The Brief

Wearing gloves past their wrists, Alekos Tetradis stood guard by a cluster of compost, recycling, and landfill bins. Around them, attendees at this West Los Angeles College climate conference mulled where to toss their trash. If someone went for the wrong bin, Tetradis, a WLAC biochemistry student, stooped, reached in with gusto, and righted the wrong.

“It can seem a little daunting to know what is and isn’t compost, but that’s why I’m here,” Tetradis said.

Tetradis was excited to volunteer for this work at the West Los Angeles’ Climate Careers Conference. The conference’s stated goal was to identify new curriculum and training programs to advance sustainability careers.

LAist’s goal was to watch the food line: Would it be any different from other conferences, with rows of boxed lunches that might get tossed? Would participants be given those red “delicious” apples only to then just throw them away? What does it take to “walk the sustainability walk” when you have to feed hundreds of people?

The plan to spend money

Tetradis stepped away to consult with another volunteer about the coffee cups, which seemed compostable — they looked brown and felt rough, as if made from recycled material. Tetradis and the volunteer determined the inside had a wax coating, so it would fall under recycling.

(Editor's note: After this story published, there was some discussion about whether a coffee cup with a wax coating is recyclable. Tetradis did note that it technically requires a special facility. These things are complicated.)

“We have to care to compost because if you're not thinking about the effects, if you're not thinking about honestly how easy it is to separate your trash before you throw it away, you just toss everything into one bin,” Tetradis said. “It's so much easier.”

Jo Tavares, the director of the California Center for Climate Change Education, said the planning committee began meeting several months in advance, “making sure that we were aligned with practices with the things that we're telling the world that we all need to change. Perhaps not overnight, but culturally speaking, right? Like a culture of reducing waste in general.”

Jo Tavares is the director of the California Center for Climate Change Education at West L.A. college.

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For instance, the committee spent more on aluminum water bottles than plastic — at around $2 an aluminum bottle, four times more. Before the event, participants were also encouraged to bring reusable bottles.

“When you plan an event, you have a budget, and you have to make sure that you try — especially when you're using public money, which is our case — you have to try to minimize costs. But everything that we do has a hidden cost, right,” Tavares said.

For example: the pollution from a single-use plastic water bottle isn’t reflected in the consumer price of 50 cents. And the aluminum water bottles can be recycled.

The necessary provisions of calories and caffeine

Then there’s the first meal of the day: A breakfast of bagels, danishes, muffins, quick breads, cut fruit, and of course, coffee.

Coffee’s contention with sustainability includes the environmental cost of production, including substantial water use and other issues.

But, Tavares said, “we’re still in a situation that I cannot have a conference that starts at 8:30 a.m. and not offer coffee to the participants, right? It's something that culturally would be absolutely unacceptable."

A cart carrying the leftovers from breakfast gets wheeled away.

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Mid-morning, a cart carrying half-full bowls of cut fruit, muffins, and bagels made its exit. Research from the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment and World Wildlife Fund identified those items as among the most common kinds of food waste at events.

The committee decided to pay a local organization to manage the compostable waste and leftover food, which cost $2,000 spread over three days of events. There are composting centers available for drop-off, but Tavares said it made sense to pay another organization to manage the waste and leftovers.

“What is it that is important to you? What are these trade-offs that you're willing to do? And, you know, do they really need to be sacrifices all the time? Are there substitutions or new ways of looking at the way things ought to be?” Tavares said.

A lot of events stick with the tried and true.

“I’m looking at breakfast buffets and hotels — it’s sugar, it’s pastries, and things like that,” Tracy Stuckrath, a certified events planner, told LAist.

Struckrath works for thrive! meetings & events, which specializes in safe, sustainable, and inclusive dining. She also runs a podcast called Eating at a Meeting, and said she asked her audience what they wanted to eat for breakfast.

“They said they were looking for protein and you don’t get that on a continental breakfast,” said Stuckrath, who pointed out adding eggs, bacon, and sausage could add $20 per person.

Adding a lot of meat has other costs, too, though. But it’s still early; we’ll save that discussion for lunch.

The tedious but rewarding chore of sorting trash

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, food waste accounts for about 20% of municipal solid waste in U.S. landfills, but makes up nearly 60% of annual landfill methane emissions.

California has made it a requirement to divert organic waste from landfills and reduce methane emissions since the passage of SB 1383. By 2025, the state aims to reduce organic waste in landfills by 75% and redirect at least 20% of currently disposed edible food for people to eat.

Alekos Tetradis, a second year West L.A. student

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West L.A. College student Alekos Tetradis sorts through the compost bin.

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To help sort through its own waste and minimize harm, the center conference relied on friendly student volunteers, like Tetradis.

Tetradis talked to LAist about “greenwashing,” how items may be marketed as plant-based, but in reality may be mixed with chemicals that ultimately renders them not compostable. They believe the labeling should be more transparent.

Examining the cutlery at today’s event, Tetradis found out what it was made of: “Oh, the forks are metal! Oh this is perfect.”

They would be washed and reused.

The perennial headache of the RSVP list

Not surprisingly, the best way to reduce food waste is to make less food to begin with.

Fabio Miranda’s locally based company City Fare catered the event. City Fare has been incorporating more compostable disposables and more vegan options, which he anticipates there will be increasing demand for. In theory, he said, catering for an event means preparing food for a set number of people, so there would be less waste than the uncertainty restaurants face.

With catering for events, however, “there’s always attrition,” Miranda said. “There’s always last minute no-shows even though individuals have RSVP’d, and that’s a little difficult to kind of gauge and estimate. How many people will be no-shows?”

He points out that no one hosting events wants to run out of food either.

Fabio Miranda represents the catering company City Fare at West L.A. college.

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Stuckrath, the events planner who specializes in sustainability, told LAist, “it really comes down to monitoring your attendee arrivals and departures schedules.”

There have been financial and cultural incentives for providing extra food, said Jackie Suggitt, director of capital, innovation and engagement at ReFED, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending food loss and waste. Vendors would need to compensate attendees if food runs out and event attendees “regardless of what we say about our sustainability preferences, we like the options, even if we’re the last one going through the buffet.”

Suggitt said one of the solutions their organization proposes from their own event planning experience and case studies is to actually underproduce. ReFED will produce food for 50% to 85% of the people registered for the event. (By day two of an event, “No one actually comes down for breakfast, they just want coffee,” she said.)

“I mean, that's hard, right? Like over the fear of running out of food. You may run out of one of your dishes and that happens. Right?” Suggitt said.

She observed this earth friendly mindset could be acceptable at a conference about food waste, but elsewhere “can be kind of a difficult norm to break away from.”

The environmentally conscious plant-based lunch

The climate conference lunch was a taco bar buffet spread with traditional fixings of rice, beans, tortillas, guacamole, salsa, and, among other items, plant-based beef fajitas.

Besides food waste in landfills, the raising of livestock also contributes significantly to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Vegan beef fajitas are served for lunch as part of the taco buffet bar.

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Meat and plant-based preferences is something the organizer Tavares did wrestle with, worrying that students, particularly high school students attending this week’s events, may not eat the vegan options.

But Jade Allison, a conference participant, said the plant-based lunch menu showed the organizers are aligned in practice with their sustainable messages.

Some liked the plant-based meat. “I love rice and beans, and I like the Beyond Meat steak,” said Andrea Abrego, a West L.A. student who participated in an internship panel.

Ayman Sharafat, though, preferred a meat option. He's doing a fellowship in Texas with the Climate Action Network, but originally hails from Jordan. While the lunch was “delicious and healthy,” when asked how he would design the ideal conference lunch, he said, “some people like lamb, some people like pork, beef, and chicken.”

The necessary origin of the food

Seated at a round table, conference participant Beth Yirga chimed in to a conversation about the food’s origins and final destination.

“I want to know the history of my plate…I want every piece of my plate to be connected to a community that is doing this work to heal the planet," Yirga said. "And I'm, we're, supporting their efforts and nourishing our bodies at the same time.”

Mariela Bazán, chief sustainability officer for the Events Industry Council, a global organization that has established sustainable event standards, calls this “social procurement.”

Social procurement means “where are you purchasing from? Do you have a policy of sourcing from small and medium enterprises? Are you looking for diversity in your supply chain? Are you looking for fair labor, not child labor, in your supply chain?” Bazán said.

She said in the past, when considering sustainability, the events industry used to focus on materials like plastic water bottles and reducing waste, but over time, considering the climate impact of travel and social procurement has grown in importance. That means considering things like chocolate certifications, fair trade coffee, and other elements of sourcing (seafood, for example, can be notorious to track, but one can start the conversation by asking).

The final fate of the waste

Not all of this conference’s food would make its way onto people’s ceramic lunch plates.

“I think that is a hidden side of something like conference lunches and buffets that we don't really get to know,” said attendee Allison, who wanted to know what would happen to the leftovers. “Like a product’s life cycle and lifespan is much larger than it being on a plate in front of me. And I think, like, for sustainability, we have to shift our mindset to incorporate the full picture more often.”

CCCCE contracted the organization Compostable to bring the compost to partner farms and urban growing spaces within 10 miles of the event, and redistribute the leftovers to Free Food Collective, a local organization which delivers food to unhoused people in West L.A.

Becca Scheuer takes away the leftover food and compost. The leftover food will go to a local organization that will distribute the food to unhoused people and the compost will go to partner farms and urban growing spaces.

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At the end of the day, Becca Scheuer from Compostable weighed the food waste and leftover food — approximately 60 pounds of food waste to become compost, about 80 pounds of leftover food to be redistributed.

“So that is great,” Scheuer said while loading up the pickup truck. “None of that is in the landfill.”

VAN, Turkey — It has been more than one month since the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran. The U.S. says it has hit more than 10,000 targets. But U.S.- and Norway-based human rights groups estimate that at least hundreds of Iranian civilians have also been killed.

The war has also widened bitter ideological divides among Iranians in and outside the country over whether the conflict has been justified.

"There is difficulty [with the bombing], but we are not that weak," says one Iranian woman from Tehran, traveling to Turkey for a short break, given that her work has stopped due to the U.S. and Israeli bombing of the capital city. "In the past few years, the Islamic Republic [of Iran] has proved to us that we cannot trust them. But we were in war with Israel in the summer [during the 12-day war], and we saw how precise their targeting was, so we trust them."

"We are going to build a nuclear bomb now, because there's no fatwa against it anymore," interjects an Iranian man, overhearing her remarks, referring to a rumored religious ban on nuclear weapons issued by Iran's former supreme leader, whom Israel assassinated with U.S. help at the beginning of the war in late February.

Like all the Iranians in this story, the two people asked to remain anonymous. They have received texts from the Iranian government and have seen signs coming out of Iran warning them not to speak to foreign media on pain of arrest.

A microcosm of divergent opinions

Just across the border with Iran, in eastern Turkey, the Turkish city of Van is just as full as during prewar times, with thousands of Iranian workers, consulate employees, students and tourists, who are traveling despite the war in their home country. Van has also become a microcosm of the full range of divergent opinions that Iranians have about the war.

"There is no such thing as hardship in Iran," says one Iranian man, who crossed into Turkey for his job last week. "Everyone lives freely, woman or man."

Next to him, a second Iranian man looks at him, wide-eyed and shaking.

"In two days, the government killed 40,000 people," the man says, referring to a government crackdown in January on protesters. A U.S.-based human rights group has confirmed over 7,000 deaths, but many Iranians believe the death toll is far higher.

NPR has not been able to travel and report inside Iran, so it has been interviewing Iranians traveling through border areas, including in eastern Turkey.

The dozens of Iranians NPR has interviewed transiting through Van may not be representative of all Iranians in the country. Many Iranians in Van are those wealthy enough to travel. But there are also poorer Iranians working, often under the table, in Turkey. A few Iranians I met and interviewed say they are heading off to study abroad.

The commonality among most Iranians NPR spoke with is that they feel they have lost opportunities — to make a living, to voice their opinions, simply to live — under the current government, which they say must go.

"Our pain is something you have to feel for yourself [to understand]," says one Iranian man who has been working in Turkey for the last year. He spent the previous seven years in prison, he says, after being accused of being an anti-Islamic heretic. "Iran's security forces … took everything from us. They only give pain. They are pain incarnate," he says, so much so, he is willing to lose all he has, even his family in Iran, for his government to be wiped out.

"The war should never have started," says one Iranian university student. "But now that it has, the U.S. and Israel should finish it," she says, meaning toppling Iran's regime.

"Met with bullets"

Some Iranians who support the war against their own country say their perspectives are indelibly shaped by that government crackdown in early January. This year's killings of demonstrators finally made them realize, they say, that decades of popular resistance would never change their government.

"Three of my own friends were killed" in the crackdown, says one Iranian man. He crossed into Turkey last week to earn money, more than he could make in Iran. "My friends were all young. I knew them all my life. Yet the government killed them so easily."

"Every two years, there is a big protest," he says. Research from Stanford University published this year found thousands of instances of dissent over the last decade and a half, averaging to one protest every three days inside Iran.

But this time, his hometown, in Iran's western Kermanshah province, was brutally punished by government paramilitary groups for people in his town participating in January's protests.

"It is as if my town has been burned down. Nothing is left of it," he says. "I see no future for my children in Iran." His only hope now, he says, is a foreign intervention. "Our only hope is Trump. Our only hope is that Trump and Bibi [Israel's prime minister] make the right moves."

"We are scared of the bombing," an Iranian woman says. "But we are happy thinking that there might be a light at the end of this darkness. When our young people went out and protested this January, they were met with bullets. With slaughter. With executions."

Nearly all the Iranians traveling in Turkey who spoke to NPR said they are hopeful about Iran. They have immediate plans to return to their country and stressed that they are not leaving it. Migration data from the United Nations shows fewer Iranians are leaving Iran for Turkey than before the war.

"We are not fleeing," says one young Tehran resident. Even though she almost lost an eye in the anti-government demonstrations this winter, she says she is going back to Tehran in a few days. "We are determined to rebuild our country, and if the government changes, I will work, for free if needed."
Copyright 2026 NPR

Before taking his last steps on the moon, NASA astronaut Gene Cernan made sure to scratch his young daughter's initials into the lunar dust.

He had some parting thoughts for the rest of humanity, too.

"We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind," the Apollo 17 commander said before departing for Earth.

That was December 1972. Now, more than half a century later, NASA may be about to fulfill Cernan's wishes.

Watch the launch live stream, set to start at 12:50 p.m. ET, here.

As early as Wednesday at 6:24 p.m., an Orion capsule seated atop a 322-foot rocket will blast off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If all goes according to plan, the capsule will carry four astronauts around the moon and back — sending humans the farthest they've ever been from our home planet.

The mission will be the first launch in the Artemis moon program to include a crew. It follows the uncrewed Artemis I test flight in 2022, which sent an empty Orion capsule on a three-week ride around the moon before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

This time, the Artemis II astronauts will first orbit Earth to check out key systems on the spacecraft, and then trace a figure-eight path around our lunar neighbor and back. The entire journey is expected to take just under 10 days.

This mission is a crucial step toward NASA's goal of once again setting foot on lunar soil, and eventually establishing a permanent lunar presence — including a moon base — with the help of international partners.

At a press briefing on Tuesday, Mark Burger, launch weather officer with the Space Force's 45th Weather Squadron, said there was an 80% chance of favorable conditions for launch day, though they were keeping a close eye on the weather.

Jeff Spaulding, senior NASA test director, is a veteran of many launches. He said that for his part, the reality that humans would soon be flying to the moon would probably set in during the final minute before ignition.

"That's when it really starts to hit home that, you know, we really got a shot at making it today," Spaulding said at the briefing. "And I know a lot of people are thinking the same thing, because you can hear a pin drop in that firing room as you count from 10 down to T-zero."

"After that, though," he said with a smile, "it may get a little bit noisier."

Copyright 2026 NPR

President Trump is set to address the nation on the Iran war at 9 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday night, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying he would be providing "an important update," without providing further details.

On Tuesday, Trump said he expected the conflict to be over in two to three weeks, adding, "we'll be leaving very soon," and promising gas prices would then "come tumbling down."

Trump shrugged off what would happen to the blockaded Strait of Hormuz – which has cut off one fifth of the world's oil supply – saying, "we're not going to have anything to do with it." He said that it wouldn't affect the U.S. and would be something for other countries to deal with.

"They'll be able to fend for themselves," he said, having previously told European allies who have refused to enter the war to "go get your own oil!"

The assertion to wrap up the war quickly comes just days after Trump threatened to up the ante if there was no deal and Tehran didn't reopen the strait. He said he could seize Iran's oil and blow up all of their Electric Generating Plants and desalinization plants. He also said he was considering an invasion of Iran's key oil export terminal, Kharg Island.

But on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed his boss's latest comments on the war being over in a matter of weeks, saying the main goal of preventing Iran from being able to build a nuclear weapon had been achieved.

Rubio has expressed frustration in recent days over news reports accusing the administration of lacking clear objectives in Iran.

He said the objectives were: the destruction of Iran's air force, the destruction of its navy, the "severe diminishing" of its capability to launch missiles, and the destruction of its factories.

Regime change, previously touted by the administration as a goal, was not mentioned. Earlier this week Trump said he considered regime change had been achieved, despite the fact that it remains a hardline theocracy led by the son of the previous ayatollah.

Here are more updates on day 33 of the Iran war:

Fighting overnight | World leaders | Iran | American journalist kidnapped| Hegseth visits troops | Aid hold up | Peace plan

Regional Fighting overnight

The Israel Defense Forces said they hit 230 targets in Tehran while also widening an invasion into Lebanon. Meanwhile, Iran is striking back at Gulf neighbors, especially military bases used by the U.S. this week. One of those attacks injured as many as 20 U.S. service members in Saudi Arabia.

Since the war began over a month ago, 13 U.S. service members have been killed. Iran says more than 1,700 people have been killed in Iran.

People take cover in a bomb shelter as air raid sirens warn of incoming Iranian missile strikes in Bnei Brak, Israel, Wednesday, April 1, 2026.

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Also overnight Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed missile attacks on Israel, which the Israeli military intercepted. The Houthis have vowed an "escalation" in attacks.

Israel's emergency services reported Iranian missiles fired at central Israel had injured 14 people, including children.

At Kuwait's international airport, Iranian drones hit fuel depots, causing a huge fire, a day after a Kuwaiti oil tanker off Dubai was hit.

In Qatar on Wednesday, a missile launched by Iran hit an oil tanker leased to QatarEnergies, which said no one was injured and reported no environmental impact.

UK, Australia leaders speak

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer addressed the nation on Wednesday about how the rising cost of living caused by the conflict will affect British citizens and what his government is doing to try to mitigate that.

He repeated a previous vow that the U.K. will only take "defensive" action against Iranian attacks in the Middle East and would not get drawn into the war. He also announced his foreign secretary would organize an international summit on the Strait of Hormuz aimed at restoring freedom of navigation.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also gave a national address on the war on Wednesday.

Earlier this week Albanese announced his government would halve the fuel tax for three months to give Australians some respite from the rising costs.

He urged Australians to use public transport and not to hoard fuel. He also warned that "the reality is, the economic shocks caused by this war will be with us for months."

'Hospitality' is over, says Iran

Ebrahim Azizi, the head of Iranian Parliament's National Security Committee, said on X in a message to Trump that the Strait of Hormuz would reopen "but not for you."

People sift through rubble in the aftermath of a drone attack on a residential building in which one civilian was killed on March 31, 2026 in eastern Tehran, Iran.

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Referring to the period since Iran's 1979 revolution, he added: "47 years of hospitality are over forever."

Iran this week approved a bill to charge vessels for crossing the vital economic waterway.

"Trump has finally achieved his dream of 'regime change' — but in the region's maritime regime!" Azizi said.

It's not just vessels that are now trapped near the Strait of Hormuz.

An estimated twenty thousand seafarers are onboard — in an active warzone — and the U.N. is trying to extricate them.

Most seafarers are from the Philippines, Bangladesh and India and some vessels are reportedly running low on food and water.

The U.N.'s International Maritime Organization is negotiating with all sides to try to evacuate them.

American journalist kidnapped in Iraq

American freelance reporter Shelly Kittleson was kidnapped in Baghdad Tuesday, according to Al-Monitor, a Middle Eastern news site for which she has written.

Iraqi security forces said they intercepted a vehicle that crashed and arrested one of the suspected kidnappers, but are still searching for the kidnapped journalist and other suspects.

U.S. officials say they're working to get her released.

"The State Department previously fulfilled our duty to warn this individual of threats against them and we will continue to coordinate with the FBI to ensure their release as quickly as possible," Dylan Johnson, the assistant secretary of state for global public affairs, said on social media.

He said Americans, including media workers, have been advised not to travel to Iraq and should leave the country. The statement did not condemn the kidnapping or express concern.

Johnson said Iraqi authorities apprehended a suspect associated with Iran-backed Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah, believed to be involved in the kidnapping.

Press freedom organizations expressed deep concern. The Committee to Protect Journalists called on "Iraqi authorities to do everything in their power to locate Shelley Kittleson, ensure her immediate and safe release, and hold those responsible to account."

Based in Rome, Kittleson has reported on Iraq, as well as Syria and Afghanistan, for years, according to Al-Monitor.

Reporters Without Borders said she is "very familiar with Iraq, where she stays for extended periods."

"RSF stands alongside her loved ones and colleagues during this painful wait," the organization said.

Al-Monitor said in a statement it is "deeply alarmed" by her kidnapping. "We stand by her vital reporting from the region and call for her swift return to continue her important work," it said.

U.S. defense secretary visits troops

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made an undisclosed trip to the Middle East to visit troops on military bases over the weekend. He did not divulge the location for the troops' safety.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks to members of the media during a press briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, Tuesday, March 31, 2026.

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"I spoke to Air Force and Navy pilots on the flight line who every day both deliver bombs deep into Iran, but also shoot down drones defending their base. Many had just returned from the skies of Iran and Tehran," he told reporters in a briefing Tuesday.

He said he "witnessed an urgency to finish the job" and tried to draw a comparison with America's earlier drawn-out wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said the U.S. is improving bunkers and layered air defenses as a priority to protect troops and aircraft.

This comes after more than a dozen U.S. service members were injured, several severely, and U.S. aircraft were damaged in Iranian strikes on a base in Saudi Arabia last Friday. The Pentagon says 13 U.S. service members have been killed and 300 wounded in what it calls Operation Epic Fury.

He repeated the administration's assertion that the U.S. is negotiating with Iran, despite Iranian officials' denial that talks are happening.

Aid hold up

The World Food Program says tens of thousands of tons of food aid are stuck in ports as a consequence of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

The WFP says there is a whole disruption in the global supply chain with carriers not able to use the Strait of Hormuz and choosing not to use the Suez Canal through Egypt out of concerns of attacks there, too.

The agency says this is adding a month to shipping time and costing more because of spikes in fuel prices from the war. It noted that as people around the world pay more for fuel, more families will struggle to put food on the table.

Some 45 million additional people will fall into acute hunger around the world if current conditions continue through June- reaching 363 million globally, the WFP said.

Pakistan, China release statement

Pakistan's and China's foreign ministers issued a joint statement on Tuesday calling for talks to the war on Iran as part of a broader peace plan. The statement called for a halt to fire, an end to attacks on civilian infrastructure, and reopening of the State of Hormuz.

For days Pakistani officials had said they hope to help mediate talks to end a war that has seized up the global economy, pushed up the price of fossil fuels, and key commodities like fertilizer — and that has killed thousands of people, mostly Iranians and Lebanese.

The joint statement with China came after high-ranking Pakistani officials led a flurry of meetings with regional powers. China is Iran's biggest customer for oil — and it's seen as sympathetic to the country.

Jane Arraf in Amman, Jordan, Diaa Hadid in Mumbai, Quil Lawrence in New York, Giles Snyder, Michele Kelemen in Washington, Emily Feng in Van, Turkey, Aya Batrawy in Dubai, and Kate Bartlett in Johannesburg contributed to reporting.
Copyright 2026 NPR

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The Supreme Court chamber will be packed on Wednesday, as the justices hear arguments in a case that almost certainly will result in a historic ruling. At issue is President Trump's challenge to a constitutional provision that has long been interpreted to guarantee American citizenship to every child born in the United States.

Listen to arguments and live NPR special coverage beginning at 10 a.m. ET:

Trump has long maintained that the Constitution does not guarantee birthright citizenship. So, on Day 1 of his second term, he issued an executive order barring automatic citizenship for any baby born in the U.S. whose parents entered the country illegally or who were here legally, but on a temporary, or even a long-term visa.

"We are the only country in the world that does this with birthright," Trump said as he signed the executive order. "And it's absolutely ridiculous."

That actually is not true. There are nearly 33 countries, mainly in North and South America, that have birthright citizenship — including, among others, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.

Can't see the video above? Watch it here.

D-Day for Trump's attack on birthright citizenship

But Trump has long been determined to rid this country of its longstanding protection for birthright citizenship. Wednesday is D-Day in that effort, and to understand the issues, it's worth taking a stroll through American history.

While citizenship was not defined at the nation's founding, the colonists were largely pro-immigrant, according to University of Virginia law professor Amanda Frost, author of American Birthright: How the Citizenship Clause made America American, due out in September.

The founders "wanted to populate this mostly empty continent," she observes, adding that, in fact, one of the complaints against the British king in the Declaration of Independence was that the British "were discouraging immigration."

Indeed, she notes, after the Revolutionary War, even those who had been loyal to the king but wanted to stay in America were granted U.S. citizenship.

Trump's view of the 14th Amendment

Birthright citizenship didn't make it into the Constitution, though, until after the Civil War, when the nation enacted the 14th Amendment to reverse the Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision — a ruling that in 1857 declared that Black people, enslaved or free, could not be citizens of the United States.

To undo that decision, the post-Civil War Congress passed a constitutional amendment that defines citizenship in broad terms. It says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."

President Trump, however, maintains that the constitutional amendment was intended to be more limited than it has been in practice. "This was meant for the slaves … for the children of slaves," Trump said last January. "I'm in favor of that. But it wasn't meant for the entire world to occupy the United States." 

But as the University of Virginia's Frost notes, the framers of the 14th Amendment had more than one explicit purpose. They wanted a clear, bright line definition of citizenship; they wanted the former slaves and their children to be citizens, and they wanted to include immigrants, many of whom were the targets of great hostility.

"I like to remind my students that between 1845 and 1855, approximately 2 million people from Ireland fled to the United States," Frost observes. They were fleeing from famine and harsh British rule. And while "there certainly was some prejudice and discrimination and xenophobia," she says, "their children soon would automatically become American citizens" when born on U.S. soil after enactment of the 14th Amendment.

Trump's interpretation of the 14th Amendment is avowedly far more restricted. What's more, it has not been embraced by the courts or the legal norms of the country for 160 years.

The counterargument

"The president's executive order is attempting a radical rewriting of that 14th Amendment guarantee to all of us," says Cecillia Wang, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Indeed, even as both Republican and Democratic administrations have sought in modern times to deport large numbers of individuals who have entered the country illegally, the notion of birthright citizenship has remained so entrenched that during World War II when Japanese citizens were held as enemy aliens in U.S. detention camps, their newborn children were automatically granted American citizenship because they were born on U.S. soil. And Congress later codified that understanding in the 1940s, '50s and '60s.

At the Supreme Court on Wednesday, the justices are likely to focus on some of the key court decisions that have protected birthright citizenship during the past century and a half. Perhaps most important among these is the case of Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese immigrants who ran a small business in the city. Back then, immigrants like Wong's parents were largely free to enter the U.S. without any documentation, but his parents eventually returned to China. And after their son visited them in 1895, officers at the port in San Francisco refused to allow him back into the United States, contending that he was not a qualified citizen.

Wong challenged the denial and, in 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor. By a 6-2 vote, the justices interpreted the words "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" to mean that all children born in the U.S. were automatically granted citizenship. The court noted that only three exceptions were specified in the amendment: The children of diplomats were not deemed to be U.S. citizens because their allegiance was to another country; the children of occupying armies were similarly excepted, as were the children of Native American tribes. Of these three exceptions, the only one that still applies is to the children of diplomats, as there are no invading armies, and Native Americans were granted automatic citizenship in 1924.

The Trump administration, however, argues that Wong Kim Ark's situation was very different from many of the children who become automatic American citizens today, because Wong's parents, though undocumented, were here legally, by virtue of having a permanent residence in the U.S. And the Trump administration points to language in the 1898 Supreme Court opinion that assumes the parents had legal status in the country because they had a permanent residence in San Francisco.

The Trump administration makes an even broader argument. "An individual who is naturally born in the United States is only considered a citizen if their parents have allegiance to the nation," says Daniel Epstein, vice president of America First Legal, the organization founded by the architect of Trump's immigration policies, Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff. "It is a misdemeanor to come into the United States without authorization. That is a crime," he says. "That is strong evidence that you don't kind of meet the traditional notion of allegiance."

"We do not punish children for the sins of their parents"

Countering that argument, the ACLU's Wang will tell the Supreme Court that the men who wrote the 14th Amendment deliberately chose to confer automatic citizenship on the child, not the parent.

"And the idea — that actually goes back to the founding — is that in America we do not punish children for the sins of their fathers, but instead we wipe the slate clean. When you're born in this country, we're all Americans, all the same," Wang says.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is supporting the president's position, along with 11 other GOP senators, and 16 House members, who signed on to the America First brief.

"As a policy matter, birthright citizenship is stupid," Cruz says, "because it incentivizes illegal immigration. It makes absolutely no sense that someone breaks the law and they get rewarded with a very, very, precious gift, which is American citizenship."

Can an executive order trump a constitutional amendment?

The ACLU's Wang counters that Trump is trying, by executive order, to change the meaning of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, a measure that was approved overwhelmingly by the Congress in 1866 and, after a great public debate, ratified by more than three-quarters of the states. She argues that the consequences of such a dramatic change by executive fiat would have untold consequences.

"What will immediately happen is that every month, tens of thousands of U.S.-born babies will be stripped of their citizenship. They may be stateless because their parents' country of nationality may not consider them to be citizens. And so you'll see a permanent underclass of people who have no nationality, who are living in the United States, who can't pass on their nationality to their children born in the U.S.

In a separate brief, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops stresses the problems that would be created by generation after generation of children who are stateless, with no country to call home, and no citizenship to pass on to their children.

"The children … would be the ones to bear the brunt of this," says Bishop Daniel Flores, vice president of the bishops conference. "I have people asking this now in my diocese. 'Bishop, am I going to get into trouble if I give food to somebody that I'm not sure of their documentation? … Can we help these people? Because we think we need to, because they're people and they were born here."

The Trump administration counters that birthright citizenship raises two other problems: a generic potential threat to national security and the problem of so-called "birth tourism."

In fact, even birthright defenders concede that a cottage industry has long existed in which women pay money to come to the U.S. and have their children here. But the numbers are consistently very small. Even the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors limited immigration, estimates only 20,000 to 26,000 birth tourism children are born in the U.S. each year, compared to the overall birth count of 3.6 million babies born each year.

Daniel Epstein of America First Legal contends that numbers are not important. "I view just one illegal act as illegal, and birth tourism is illegal and it's against the law, and the law matters."

Population experts say that if automatic birthright citizenship were to be voided, the consequences would be profound — and counterintuitive. The Population Research Institute at Penn State, for instance, estimates that a repeal of birthright citizenship would result in 2.7 million more people living here illegally by 2045, people who previously would have been entitled to birthright citizenship, but now have no such citizenship for themselves or to pass on to their children or the generations thereafter.

Also likely to come up at today's Supreme Court argument are practical questions, like those raised by Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year in a related case. How would a hospital know that the parents of a child are illegally in the country? What would hospitals do with a newborn? What would states do? The answer from Trump's solicitor general, D. John Sauer, was "Federal officials will have to figure that out."

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