The Daily Brief — Apr. 10, 2026
The latest on the Iran war negotiations, the Artemis II lunar mission splashdown, surging inflation and more
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Iran War
Vice President JD Vance departed for Islamabad today, telling reporters before boarding Air Force Two that the US is willing to “extend the open hand” if Iran negotiates in good faith. “If they’re gonna try and play us, then they’re gonna find that the negotiating team is not that receptive,” he said.
The talks, brokered and hosted by Pakistan, are set to take place tomorrow. Vance is accompanied by, among others, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, and President Trump’s son-in-law. Although Iran has not confirmed its representatives, Speaker of the Parliament Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi are expected to lead the Iranian team.
But the negotiations are in doubt. Ghalibaf wrote on X today that two preconditions must be met before talks can begin: a ceasefire in Lebanon and the release of Iran’s blocked assets — likely an estimated $100 billion in oil and gas revenues frozen in banks worldwide under US sanctions. “These two matters must be fulfilled before negotiations begin,” he wrote.
Israel has continued striking Lebanon despite a two-week ceasefire announced earlier this week between the US and Iran, with Pakistan’s prime minister saying Lebanon was included in the truce and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and President Trump — insisting it was not. Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 303 people were killed and more than 1,150 wounded by Israeli strikes on Wednesday, making it the deadliest single day of the war. Today, Israeli airstrikes killed at least 14 more people in southern Lebanon.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu instructed his cabinet to begin direct negotiations with Lebanon. The State Department confirmed it will host talks next week, though Lebanon has demanded a ceasefire with Israel first.
Apart from the issue of Lebanon, the US and Iran continue to disagree on the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively closed again after a brief opening earlier this week. The nations are also at odds over Iran’s nuclear program — Iran says it must retain the right to enrich uranium; the US has said no.
Inflation
Consumer prices surged last month at the fastest pace in nearly four years, driven by the Iran war’s impact on energy costs.
The Consumer Price Index released this morning showed prices rose 0.9% from February — the largest monthly gain since June 2022 — and 3.3% from a year ago. Gasoline prices accounted for nearly three-quarters of the overall increase, jumping 21.2%, the largest monthly increase since 1967. The national average for a gallon of regular has climbed from about $3.00 before the war to over $4.16, according to AAA.
Artemis Splashdown
NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, are set to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego at approximately 8:07 p.m. EDT tonight — capping a 10-day journey around the moon, the first crewed mission beyond low-Earth orbit in more than 50 years.
The Orion capsule will enter a six-minute communications blackout around 7:53 p.m. as plasma forms around the heat shield during peak re-entry. “It’s 13 minutes of things that have to go right,” NASA’s flight director, Jeff Radigan, said at a briefing yesterday. “Let’s not beat around the bush. We have to hit that angle correctly. Otherwise, we’re not going to have a successful re-entry.”
The heat shield has been a source of concern since Artemis I returned in 2022 with unexpected cracking. Rather than replace the shield, NASA redesigned the reentry trajectory. On the previous uncrewed mission, the capsule dipped into Earth’s atmosphere, bounced back into space, and then re-entered a second time — a technique meant to reduce speed gradually. That double pass trapped heat inside the shield material, cracking it. For tonight’s return, there will be no double bounce. Orion will enter the atmosphere directly, with no skip back into space.
Judge Rebukes Pentagon
A federal judge ruled yesterday that the Defense Department is violating his earlier order to restore press access to the Pentagon.
US District Judge Paul Friedman sided with The New York Times for the second time in a month. In March, he found that the Pentagon’s new credential policy violated journalists’ constitutional rights to free speech and due process. Friedman ordered the Pentagon to reinstate credentials for seven Times reporters and stressed that his decision applies to “all regulated parties.” Yesterday, he said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s team had tried to evade that ruling by closing the decades-old press workspace inside the Pentagon and requiring all reporters to be escorted at all times in the building — effectively barring them from the hallway access and source contact that made Pentagon reporting possible.
“The department simply cannot reinstate an unlawful policy under the guise of taking ‘new’ action and expect the court to look the other way,” Friedman wrote.
Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell said the department disagrees with the ruling and intends to appeal.
Newsbreak
In Erasing History, Yale professor of philosophy Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the right’s attacks on education, identifies their key tactics and funders, and traces their intellectual roots. He offers a key insight: that hearts and minds are won in our schools and universities — places that democratic societies across the world are losing the ability to defend. It’s a sobering read, but one that’s clear-eyed about the importance of protecting education from efforts to suppress and rewrite the past.
DHS Funding
Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John Barrasso (R-WY) are heading to the White House today to discuss a Republican bill to fund ICE and parts of CBP. DHS funding lapsed in mid-February. The budget reconciliation process lets them bypass Democrats, who have demanded reforms to immigration enforcement, including requiring judicial warrants before arrests.
Since DHS funding lapsed, about 500 of the 50,000 TSA security screeners have quit, and thousands have called in sick after going unpaid. Trump issued an order directing DHS to pay TSA and other agencies through last year’s tax and spending act, but DHS warned employees this week that today’s paycheck could be their last unless Congress acts.
CA Supreme Court Halts Sheriff’s Investigation
The California supreme court ordered Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco to stop his investigation into ballots from the November special election on Proposition 50 — a redistricting measure that favors Democrats in the midterms. Bianco, who is running for governor as a Republican, had seized more than 650,000 ballots from the local election office after a third-party group, the Riverside Election Integrity Team, claimed to have found roughly 45,000 excess votes in the special election.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, asked the state’s supreme court to intervene, arguing that the sheriff has no authority over election materials and failed to show probable cause that any crime occurred. Bonta said Bianco had “willfully defied” his direct orders to stop the probe. The county registrar has said the discrepancy claim was unfounded.
FISA Extension
The government’s warrantless surveillance program will keep running for another year — even though Congress has not voted to renew it.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret federal court that oversees government spying in foreign countries, renewed its approval of the program last month, The New York Times reported yesterday. The program, known as Section 702, allows the government to compel US-based companies like Google and network providers like AT&T to turn over communications of targeted foreigners abroad without a warrant. Americans’ data gets swept up when they communicate with those targets.
The court’s approval means collection can continue through March 2027. Congress authorizes the law itself, which expires April 20, while the court separately certifies the rules agencies have to follow to collect data.
Once the court approves those rules, collection can continue under existing orders even if the statute lapses. The Trump administration has asked Congress for a clean 18-month extension.
But the approving judge imposed new limits. The court ruled that when analysts use filtering tools to zero in on a specific American’s messages within a broader foreign-target search, that counts as a search of Americans’ data and must follow stricter rules. Agencies were ordered to retool those filters or stop using them. The administration is weighing whether to comply or appeal.
Blocked Covid-19 Vaccine Success Report
The acting director of the CDC, Jay Bhattacharya, has delayed publishing a report showing that updated Covid-19 vaccines significantly reduce hospitalizations and emergency visits, The Washington Post reported yesterday.
According to a vaccine-usage summary obtained by the Post, healthy adults who received the 2025–2026 shot between September and December last year were 50% less likely to need emergency or urgent care and 55% less likely to be hospitalized for Covid-19 compared with unvaccinated adults in the same period.
The report had cleared the agency’s scientific review process, but Bhattacharya held it over concerns about the methodology, two agency scientists told the Post. That same methodology has long been used by the CDC to evaluate vaccine effectiveness for respiratory viruses — including in a flu-vaccine report published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report just a week earlier.
The delay has raised concerns among current and former officials that the vaccine’s benefits are being downplayed because they conflict with the views of Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of the shots.