war that Israel started opportunistically. And that fact reflects an important shift in the country’s strategic thinking since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and the catastrophic intelligence failures that made it possible.
No longer does Israel trust its intelligence establishment’s ability to read its adversaries’ intentions accurately. So when enemies bent on Israel’s destruction begin amassing the means to achieve it, Israel now sees an imperative to destroy those capabilities whenever it gets the chance.
“That’s why the conversation about whether Iran was really on the verge of developing nuclear weapons doesn’t even really matter at this point,” said Shira Efron, an Israel analyst at RAND, referring to a major rationale for the Israeli-U.S. attack on Saturday.
According to three Israeli defense officials, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered military leaders at the end of last year to begin planning for a solo strike against Iran to be carried out sometime between April and June.
Military commanders were unenthusiastic, one defense official said, because they did not believe that Israel, acting alone, could achieve much more than it had in the 12-day war in June 2025. They were also concerned about their ability to defend against what they expected would be an Iranian response targeting Israeli population centers with ballistic missiles, the defense official said.
Once it became clear that the United States would be Israel’s partner in an attack on Iran and it began to amass forces in the region, two defense officials said, Israeli generals changed their tune. They grasped a historic opportunity to batter Iran, destroy its missile arsenal, further damage its nuclear program, and even try to push the Iranian government to the breaking point.
The shouldering of much of the burden by the Americans — including sending aloft a huge fleet of midair-refueling tankers — made it possible for Israel to deploy its largest air fleet ever on Saturday, the two officials said. That allowed for what proved a devastating assault on Iranian missile launchers, they said.
By contrast, Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah, analysts said, reflects the fact that it had made plans months ago for such an attack and was waiting for an excuse to execute them.
“Israel was waiting for the opportunity,” said Orna Mizrahi, a former deputy national security adviser who specializes in Lebanon at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. She called Monday’s missile and drone strike by Hezbollah a profoundly “stupid adventure.”
Since its eight-week war with Hezbollah in October and November of 2024, Israel has accused the militant group of violating a truce and has struck what it calls terrorist targets in Lebanon almost daily.
“That was the reason to plan for another campaign,” Ms. Mizrahi said. “Every two houses or so, there was military infrastructure and places and equipment and missile launchers. There was a lot to do, and the I.D.F. couldn’t complete all of it.”
Hezbollah, for its part, says those Israeli strikes are violations of the cease-fire, and described its attack on Monday as a response to Israeli provocations. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced in Lebanon since the fighting began, and 52 were killed on Monday, according to the Lebanese government.
For months, Israel threatened to launch a new offensive if Lebanon’s government did not hasten the disarmament of the group, as required under the 2024 cease-fire. Though severely weakened, Hezbollah resisted nationwide disarmament unless Israel stopped its strikes in Lebanon and withdrew from several small areas it has held onto in Lebanese territory.
In January, the Lebanese Army said it had taken operational control south of the Litani River, except for those Israeli outposts.
“But that didn’t mean they had eliminated all the military existence of Hezbollah there,” Ms. Mizrahi said. “They didn’t even pretend to. And this is not enough for Israel.”
As for what a new Lebanon campaign will entail, analysts said they expected a ground operation, not just airstrikes, and noted the deployment of reservists to infantry and armored units along the northern border. An Israeli military spokesman announced Tuesday morning that troops had indeed seized new areas of southern Lebanon close to the border overnight, but insisted that this was a “tactical step” and not part of a broader maneuver or invasion.
Shimon Shapira, a retired brigadier general who has studied Hezbollah for many years, said the objective of the new offensive against the group had to be nothing short of dismantling its military.
“The goal is to make Hezbollah a political party without any weapons or army,” he said. “You can take the missiles, the weapons, the ammunition. That you can do. And on the way, kill the commanders.”
On Monday, Mr. Netanyahu, visiting the scene of a deadly Iranian missile strike, assured Israelis and Iranians that the “day is nearing” when the Iranian people would be able to break free from “the yoke of tyranny.” And when that day comes, he said, “Israel and the United States will be there.”
If Israel’s leaders sound upbeat about the prospects for this two-front war and what it could mean for the region, that should not come as a complete surprise, analysts said.
Apart from the war in Gaza, Israel has had a powerful run militarily in the past few years, weakening Iran’s proxies in Syria and Lebanon, and overshadowing its Oct. 7 failures with repeated intelligence coups and devastating aerial attacks.
But the country’s swaggering self-confidence also carries the possibility of overreach.
Ms. Efron, the RAND analyst, said that Israel needed to remember to make political agreements, not just make war.
“For a country of 10 million people to think that, just through the use of force, it can transform the whole region, is a bit of a stretch,” she said. “No one likes Iran, but that doesn’t mean that bullyish behavior by Israel is acceptable.”
David M. Halbfinger is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. He also held that post from 2017 to 2021. He was the politics editor from 2021 to 2025.
Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv."
Sunday, March 01, 2026
Members of U.S. Congress Are Divided on U.S. Strikes in Iran - The New York Times
Here’s What Members of Congress Are Saying About the Attacks on Iran
"As explosions rocked Tehran, Republicans largely voiced support as Democrats warned about a costly and unauthorized conflict.
Members of Congress are weighing in on the United States’ attack on Iran, and Republicans and Democrats are significantly at odds.
Republicans largely praised President Trump for what they said was a critical operation targeting a country that had long threatened the United States and its allies. Many circumvented the issue of whether the president needed authorization from Congress to carry out an extended military operation.
Democrats warned that Mr. Trump was dragging the country into another protracted war in the Middle East and needlessly endangering American troops. Democrats and a small bloc of Republicans in the House and Senate had planned to force a vote next week on whether to restrain Mr. Trump from waging war in Iran without congressional approval.
Here’s how members are responding:
Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, said Mr. Trump had exhausted “peaceful and diplomatic solutions” to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and now Iran was “facing the severe consequences of its evil actions.” He said that the Gang of Eight — the House and Senate leaders from both parties — were told this week that military action in Iran was a possibility “to protect American troops and American citizens in Iran.” He said that Iran and its proxies have “menaced America and American lives,” undermined U.S. interests and “threatened the security of the entire West.”
Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, praised Mr. Trump for taking action, saying that Iran had “posed a clear and unacceptable threat” to the United States and its allies for years and had “refused the diplomatic offramps.” He said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had provided updates on the operation over the past week, and that the administration would brief members of Congress on the attacks.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, the minority leader, called for the Senate to “quickly return to session and reassert its constitutional duty by passing our resolution to enforce the War Powers Act.” He said that the Trump administration had “not provided Congress and the American people with critical details about the scope and immediacy of the threat” before the strikes, and that confronting Iran, including its attempts to develop a nuclear weapon, required “strategic clarity.”
Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York, the minority leader, said in a statement that Iran was a “bad actor” that must be “aggressively confronted” for its human rights violations and nuclear ambitions, among other things. But he condemned Mr. Trump for failing to seek congressional approval for the strikes. The Trump administration, he wrote, must explain its rationale and justification for the strikes, define the national security objective and “articulate a plan to avoid another costly, prolonged military quagmire in the Middle East.”
Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, supported the strikes, saying on social media that Iran sought to develop its nuclear capabilities, sponsored terror groups and waged war against the United States for 47 years. “The butcher’s bill has finally come due for the ayatollahs,” he wrote. “May God bless and protect our troops on this vital mission of vengeance, and justice, and safety.”
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, questioned the constitutionality of the strikes. “The Constitution is clear,” he wrote. “The decision to take this nation to war rests with Congress, and launching large-scale military operations — particularly in the absence of an imminent threat to the United States — raises serious legal and constitutional concerns.”
Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, who had planned to force a vote next week to curb Mr. Trump’s ability to strike Iran, called the strikes a “colossal mistake.” He said the Senate should “immediately return to session” and vote on his resolution. “Every single senator needs to go on the record about this dangerous, unnecessary and idiotic action,” he said in a statement.
Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky and an ardent opponent of overseas military intervention, described the strikes on social media as “acts of war unauthorized by Congress.”
Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said Mr. Trump had “thrust our nation into a major war with Iran” without seeking congressional authorization. He warned that Iran was “weakened, but far from incapable,” and could launch counter strikes and cyberattacks. “Our forces and our allies must be fully prepared for a sustained and dangerous campaign,” he added.
Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California and a sponsor of the bipartisan war powers resolution, urged lawmakers convene on Monday to vote on the measure. “Trump has launched an illegal regime-change war in Iran with American lives at risk,” he said. “Every member of Congress should go on record this weekend on how they will vote.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, a close ally of the president who for years has favored intervention in Iran, said on social media that the operation “will be violent, extensive and I believe, at the end of the day, successful.” He repeated the president’s call to the Iranian people to overthrow their government, and addressed members of the U.S. and Israeli militaries, writing that “if you are injured or fall, I believe with all my heart that your sacrifice makes your country and the world a better and safer place.”
Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky and a sponsor of the bipartisan war powers resolution, shared “sympathy for the plight of the Iranian people,” but said on social media that he would “oppose another presidential war.” He added, “The Constitution conferred the power to declare or initiate war to Congress for a reason, to make war less likely.”
Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the few Republicans who voted to curb Mr. Trump’s power to continue military action against Venezuela, said on social media that there was “no question that Iran’s brutal regime must be held accountable.” She said she expected lawmakers to receive a “comprehensive briefing” so they could “fully understand the scope, objectives, and risks of any further military action.”
Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, who has broken with his party on issues involving Israel, came out in favor of the attacks on Saturday. “President Trump has been willing to do what’s right and necessary to produce real peace in the region,” he wrote on social media.
Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a Democrat who broke ranks before the attack and said he would not support the resolution to rein in Mr. Trump, said he expected the president to comply with the War Powers Act. “Congress and the appropriate committees must be fully briefed on the strategy ahead to secure American interests, protect our allies,” he said, “and create the conditions for a safer and freer future for the Iranian people.”
Robert Jimison and Catie Edmondson contributed reporting."
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