Category: News

More than a dozen people broke into the Oceanwide Plaza skyscraper development in Los Angeles, covering the windows of the glossy, unfinished buildings with spray-painted colorful block letters that read, “Crave,” “Dank” and “Amen,” among other phrases, the police said on Thursday.

The spray-painters made their way up multiple floors in the 40-story buildings, which were once set to be the tallest residential towers in the city, according to Forbes. It was not immediately clear how long the people were inside the buildings, or how they had entered, but the police were called about the graffiti on Tuesday.

The buildings, which have been unoccupied since 2019, are across from Crypto.com Arena at L.A. Live, where the Grammy Awards are set to take place on Sunday.

The Oceanwide Plaza project was intended to be a mixed-use space with retail shops, a hotel and luxury apartments, but the project was halted in 2019 after the developer, Oceanwide Holdings, ran out of money, The Los Angeles Times reported.

The graffiti has only emphasized the unfinished buildings, which critics say are an eyesore and a source of frustration for many residents.

Kevin de León, a member of the Los Angeles City Council, called on the owners of the buildings to do something about the vacant property.

“The city of L.A. has already served the property owners in order to comply with a deadline instructing them to fulfill their responsibilities,” Mr. de León said during a news conference on Friday morning. He could not be reached for comment on Saturday.

Stefano Bloch, a cultural geographer, a professor at the University of Arizona and a former graffiti artist, said the graffiti had helped draw attention to the incomplete project, while noting that the intruders did still break the law.

“This is people taking it upon themselves to use a space that in many ways was abandoned by people with money and power,” said Mr. Bloch, who is a Los Angeles native.

The police said that more than a dozen people had been involved in the graffiti incident. All but two had fled before officers arrived, the police said, adding that two men were cited for trespassing and then released.

Those responsible for the graffiti might not face the same harsh legal repercussions as in the past, Mr. Bloch said. Decades ago, graffiti artists faced prison sentences, but now they are more likely to be fined for vandalism and trespassing, he said.

“In the 1990s, there was this moral panic about graffiti being linked to gangs, but times have changed,” Mr. Bloch said. “Even if people don’t like it — and they’re entitled not to like it — they understand that graffiti is not connected to violence.”

The United States and Britain carried out large-scale military strikes on Saturday against multiple sites in Yemen controlled by Houthi militants, according to a statement from the two countries and six allies, as the Biden administration continued its reprisal campaign in the Middle East targeting Iran-backed militias.

The attacks against 36 Houthi targets at 13 sites in northern Yemen came barely 24 hours after the United States carried out a series of military strikes against Iranian forces and the militias they support at seven sites in Syria and Iraq.

American and British warplanes, as well as Navy Tomahawk cruise missiles, hit deeply buried weapons storage facilities; missile systems and launchers; air defense systems; and radars in Yemen, the statement said. Australia, Bahrain, Denmark, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand provided support, which officials said included intelligence and logistics assistance.

“These precision strikes are intended to disrupt and degrade the capabilities that the Houthis use to threaten global trade and the lives of innocent mariners, and are in response to a series of illegal, dangerous and destabilizing Houthi actions since previous coalition strikes,” the statement said, referring to major attacks by the United States and Britain last month.

The attacks were the second-largest salvo since the allies first struck Houthi targets on Jan. 11. They came after a week in which the Houthis had been particularly defiant, launching several attack drones and cruise and ballistic missiles at merchant vessels and U.S. Navy warships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

The American-led air and naval strikes began last month in response to dozens of Houthi drone and missile attacks against commercial shipping in the Red Sea since November. The Houthis claim their attacks are in protest of Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza.

The United States and several allies had repeatedly warned the Houthis of serious consequences if the salvos did not stop. But the U.S.-led strikes have so far failed to deter the Houthis from attacking shipping lanes to and from the Suez Canal that are critical for global trade. Hundreds of ships have been forced to take a lengthy detour around southern Africa, driving up costs.

“Our military operations against the Zionist entity will continue until the aggression against Gaza stops, no matter what sacrifices it demands from us,” a senior Houthi official said in response to the latest attacks. “We will meet escalation with escalation.”

While the Biden administration maintains that it is not looking to widen the war in the region, the strikes over the past two days represent an escalation.

In scope, the strikes in Yemen were roughly the size of U.S. and British attacks on Jan. 22, but smaller than the salvos on Jan. 11, officials said.

The strikes on Saturday came after a back-and-forth exchange of more limited attacks in the previous 36 hours between the Houthis and U.S. forces in the Red Sea and nearby waters.

At about 10:30 a.m. local time on Friday, the destroyer Carney shot down a drone flying over the Gulf of Aden. Six hours later, the United States attacked four Houthi attack drones that the military’s Central Command said were about to launch and threaten merchant ships in the Red Sea. At about 9:20 p.m., U.S. forces struck cruise missiles in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen after determining they presented a threat to vessels in the region, Central Command said in another release. And about five hours after that, early Saturday, the destroyer Laboon and FA-18 attack planes shot down seven drones flying over the Red Sea.

Then on Saturday night, before the planned strikes, the United States hit six Houthi anti-ship cruise missiles as they were being prepared to launch against ships in the Red Sea, Central Command said.

So far, the Biden administration has been trying to chip away at the ability of the Houthis to menace merchant ships and military vessels without killing large numbers of Houthi fighters and commanders, which could potentially unleash even more mayhem into a widening war.

“I don’t see how these airstrikes achieve U.S. objectives or avoid further regional escalation,” said Stacey Philbrick Yadav, a Yemen specialist at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. “While they may degrade Houthi capabilities in the short term, the group’s leadership has vowed to continue its Red Sea attacks and to retaliate in response to these airstrikes.”

Saturday’s strikes came as the U.S. military had begun assessing the dozens of airstrikes it conducted Friday night that hit 85 targets at seven sites in Iraq and Syria.

The strikes were in retaliation for a drone attack on a remote outpost in Jordan last Sunday that killed three American soldiers. Washington has suggested that an Iran-linked Iraqi militia, Kataib Hezbollah, was behind that attack.

Syria and Iraq said Friday’s strikes killed at least 39 people — 23 in Syria and 16 in Iraq — a toll that the Iraqi government said included civilians.

The multiple strikes left the region on edge, though analysts said they seemed designed to avoid a confrontation with Iran by focusing on the operational capabilities of the militias.

“We do not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else,” the U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, said after the Friday strikes, “but the president and I will not tolerate attacks on American forces.”

The reaction from Iranian officials to Friday’s round of strikes was condemnatory but not inflammatory. A Foreign Ministry spokesman, Nasser Kanaani, said the U.S. attacks represented “another strategic mistake,” but did not speak about striking back.

Syria and Iraq denounced the U.S. strikes in their countries as violations of their sovereignty, adding that the attacks would only impede the fight against Islamic State militants.

Washington not only calibrated the attacks to avoid stoking a broader war, but had openly warned that they were coming days in advance of the strikes, said Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, Lebanon. Both sides, she added, had sought ways to attack that remained “below a threshold that would spell an all-out war.”

The stakes of this particular American bombing were high, given rising tensions across the Middle East because of the war in Gaza and related violence it has fueled elsewhere in the region.

Since the deadly Hamas-led assault on Israel on Oct. 7, and Israel’s retaliatory bombing campaign and ground invasion in Gaza, Iran-backed militias have carried out more than 160 attacks on U.S. forces in the region, as well as on commercial ships in the Red Sea.

The Houthis in Yemen have said they will not stop the attacks in the Red Sea until there is a cease-fire in Gaza. Mr. Kanaani, the Iranian foreign minister, echoed that sentiment, saying on Saturday that the “unlimited support for the U.S.” for Israel was a main driver of regional tensions.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken will return to the region this week to continue negotiations on the release of Israeli hostages and a temporary cease-fire. More than 27,000 Palestinian have died in the conflict, according to Gazan health officials, and about 1,200 Israelis have been killed, Israeli officials said. More than 100 hostages kidnapped from Israel in the Oct. 7 assault remain captive in Gaza.

The three U.S. soldiers killed in Jordan were the first to die in Gaza-related military violence since the war began. The United States said it struck only targets associated with militias backed by Iran that had been involved in the attack on the base in Jordan, or in other offensives against U.S. troops.

But the United States did not attack Iran itself, despite its status as the patron and overall coordinator of these militias. Nor did it strike Hezbollah in Lebanon, the most powerful of Iran’s regional proxies, which has been battling Israeli troops along the Lebanon-Israel border throughout the war in Gaza.

That fits with the United States’ efforts to keep its own military activities separate from those of Israel, which says it is seeking to destroy Hamas.

How successful the new strikes will be in degrading the military capabilities of Iran and its proxies — or in deterring them from attacking the United States — remains an open question.

Iran created its network, with affiliates in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, to extend its influence and give it a way to strike foes without having to do so itself, analysts say. Anti-Iran hawks in the United States and the Middle East often argue that attacking the proxies without hitting Iran is a waste of time.

Ms. Yahya of the Carnegie Center said she did not expect the new U.S. strikes to drastically change the activities of Iran’s regional proxies.

“The only thing that will get them to pull back would be a clear sign from Iran telling them to pull back,” she said. “But even then, they may listen and they may not.”

That is because Iran does not directly control its proxies, who have significant latitude to make their own decisions, Ms. Yahya said.

Reporting was contributed by Raja Abdulrahim and Aaron Boxerman from Jerusalem, Max Bearak from New York, Ben Hubbard from Istanbul, Hwaida Saad from Beirut and David E. Sanger from Berlin.

There was very little that could be said about the 19 people who were eulogized on Saturday morning in a service at the University of Pennsylvania. Their names were lost, and not much about their lives was known beyond the barest facts: an old age spent in the poorhouse, a problem with cavities. They were Black people who had died in obscurity over a century ago, now known almost entirely by the skulls they left behind. Even some of these scant facts have been contested.

Much more could be said about what led to the service. “This moment,” said the Rev. Jesse Wendell Mapson, a local pastor involved in planning the commemoration and interment of the 19, “has not come without some pain, discomfort and tension.”

On this everyone could agree.

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, like cultural and research institutions worldwide, has been grappling with a legacy of plunder, trying to decide what to do about artifacts and even human bones that were collected from people and communities against their will and often without their knowledge.

The museum plans to repatriate hundreds of craniums from all over the world, but the process has been fraught from the beginning. Its first step — the entombment at a nearby cemetery of the skulls of Black Philadelphians found in the collection — has drawn heavy criticism, charged by activists and some experts with being rushed and opaque.

“There are so many places dealing with this,” said Aja Lans, a professor of anthropology and Africana studies at Johns Hopkins University, who has criticized the Penn Museum’s handling of the Morton remains. “Anyone who works in human remains is paying attention to what’s happening at Penn. No one wants to replicate what’s happening.”

In the early and mid-19th century, Samuel George Morton, a Philadelphia physician and naturalist, amassed one of the largest known collections of human skulls in an effort to bolster an influential but scientifically bogus theory of racial hierarchy. Like many physicians and medical students of his time, he looted the cadavers of the poor and mentally ill from the city’s almshouse.

The collection continued to grow after Morton’s death in 1851 but was largely forgotten along with his odious theories. In 1966, the bones were transferred to the Penn Museum, where they remained for decades, some sitting on a classroom shelf, visible through a window to anyone waiting at the nearby bus stop.

The collection began drawing attention in recent years, fueled by research at Penn and the national calls for a reckoning with historical racism. In February 2021, a Ph.D. student, Paul Wolff Mitchell, wrote a report finding that the Morton collection included the skulls of at least 14 Black Philadelphians, some of whom were most likely born in slavery.

The museum, which had pledged to repatriate all the skulls in the Morton collection, formed a committee to arrange for the burial of these and six more craniums that also appeared to be from Black Philadelphians. In addition to university officials and local clergy, the committee included aAliy A. Muhammad, a community activist who was among the first to publicize that the museum was holding some bones of children killed in a notorious 1985 police-ordered firebombing.

Mx. Muhammad, who identifies as nonbinary, insisted that decisions about the remains should lie not with the museum but with the descendant community, people who have deep roots in Black Philadelphia. Along with Lyra D. Monteiro, a history professor at Rutgers University, Mx. Muhammad formed a group called Finding Ceremony, which demanded that the museum transfer the collection to the group and fund research into the identities of the hundreds of people whose craniums it had kept. Of the 20 people the museum planned to bury, only one — a porter named John Voorhees, who died of tuberculosis in 1846 — was known by name.

The fight between the museum committee and Finding Ceremony went to court, and in February of last year, a judge ruled in favor of the museum, ordering the interment to take place within a year. The committee planned to entomb the remains in a mausoleum at Eden Cemetery, a historic Black graveyard.

Having lost in court, Dr. Monteiro combed local archives. Finding names was a daunting task; many of the people whose remains ended up in the Morton collection were described in Morton’s records in only the crudest terms.

“It seems unlikely to me that all of these individuals will be identified,” said Christopher Woods, the director of the Penn Museum since 2021. Dr. Woods, who is the museum’s first Black director, pointed out that even if a person could be named, the person might have hundreds of descendants to consult. The process, he said, could take years.

“Institutions too often have used the claim of future research or more conclusive research as a tool of inaction,” he added. The remains were intentionally put above ground, in a mausoleum, he said, so they could be retrieved if ongoing research efforts turned up identities.

Then, in mid-January, Finding Ceremony announced a discovery. Dr. Monteiro had found in the city’s archives an 1846 interview with John Voorhees, in which he said that his mother was Native American. His cranium was thus covered by the federal law governing the remains of Native Americans. The one named person of the 20 to be interred was taken out.

To critics of the process, this was proof that the museum’s approach had been overly hasty. It also raised questions about how much the museum really knew about the 19 others.

“What does this suggest about the thoroughness of the research?” asked Dr. Mitchell, whose report first called attention to Black Philadelphians in the collection, and who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Dr. Mitchell said he welcomed Penn’s openness to returning human remains but contrasted it with what he saw as the more meticulous approach taken by some other institutions. “Frankly, how you carry out this process of repair is really important,” he said.

A spokesperson for the museum said that archival research into the identities was continuing, and that the museum was working with an independent genealogy expert.

Compounding the anger of the museum’s critics, word spread days before Saturday’s ceremony that the actual interment had taken place quietly on Jan. 22. “It was shocking,” said Mx. Muhammad, who like many had understood the Feb. 3 ceremony to involve the burial itself, as the website seemed to suggest.

Members of the museum committee said separating the physical burial from the public ceremony had always been the plan given the logistical complications of burial. The spokesperson said the museum had informed people about it beforehand in a release sent to the museum’s email list.

Beyond prayers, hymns and a drum procession, the event on Saturday was as much an act of atonement as a memorial. Several university officials, all of them Black, apologized for what the provost, John L. Jackson Jr., called the “sordid history” behind the Morton collection.

As attendees left the commemoration, many of them heading to a graveside service at the cemetery, people affiliated with Finding Ceremony stood outside the auditorium handing out fliers. The fliers questioned the museum’s claims about the identities of some of the 19 who had been entombed and gave crumbs of biography known about the others.

“She was born before 1760 and lived to the age of 80,” read one. “Wherever she was born, she was almost certainly enslaved for decades. By the time she died in Philadelphia, she was free.”

A line of trucks and campers, cars and vans — from South Dakota and North Carolina, Washington and Pennsylvania — snaked over farm roads on Saturday before gathering on the winter-brown grass of a ranch, steps from the Rio Grande, in the rural community of Quemado, Texas.

The gathering marked the final stop of a days-long journey: a convoy of conservative Americans who drove to the border to demonstrate their frustration, fear and anger over what they saw as a broken immigration system.

The location in Quemado had been chosen for its proximity to the city of Eagle Pass, a flashpoint in the pitched confrontation over border security and immigration between the Biden administration and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas. Other convoys this week reached the border in Yuma, Ariz., and San Ysidro, Calif., all with the goal of spurring tighter controls on migrants crossing the border.

Concerns over potential violence followed the convoys as the federal government and Republican state leaders appeared to be on an increasingly imminent collision course. In December, the federal government recorded 302,000 encounters with unauthorized migrants, the record for a month.

In the end, the rally in Texas — part political protest, part Christian revival — attracted a modest crowd to the ranch, and no outbreaks of violence. Many in attendance were retired and had decided to make the trip almost spontaneously after having heard about it on social media or the local news.

“We slept in the car,” said George Barton, 73, who chose to join the caravan as it passed through his hometown, Dripping Springs, Texas. He came with his wife, Terrie, 71, who wrote along the side of their white sport utility vehicle: “Immigration is good! Invasion is bad!” Their 9-year-old dog, Rudy, also came.

“I do know that there are laws and they are not being upheld,” Ms. Barton said.

“I appreciate them coming here,” said Elias Mata, 70, a resident of Eagle Pass, as he walked through the rally. “I think Greg Abbott is doing the right thing.” He said that his wife, who declined to give her name, had emigrated from Mexico. She said she agreed, adding, “I love the U.S.A.”

The rally, across a farm road from the Rio Grande and the border with Mexico, took place against the backdrop of an intensifying legal fight between Texas and the federal government over the unfurling of miles of concertina wire in Eagle Pass and the takeover of a riverside municipal park by state law enforcement officers.

The courtroom battle has attracted heated rhetoric, with Mr. Abbott and others describing the record number of migrants entering the country as an “invasion.”

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Texas, saying that federal border agents could continue cutting or removing concertina wire while the case proceeds, many Republican state leaders publicly expressed defiance in terms that echoed armed conflicts.

“Come and take it,” wrote Senator Ted Cruz on social media, borrowing the slogan from a flag flown during the Texas war of independence, in this case replacing an image of a cannon with concertina wire. The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, posted a similar image, adding a silhouette of the Alamo.

Amid the conflict with the federal government last month, an original version of the flag, dating to 1835, flew over the headquarters of the Texas Military Department.

At the gathering on Saturday, several people wore T-shirts with versions of the same slogan and imagery.

Responding to reports of threats of violence against migrants or federal border patrol processing centers in Texas, a spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Saturday that the agency was taking “appropriate and necessary actions to keep our employees and migrants in our custody safe.”

Some attendees at the Texas rally spoke of their concern that political divisions in the country could lead to a civil war, including one of the organizers, Rod Parker, a revivalist pastor.

“I hope I’m wrong,” Mr. Parker said. “We’re here to pray against that.” He then excused himself to help baptize a woman near the stage.

The Republican governors of 25 states said that they would stand alongside Texas in its confrontation with the federal government. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said this week that he would send hundreds of his state’s National Guard troops “to assist Texas in its efforts to stop the invasion at the southern border.”

More than a dozen Republican governors were expected to join Mr. Abbott on Sunday in Shelby Park, the Eagle Pass park that has become a flashpoint in the conflict.

Democrats as well as immigration and civil rights groups have accused Mr. Abbott and other Republicans of inflaming an already heated issue.

“This moment reminds us of what happened on Jan. 6,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of America’s Voice, an immigrant rights group, referring to the storming of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald J. Trump.

In the last two years, Mr. Abbott has steadily expanded his program of state-level enforcement at the border, known as Operation Lone Star. Much of that effort has concentrated on Eagle Pass, a city of about 28,000 that has become, during the Biden administration, a popular crossing point for large groups of migrants. Most have arrived looking to surrender to federal agents for processing and possible release into the country.

Later this month, Mr. Abbott will be back in court to defend his latest expansion of the program: a new law, set to go into effect in March, that will allow law enforcement officers across Texas to arrest migrants who cross without permission from Mexico. The Biden administration has sued, arguing that the act violates the federal government’s authority over immigration law.

The Texas portion of Saturday’s rallies had initially been aimed at Eagle Pass. But organizers decided instead to hold it on the Cornerstone Children’s Ranch, about 20 miles north of the city, and urged those participating not to travel to the city, to avoid any potential confrontations there.

“We are flat-out telling people: Do not go to Eagle Pass,” said Anson Bills, operations manager at the Cornerstone Children’s Ranch.

On Saturday, few people seemed interested in making that trip. Many sat in folding chairs and listened to Christian music and speeches. “It’s like a Trump rally without Trump,” said Tom Welch, 25, who had traveled with his mother from St. Louis.

The overtly religious nature of the gathering was not what some had expected, and some appeared a bit disappointed. “I was looking for the heathens, but there are none,” said Wayne Harris, 75, who had traveled from costal Rockport, Texas. “I’m at the wrong place. I believe, and I pray. But I thought this was going to be a Trump rally.”

Hamed Aleaziz contributed reporting.

As Iran and the United States assessed the damage done by American airstrikes in Syria and Iraq on Friday, the initiative suddenly shifted to Tehran and its pending decision whether to respond or to take the hit and de-escalate.

The expectation in Washington and among its allies is that the Iranians will choose the latter course, seeing no benefit in getting into a shooting war with a far larger power, with all the risks that implies. But it is not yet clear whether the varied proxy forces that have conducted scores of attacks on American bases and ships — and that rely on Iran for money, arms and intelligence — will conclude that their interests, too, are served by backing off.

The Houthis, an Iran-backed rebel group that controls parts of Yemen, have continued to attack ships in the Red Sea despite a series of American strikes, including one on Saturday, meant to deter them.

Friday’s strikes were largely in retaliation for a drone attack by an Iran-backed militia that killed three American soldiers in Jordan on Jan. 28. The United States hit back at that group and several other Iran-backed militias with 85 targeted strikes. In the aftermath, American officials insisted there was no back-channel discussion with Tehran, no quiet agreement that the United States would not strike directly at Iran.

“There’s been no communications with Iran since the attack,” John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, told reporters on a call on Friday night after the retaliatory strikes were completed.

But even without direct conversation, there has been plenty of signaling, in both directions.

President Biden is engaged in a military, diplomatic and election-year gamble that he can first restore some semblance of deterrence in the region, then help orchestrate a “pause” or cease-fire in Gaza to allow for hostage exchanges with Israel and then, in the biggest challenge of all, try to reshape the dynamics of the region.

But it is all happening in an area of the world that he hoped, just five months ago, could be kept on the back burner while he focused on competition with China and the war in Ukraine, and in the middle of a campaign where his opponents, led by former President Donald J. Trump, will declare almost any move a sign of weakness.

For their part, the Iranians have been broadcasting in public that they want to lower the temperature — on the attacks, even on their quickly advancing nuclear program — though their ultimate objective, to drive the U.S. out of the region once and for all, remains unchanged.

Their first response to the military strikes on Saturday morning was notably mild.

“The attack last night on Syria and Iraq is an adventurous action and another strategic mistake by the American government which will have no result other than increasing tensions and destabilizing the region,” said Nasser Kanaani, a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry.

Until Friday night, every military action by the United States has been calibrated and cautious, the hallmark of Mr. Biden’s approach. The deaths of the American soldiers forced his hand, though, administration officials said.

He had to make clear that the United States would seek to dismantle many of the capabilities of the groups that call themselves the “Axis of Resistance.” That’s a reference to the concept that unites a fractious, often undisciplined group of militias — opposition to Israel, and to its chief backer, the United States.

And the strikes, Mr. Biden’s advisers quickly concluded, had to aim at facilities used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

But the president made the decision to strike largely at facilities and command centers, without aiming to decapitate the force’s leadership or threatening Iran directly.

There was no serious consideration of striking inside Iran, one senior administration official said after the first round of strikes was complete. And the telegraphing of the hit gave Iranians and their proxies time to evacuate senior commanders and other personnel from their bases, and disperse them in safe houses.

To Mr. Biden’s critics, this is too much calibration, too much caution.

“The overriding intellectual construct of Biden foreign policy is avoidance of escalation,” said Kori Schake, a former defense official in the George W. Bush administration who directs foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

“They are not wrong to be worried about escalation,” she said. “But they don’t take into account that it encourages our adversaries. We often seem more worried about fighting wars we can win, and that encourages them to manipulate our fear.”

For Ms. Schake, who was an early leader of the “Never Trump” camp of Republican national security officials, there is a middle ground between attacking Iran and focusing on the proxy groups, like Kataib Hezbollah and the Houthis, that have struck American forces. Mr. Biden could make clear, she said, that officers of the Revolutionary Guards force “are targets anytime they set foot outside of Iran.”

But Iran’s leaders have indicated that they will retaliate for such attacks, as they did after Mr. Trump ordered the assassination of Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ most elite unit, the Quds Force, in Baghdad in 2020.

“If an oppressive and bullying power wants to bully,” President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran said on Friday, “the Islamic Republic will deliver a stern answer.”

Mr. Biden’s decision to mount the strike with B-1B bombers that took off from the continental United States carried its own message, of course: While Pentagon officials said the B-1B’s were the best bomber available for the complexity of these strikes, they were also the same warplanes that would be used in any attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, should Tehran decide to make a final sprint for a nuclear weapon. Nothing reminds Tehran of the reach of American power more than a strike next door, one official said on Saturday morning.

What seems overcautious to some in Washington is still seen as hostile in the region. The Syrian defense ministry called the attack a “blatant air aggression,” not addressing the fact that the Assad government had let these militias operate from territory it ostensibly controls. Iraq’s government, which Washington has been trying not to destabilize, said that 16 people had been killed and 25 wounded on its territory, and that the attacks were “a threat that will drag Iraq and the region into unforeseen consequences.”

But the Iranians themselves were slow to respond, and even then they pointed to the war in Gaza, not the United States, as the culprit. In a statement, Mr. Kanaani, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that the “roots of the tension and crisis in the region go back to the occupation by the Israeli regime and the continuation of this regime’s military operations in Gaza and the genocide of the Palestinians with the unlimited support of the United States.”

And when Kataib Hezbollah, a group that U.S. intelligence believes was involved in the deadly Jordan attack, declared earlier this week that it would no longer target American forces, it made clear that it was pressured by Iran and Iraq — and wasn’t happy about it.

It was a revealing moment about the two strategies that Iran appears to be pursuing. The first is a short-term approach related to the war in Gaza, where proxies have opened multiple fronts against Israel and escalated attacks on American bases to pressure Washington, which they see as Israel’s backer, to get a cease-fire. One senior American official noted recently that when a brief pause was declared in November and hostages were exchanged, the proxies suspended their attacks.

But there is a longer-term aim by Iran: to drive Americans out of the region with the help of its proxies in Iraq and Syria.

“This is not an all-or-nothing moment for Iran — this is just one dot on a much longer plotline of Iran’s strategic agenda in the Middle East,” said Afshon Ostovar, an associate professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and an expert on Iran’s military.

“Iran can suffer as many Iraqi and Syrian casualties as it likes,” he said. “It doesn’t feel compelled to respond to the deaths of proxy militants. But if Iranians are killed, it’s different.”

“For Iran this is a long war, not a short war, and this has nothing to do with Gaza,” Dr. Ostovar said. It is, he said, “about Iran’s steady, long march across the Middle East to push out U.S. forces and weaken U.S. allies.”

The evidence of the past few years suggests that military action by the United States may degrade capabilities, but it does not create long-term deterrence. After the drone strike that killed General Suleimani, Mr. Trump claimed it would stop Iran and its proxies from attacking Americans and their allies. It led to a pause, but not a halt.

Negotiation has done more, but not much more. When Washington and Tehran, through indirect negotiations that involved Oman and Qatar, negotiated last year for the release of $6 billion in frozen oil revenues in exchange for a detainee swap, attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria diminished significantly.

But that fell apart after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, resulting in roughly 1,200 Israeli deaths and setting off the Gaza war. Iran and its proxies have maintained that if a permanent cease-fire is reached in Gaza, things will again quiet down. But it is still unclear whether the cease-fire, or even another temporary pause, can be negotiated. And the history of the Middle East suggests the quiet may not be long-lived.

President Biden is sitting out the Super Bowl for the second year in a row.

CBS said on Saturday that the White House had turned down a request for Mr. Biden to participate in a televised interview with its news division, which would have aired in the highly rated hours ahead of the big game on Feb. 11.

In a tradition dating to 2009, presidents have recorded an interview with the network that broadcasts the Super Bowl, although there have been exceptions. Donald J. Trump did not appear on NBC in 2018. Last year, Mr. Biden declined to appear on Fox, home of cable hosts like Sean Hannity who are sharply hostile toward him.

But the White House has been receptive to CBS News in the past. The president was interviewed by the “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell ahead of the 2021 Super Bowl, and he participated in two lengthy “60 Minutes” pieces, in 2022 and 2023, with the correspondent Scott Pelley.

“We hope viewers enjoy watching what they tuned in for — the game,” Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, said in a statement on Saturday.

The Super Bowl, typically the most-watched telecast of the year, offers an unusually large audience for a sitting president to address current events and advance his agenda to the public.

And there is plenty of news for Mr. Biden to comment on. Starting on Friday, the United States carried out military strikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Three American soldiers were killed last Sunday in Jordan. The government just released a positive jobs report. And Mr. Biden is ramping up his re-election campaign as Mr. Trump has moved closer to clinching the Republican nomination.

In 2021, Mr. Biden’s pregame interview with Ms. O’Donnell was seen live by about 10.2 million viewers; millions more viewed clips that aired on other CBS programs in the days surrounding the game.

For this year’s event, CBS offered the White House about 15 minutes for an interview with Mr. Biden, with three to four minutes airing live during the pregame coverage on the network, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

Mr. Biden has conducted fewer media interviews than his most recent predecessors. The president’s last major network interview took place in October, with Mr. Pelley of CBS. His State of the Union address is scheduled for March 7.

Katie Rogers contributed reporting from Washington.

Forest fires ripping through central Chile’s coastal hills since Friday have killed at least 19 people and destroyed more than 1,000 homes, with many more feared dead, according to the national government.

The wildfires are encroaching on Viña del Mar and Valparaíso, two cities that form a sprawling region that is home to more than one million people on Chile’s central coastline, about 75 miles northeast of the capital, Santiago.

Just after midday, President Gabriel Boric flew over the area in a helicopter, and said his government had worked to “secure the greatest resources” in Chile’s history to fight the blazes during the country’s wildfire season, which typically hits during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer and reaches a peak in February.

“I assure you all that we will be there as a government to help you recover,” he wrote on the social media platform X.

On Friday night, President Boric issued a constitutional decree granting his government additional powers to combat the fires.

The Chilean wildfires come as Colombia has also been battling blazes in the mountains around Bogotá, the capital, as dozens of other blazes have burned across the country, in what officials say is the hottest January there in three decades. Climatologists have linked the extreme dryness there and wildfires to warming trends afflicting South America.

Various Chilean agencies, as well as the country’s air force, have deployed 92 planes to fly over the fires dropping water. The government has also issued a steady trickle of evacuation notices, mixed with pleas for calm.

Makeshift refuges and support centers have sprung up in several towns, with local authorities calling for donations of drinking water, mattresses, blankets and food.

The interior ministry imposed a 9 p.m. Saturday curfew in Viña del Mar as well as in several nearby towns.

On Saturday morning, Chile’s interior minister, Carolina Tohá, announced that 15 of the 19 victims had been identified so far, among them a 17-year-old girl.

Ms. Tohá warned that the death toll was likely to rise once authorities gained access to the affected areas. She added that 92 fires were still burning nationwide — 29 of which are still being fought and 40 of which have been brought are under control — with more than 160 square miles of land already having been ravaged by the fires.

The mayor of Viña del Mar, Macarena Ripamonti, said that in addition to the confirmed fatalities, 249 more people had been reported missing.

Eight areas of the city have been evacuated, including patients from a hospital clinic whom police and firefighters have moved to other facilities.

This January was the second hottest on record in Santiago; the hottest was in 2017, a year also affected by the El Niño weather phenomenon, which typically brings high temperatures and heavy rainfall to the Pacific Coast of South America.

While wildfires afflict central and southern Chile each summer, the regional director of Chile’s national forestry commission for Valparaíso, Leonardo Moder, said that one of the fires appeared to have been started deliberately and was racing toward Viña del Mar.

Valparaíso’s City Council has begun a criminal investigation, officials said.

Speaker Mike Johnson pledged Saturday that the House would hold a vote next week on legislation to speed $17.6 billion in security assistance to Israel with no strings attached, a move likely to complicate Senate leaders’ efforts to rally support for a broader package with border security measures and aid to Ukraine.

Mr. Johnson’s announcement to members of his conference came as senators were scrambling to finalize and vote on a bipartisan national security bill that has taken months to negotiate. The move could further erode G.O.P. support for the emerging compromise, which was already flagging under criticism from party leaders like Mr. Johnson and former President Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has said that the Senate package would be dead on arrival in the House, arguing its border security measures are not stringent enough to clamp down on a recent surge of immigration. In a letter to his members Saturday, he said that the House would prioritize its own approach to helping Israel’s war effort against Hamas, regardless of what — if any — related legislation the Senate might produce.

“Their leadership is aware that by failing to include the House in their negotiations, they have eliminated the ability for swift consideration of any legislation,” Mr. Johnson wrote, adding that “the House will have to work its will on these issues and our priorities will need to be addressed.”

Senate negotiators have been working on a sweeping national security funding bill to address Republican demands that any legislation sending military aid to Ukraine also significantly improve security at the southern border with Mexico. The emerging legislation, which includes measures making it more difficult to claim asylum and increasing both detentions and deportations, would also send more military aid to Ukraine and Israel, dedicate humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza and fund efforts to counter Chinese threats to the Indo-Pacific region.

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, announced this week that the Senate would vote no later than Wednesday on whether to take up the bill, the text of which negotiators are expected to publicize no later than Sunday.

But the measure is already facing stiff headwinds from Senate Republicans who think the border enforcement provisions ought to be tougher, as well as those loath to take a politically challenging vote for a bill that is all but assured to die at the G.O.P.-led House’s door.

Several Republicans in the Senate and the House have clamored for a split approach that would address Israel’s war effort separately from Ukraine and the border. Late last year, the Democratic-led Senate rejected a G.O.P. attempt to force a vote on an earlier Israel aid bill that was backed by the House. Democrats objected to the way that the House G.O.P. bill sought to pay for the funds, by making cuts to the Internal Revenue Service.

In his letter Saturday, Mr. Johnson acknowledged that history.

“Democrats made clear that their primary objection to the original House bill was with its offsets,” he wrote, adding that with the new Israel package, “the Senate will no longer have excuses, however misguided, against swift passage of this critical support for our ally.”

Target has pulled from its stores an educational magnet collection that misidentified three Black leaders, after a high school history teacher called attention to the errors in a TikTok video.

In the video, the teacher, Tierra Espy, said she bought the “Civil Rights Magnetic Learning Activity,” a tin case of 26 magnets and informational cards featuring illustrations of Black leaders and slogans from the civil rights movement, for Black History Month, which is celebrated in the United States in February.

“I noticed some discrepancies, like, as soon as I opened this,” she said in the video, pointing out that a magnet labeled Carter G. Woodson, a scholar of African American history, actually pictured W.E.B. DuBois, the sociologist and author of “The Souls of Black Folk.”

“Peep the ’stache,” she said, referring to a picture of DuBois on the internet with the same mustache as the figure in the magnet mislabeled as Woodson. “They got the name wrong.”

She also pointed to a magnet that was mislabeled as DuBois. It actually pictured Booker T. Washington, the business leader and founding president of the college that became Tuskegee University. Similarly, a magnet labeled Washington actually depicted Woodson, she said.

Ms. Espy said the accompanying cards also misidentified Woodson, DuBois and Washington.

“I get it, mistakes happen, but this needs to be corrected ASAP,” Ms. Espy said in the video.

In an interview on Saturday, Ms. Espy, 26, who teaches 11th-grade U.S. history at Cheyenne High School in North Las Vegas, said she bought the tin of magnets for her children, ages 4 and 6, as an educational tool for Black History Month.

Ms. Espy said she was alarmed to discover the mistakes.

“I was upset because I was like, how does this get to so many people, so many levels, and put into stores, and I caught it in 10 seconds?” she said. “Whoa, this is not OK.”

Bendon Publishing, which produces books of stickers, dress-up dolls and other magnet kits, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but on Saturday, the magnet kit was not listed among its titles on the company’s website and Amazon page.

Target said in a statement that it would no longer sell the kit online or in its stores, and that it had “ensured the product’s publisher is aware of the errors.”

Black scholars initiated a project to share and celebrate Black history in the early 20th century after Reconstruction.

Black History Month began as Negro History and Literature Week, spearheaded by Dr. Woodson, known as the “father of Black history,” in 1924. It was officially recognized by President Gerald Ford in 1976.