Top Stories — Wednesday, April 8, 2026
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- Trump’s Iran Threats Look Like Self-Incrimination for Potential War Crimes — nyt News
- Google CEO Sundar Pichai says 'AI shift' opens opportunities to invest in startups — CNBC
- Lebanese Mourn Couple Killed in Israeli Strike, Exposing Rift Over Hezbollah — nyt News
Trump’s Iran Threats Look Like Self-Incrimination for Potential War Crimes
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/8/2026, 4:00:01 AM
President Trump’s threat on Tuesday to wipe out Iran’s entire civilization escalated days of bellicose rhetoric in which he has made what appear to be self-incriminating statements about an intent to commit war crimes if the Iranian government does not submit to his demands.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, adding: “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
For days, Mr. Trump had vowed to order the U.S. military to systematically destroy every bridge and power plant in Iran if its government did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers. The laws of war forbid the deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure as a means of coercing a government.
While it can sometimes be lawful to attack a specific civilian object if it offered a military advantage, an order to indiscriminately destroy all of a country’s bridges and power plants would be illegal and place military commanders in an untenable position, said Geoffrey S. Corn, who was the Army’s senior legal adviser on law-of-war issues and now teaches at Texas Tech Law School.
“I think this is the ultimate stress test not just for the JAG corps but even more so for the commanders with stars on their shoulders,” he said, referring to judge advocates general. “This is the moment where their oath necessitates them having the moral courage and the professional honor to say, ‘I’ve looked at this, I’ve done the analysis, I’m leaning forward in the foxhole, but this is not a lawful target.’”
In a statement, Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, did not directly respond to questions about whether Mr. Trump would be committing war crimes. She instead recited human rights abuses by the Iranian government and said “the Iranian people welcome the sound of bombs because it means their oppressors are losing.”
“The president will always stand with innocent civilians while annihilating the terrorists responsible for threatening our country and the entire world with a nuclear weapon,” she said. “Greater destruction can be avoided if the regime understands the seriousness of this moment and makes a deal with the United States.”
The United States has portrayed Russia’s targeting of civilian energy infrastructure in Ukraine as a war crime. In 2023, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. ordered the U.S. government to share evidence with the International Criminal Court that included intelligence about decisions by Russian officials to deliberately strike civilian infrastructure.
In January, Mr. Trump’s own ambassador to the United Nations condemned “Russia’s continuing and intensifying attacks on Ukraine’s energy facilities and other civil infrastructure.”
Asked on Monday whether he was concerned what he was threatening amounted to a war crime, Mr. Trump delivered an unequivocal response: “No, I’m not.”
Some top aides to Mr. Trump have reportedly offered rationales that he could lawfully deem as military targets all of Iran’s bridges and power plants. During the 2024 election cycle, Mr. Trump’s team openly promised to hire only lawyers who would approve as lawful whatever he wanted.
But if there was any room left for reasonable ambiguity, Mr. Trump further reduced it early Tuesday, threatening that if the Iranian government did not concede and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, he would have the U.S. military annihilate Iran’s whole civilization.
For war crimes, as with most criminal offenses, establishing subjective intent matters. For example, if a combatant intends to hit a legitimate military objective but kills a civilian bystander by mistake or as incidental collateral damage, that is generally not a war crime. But it is unlawful to intentionally target a civilian or civilian object that has no military value, or when the harm to civilians is disproportionate to the military advantage gained.
In a ruling in January 2024 concerning allegations by South Africa that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the International Court of Justice looked to threatening and dehumanizing public statements by senior Israeli officials as evidence of the intent behind Israeli actions.
The court, in finding a plausible basis to conclude that Israel was violating the Genocide Convention and issuing provisional orders to protect civilians, cited statements by officials like Yoav Gallant, then Israel’s defense minister. In October 2023, he announced that “no electricity, no food, no fuel” would enter Gaza and told Israeli troops that he had “released all restraints” because they were “fighting human animals.”
On Monday, asked how striking Iran’s bridges and power plants would not be a war crime, Mr. Trump cited the deaths of tens of thousands of protesters at the hands of the Iranian government. He added: “They kill protesters. They’re animals. And we have to stop them and we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”
Harold Hongju Koh, a former top State Department lawyer in the Obama and Biden administrations who teaches international law at Yale Law School, said it was also a war crime to make threats for the purpose of terrorizing a civilian population. The move, he added, also undercuts the United States’ stated hope that Iranians will rise up against the government.
Accountability could be difficult. As a matter of domestic law, the Supreme Court has granted Mr. Trump presumptive immunity from prosecution for official actions, and he could issue blanket pardons to subordinates before leaving office. If his appointees at the Justice Department have produced secret memos approving systematic attacks on civilian infrastructure, it would be difficult later to prosecute officials who relied on them, even if a future administration rescinds them as wrong.
As a matter of international law, the United States and Iran are not parties to the treaty that created the International Criminal Court at The Hague, the main forum for prosecuting people who committed war crimes. The International Court of Justice, which is also at The Hague, adjudicates whether countries have broken laws, issues orders and relies on the United Nations Security Council — where the United States has veto power — to enforce them.
Still, Professor Koh noted that court systems in some European countries have asserted universal jurisdiction for prosecuting war crimes, which could make it risky for American officials who are accused of committing them to travel abroad.
Mr. Trump has not been alone in his aggressive messages about the war in Iran. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly boasted of having the military push boundaries of lethality, saying that he dialed down the rules of engagement — targeting limits meant to reduce risks of mistakes and civilian casualties — to a minimum.
Such statements came under heightened scrutiny after preliminary evidence showed the United States most likely bombed an elementary school in the opening hours of the war — killing about 175 civilians, most of them children, according to Iranian officials.
Parrying queries about the matter, Mr. Hegseth has insisted that the U.S. military does not deliberately target civilians. His rebuttal evades the question of how strict or lax the rules and practices are in his Pentagon for identifying and verifying the nature of targets.
Even so, Mr. Trump’s subsequent threats to destroy civilian infrastructure and eradicate Iran’s civilization are incompatible with Mr. Hegseth’s talking point.
Mr. Hegseth has also said the United States military will grant “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies” in the Iran war. Granting quarter means accepting enemies’ offers to surrender and taking them prisoner, rather than slaughtering them. Under the Hague Convention, it is a war crime for a military leader to declare that no quarter will be given in combat, a move the Pentagon’s law-of-war manual also says is “forbidden.”
“This means that it is prohibited to order that legitimate offers of surrender will be refused or that detainees, such as unprivileged belligerents, will be summarily executed,” the manual says. “Moreover, it is also prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors, or to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter.”
Even before the Iran war, tensions have been building over whether Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have given the military illegal orders to attack civilians or civilian objects.
Last fall, the administration directed the military to summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea, a policy a broad range of experts in laws governing the use of force have called illegal and murder. The military is not allowed to target civilians who pose no imminent threat of violence, and being suspected of a crime does not forfeit civilian status. But a Trump-appointed lawyer, in a secret memo, asserted that the policy was lawful based on accepting Mr. Trump’s claim that the nation is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and gangs.
In November, six Democratic lawmakers who are military or intelligence community veterans released a video reminding service members that they are obligated not to follow illegal orders.
Mr. Hegseth tried to punish one, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a retired Navy captain and former astronaut, by reducing his rank or opening a court-martial proceeding, but a federal judge has blocked him from doing so. Jeanine Pirro, a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Washington, tried to indict the lawmakers under a statute that forbids interfering with the loyalty, morale or discipline of the armed forces, but a grand jury rejected the charges.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
Read the full story at nyt News.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai says 'AI shift' opens opportunities to invest in startups
Source: CNBC • Published: 4/8/2026, 3:54:13 AM
With Alphabet poised to earn potentially $100 billion or more from its 2015 bet on Elon Musk's SpaceX, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the explosion of artificial intelligence has opened the door to more startup investments.
"You know SpaceX, Anthropic and so on so, I think now with the AI shift, there are more opportunities on which we can deploy capital in a good way and so we are doing that," Pichai said, in a conversation with Stripe co-founder John Collison posted on Tuesday.
Google has long been in the startup investing game through its early-stage venture group GV and its growth arm CapitalG. But with today's AI companies requiring checks in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, Google parent Alphabet is joining other tech giants like Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon in skirting the venture route and going big off the balance sheet.
Alphabet first invested in SpaceX in 2015, putting in $900 million at a valuation of about $12 billion. In February, SpaceX merged with Musk's xAI in a deal valued at $1.25 trillion. Assuming Alphabet has held onto all of its shares, its stake would now be worth around $100 billion, and could go up in the coming months.
Last week, SpaceX confidentially filed for an IPO, and the company is reportedly seeking a valuation of $1.75 trillion in what would be a record offering.
Then there's OpenAI rival Anthropic, which competes with Google at the AI model layer but also partners with the search company by committing to purchase billions of dollars worth of its tensor processing units, or TPUs, and cloud infrastructure.
In 2023, Google invested $300 million in the AI lab for a stake of about 10%. Months later, it poured in another $2 billion. Since then, Anthropic's valuation has soared from the single-digit billions to $380 billion, as of the last round in February, with Google putting in additional capital along the way.
In total, Google's investment in Anthropic now exceeds $3 billion, and it reportedly owns a 14% stake in the company.
Pichai's latest comments suggest that Google may be eyeing additional external investments as its AI returns pile up. He added that the company wants "to be good stewards of capital."
"To the extent you're bullish on ROIC, you want to invest every last dollar you can there," he said, referring to return on invested capital.
In talking to Collison about investing, Pichai was sharing his views with the leader of a portfolio company.
Stripe was valued at $159 billion as of February, up more than 17-fold since GV participated in a $150 million round in 2016. CapitalG is also an investor in the fintech company.
"We felt our investment in Stripe was being a good steward of our capital," Pichai told Collison.
Pichai also spoke about Waymo, Alphabet's autonomous vehicle division. Waymo raised its first external investment round in 2020, reeling in $2.25 billion. Earlier this year, Waymo raised a $16 billion funding round, valuing the company at $126 billion, with Alphabet contributing funding alongside a host of outside investors.
When Waymo was first raising money, Alphabet wasn't putting in the kind of cash at its disposal today.
"I would have been glad to invest more capital in Waymo earlier, but we weren't at the level of maturity to do that," Pichai said.
Lebanese Mourn Couple Killed in Israeli Strike, Exposing Rift Over Hezbollah
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/8/2026, 3:54:01 AM
Mourners gathered Tuesday in Lebanon for the funeral of a married couple who were killed in an Israeli airstrike, an attack that outraged much of the country because the pair had no apparent connection to Hezbollah, the militant group at war with Israel.
Pierre Mouawad and Flavia Murad died on Sunday in their home in the mountain town of Ain Saadeh, east of the capital, Beirut, and far from other areas that have been targeted in the war so far. Mr. Mouawad was a local official with the Lebanese Forces, a Christian political party that has long fiercely opposed Hezbollah.
On Monday, the Israeli military said it had hit a “terror target” in the attack that killed the couple, but was reviewing “reports that several uninvolved individuals were harmed as a result of the strike.” A spokesman for the Israeli military told The New York Times that Mr. Mouawad was “definitely not a target,” adding that Israel was trying to assess the circumstances surrounding his killing.
“What was his crime?” asked Elias Bidran, one of the mourners, who attended the funeral with his wife and son. “He and his family were sitting in their home when a strike came and killed them,” he added.
“This is a war on all of Lebanon,” Mr. Bidran said.
Israel launched a wave of airstrikes on Beirut on Sunday as Lebanon’s large Christian community was marking Easter. The roar of warplanes overhead and the din of drones and strikes on the capital mingled with hymns and church bells.
At least 39 people were killed in Sunday’s attacks across the country, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. The ministry said more than 1,500 people have been killed, including civilians with a range of backgrounds, and more than 4,800 others injured so far in the war.
Samir Geagea, the head of the Lebanese Forces, said in a statement on Monday that when Ms. Murad and Mr. Mouawad were killed, “the Israelis were targeting a member of the Quds Force,” the arm of Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Quds Force operates outside Iran, handling its relations with allied militias and proxies around the Middle East, including Hezbollah.
His statement did not make clear where the targeted person was in relation to the couple who were killed.
The strike hit Mr. Mouawad’s building, Mr. Geagea said, causing its roof to collapse. A third person, a woman visiting the couple, was also killed, he said.
The war generally and the killing of the couple on Sunday have once again exposed Lebanon’s deep sectarian divides.
Hezbollah is a Shiite Muslim political movement and militia, and its joining of the regional war in support of Iran has heightened resentment among Christian, Druse and Sunni Muslim communities in Lebanon, as well as secular groups.
Many fear this frustration with dragging Lebanon into another war with Israel could lead not only to widespread sectarian strife but also to mounting economic strain and a deepening political crisis, with civilians bearing the consequences no matter who is involved.
On Tuesday afternoon, as fog settled over the nearby mountains, fireworks, gunshots and church bells echoed through the air.
Two white coffins with golden handles, draped in the Lebanese Forces party flag and bearing the bodies of Mr. Mouawad and Ms. Murad, were carried into St. Simon Church in the town of Yahchouch for the funeral service.
“He was a victim of Hezbollah’s” actions, said Selim Saadeh, a member of the Lebanese Forces party who attended the service. “The war will only end after Hezbollah ends.”
Abdi Latif Dahir is a Middle East correspondent for The Times, covering Lebanon and Syria. He is based in Beirut.
Read the full story at nyt News.
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