We deliberately published today’s news briefs a little later than usual. But these 4 stories, including 2 major in-depth articles, show what 2026 looks like. Solidarity and courage are the words this year needs. Especially when looking the other way would be easier.

Trump’s press ban: Journalists are turned away at the White House entrance while administration staff are still looking for an explanation for the order. Independent journalism takes the courage to refuse to be silenced, even when the president himself orders journalists shut out.

123 dead children in Minab: American missiles struck an elementary school whose military classification had long been outdated. Our in-depth reporting shows how outdated information and a rushed target review led to a catastrophe for which Washington has still not publicly accepted responsibility.

Four stories in a single day. Children die under missiles and drones, people on boats are killed, and journalists are turned away at the doors of the White House. Solidarity and courage cannot remain pretty words for Sunday speeches in 2026. They are needed wherever people, peace, and democracy are under threat..

Three children killed near Kyiv: A Russian drone strikes a home, killing a mother and her two 3-year-old children. Another girl dies in the hospital after an attack in a different district.

Four stories from a single day of news. Solidarity means not losing sight of the people affected. Courage means continuing to look, ask questions, and report, even when the answers are uncomfortable.

Trump’s Press Ban: First the Expulsion, Then the Search for an Explanation

On Friday, Donald Trump announced that three news organizations were no longer allowed to enter the White House, effective immediately. His justification was that they had allegedly lied in their reporting about the president. More news organizations could follow. On Saturday, journalists from two of the affected outlets were actually denied access to the grounds. Behind the doors of the White House, staff members were still searching for an explanation for an order they themselves had learned about only through their president’s public post. The order apparently caught the White House just as off guard as the journalists being shut out. According to conversations with 3 people close to the administration, numerous senior staff members knew nothing about the plan before the post went up. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was out of town. The White House press office was blindsided, too. Asked how the ban was supposed to be justified or enforced, one staffer simply pointed back to Trump’s social media post. The president had made a decision; his people were left to figure out afterward what they were supposed to do with it.

One person close to the White House said Trump had tried to exclude certain news organizations before. At one point, he had even considered moving the press into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Staff members had talked him out of it back then. This time, apparently, they could not. The administration was taking the new order seriously. As far as the president was concerned, it was a real and permanent decision, the person familiar with the situation said. How permanent a ban could be when nobody had yet worked out how to enforce it was left unanswered.

On Saturday, the announced ban was put into effect. MS NOW officially confirmed that its journalists had had their press credentials revoked and had been denied access to the White House grounds. The company said it would take every necessary step to defend its First Amendment rights and the essential role of independent journalism in a democracy. CNN also confirmed that its reporters had been denied entry. Its reporting on the American government would continue regardless of any attempts to restrict access to government buildings or otherwise interfere with its journalistic work.

Whether journalists from the third affected outlet had also been turned away at the entrance was not clear from the available reports. The announced ban, however, covered all three news organizations. Less than a day passed between Trump’s public announcement and the confirmed denials of entry. No detailed explanation from the administration had emerged during that time. Access to the government was already being restricted while people inside the White House were still discussing the decision.

More than 12 current and former members of Trump’s administration were contacted about what had happened. They were given the opportunity to speak confidentially about internal discussions. The move was met with bewilderment among them as well. Other administration officials reached out on their own to express their surprise. Their reactions paint a picture of a White House where the president presented his staff with a public order and left them to deal with a decision that had already been made. Whoever was standing at the entrances the next morning had to carry out an order whose origins even longtime confidants could not explain.

Shortly after publishing his post on Friday, Trump answered questions from journalists in the Oval Office during a previously scheduled event on healthcare. He had little to say about the reasons for his ban. He again complained about alleged fake news and pointed to the accumulated reporting over the preceding period. He had not identified any particular story as the reason for his decision. Instead, his explanation covered the accumulated articles and reports that had displeased him over an extended period. After months of low approval ratings for the president and key initiatives of his administration, the question of why he had chosen this particular moment to take such a step also went unanswered.

A possible expansion of the ban, meanwhile, was already being discussed internally. Another person close to the White House said additional news organizations were under consideration. Trump himself had named 2 major American newspapers on Friday as possible next targets. There was no final list. The number of news organizations the president wanted to deny access to could therefore grow before the administration had even presented a recognizable basis for the first round of exclusions.

The episode recalls an earlier dispute with one of the outlets now affected. In February 2025, the administration canceled its subscription to that outlet’s paid political information services after falsely claiming that the previous administration had used them to subsidize the publication itself with government money. That claim had been debunked. Trump nevertheless repeated it on Friday. Back then, White House staff had backed up his accusations with prepared statements. This time, even that coordinated response was missing. Reports from inside the administration spoke mainly of confusion.

One of the banned networks was still scheduled to handle the shared television coverage from the White House on Monday. The president’s office had not yet contacted the heads of the other four networks to change the rotation. That left an outlet whose journalists had been denied entry on Saturday still listed on the schedule. We will continue to keep an eye on the schedules. The president had publicly announced the ban, and his staff at the entrances had already enforced it. Yet the banned network remained on the schedule for the shared coverage, at least for the time being.

123 Dead Children, an Outdated Target, and the Machine They Trusted Too Much

On February 28, two American Tomahawk missiles struck Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in the Iranian city of Minab. More than 150 people were killed, including at least 123 children. Within hours, Pentagon personnel knew that the United States was responsible for the attack. At that point, the school’s rubble was still lying exposed. The American government has yet to publicly accept responsibility.

According to officials involved in the internal investigation, the disaster resulted from a series of preventable failures. Years earlier, the site had been cataloged as a facility belonging to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. By then, however, a school stood there, with its own website and a publicly marked location on maps. Satellite images showed new walls and separate entrances by 2017 at the latest. Images from 2018 showed a soccer field and brightly painted walls. An American intelligence analyst had noticed changes to the site as early as 2019. His observation, however, ended up in a system that was not connected to the main military intelligence database used for targeting.

When the Trump administration demanded an overwhelming aerial assault in late February, little time remained for the final review. More than 1,000 targets were struck within the first 24 hours. According to officials involved in the investigation, work that had previously taken hours was compressed into minutes with the help of the Maven system. The site in Minab, still carrying its outdated classification as a Revolutionary Guard facility, made it onto the list of priority targets. Maven was developed by the American company Palantir Technologies and combines information from more than 150 data sources. Some personnel at US Central Command, which was responsible for the attack, apparently expected the artificial intelligence to identify outdated information and inconsistencies on its own. Why they relied on it to do so remains unclear. Palantir said the company was responsible neither for the underlying data nor for identifying intelligence gaps; there was no evidence that its software had malfunctioned. After the attack, Maven received additional features designed to identify conflicting information and flag unsuitable targets.

The machine was fed data whose reliability should have been checked by human beings. The ultimate responsibility still rested with the military.

Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, staffing for civilian protection had previously been cut drastically. According to people involved in the investigation, several teams responsible for that work had been reduced by around 90 percent, leaving fewer than 20 employees in total. At US Central Command, a team of 10 had been reduced to 1. Nobody from that specialist team reviewed the Minab target before the attack. Such a review was not mandatory, but it had become routine in recent years. Whether it would have prevented the disaster cannot be determined.

On the morning of February 28, parents were already picking up their children from school after reports of attacks began coming in. Shortly after 11 a.m., the first missile struck. Teachers brought children in from the schoolyard and took them into a prayer room. Minutes later, the second missile hit. Part of the roof collapsed. Only a few children survived beneath the rubble in the prayer room. Some parents could identify their children afterward only by pieces of clothing. The father of 7-year-old Arash Gol-Azin recognized his son in the morgue by a sock.

According to officials involved in the investigation, approximately 36 people had participated in the military targeting process before the missiles were launched. That process ended with approval from a senior commander. The site was a lawful target, the intelligence was sufficient, and reasonable precautions had been taken to protect civilians. Those were the answers he had been given. Investigators later concluded that there had been a high degree of confidence throughout the entire decision-making process in the building’s incorrect classification. One Pentagon official involved in the investigation acknowledged that Minab had shown why people should never be too confident in their intelligence.

The United Nations’ independent fact-finding mission on Iran has since concluded that the United States failed in its obligation to take every feasible measure to verify the target. That failure went beyond negligence. The mission found reasonable grounds to believe that the attack on the school and another American attack on the same day amounted to war crimes. Admiral Brad Cooper, who ordered the investigation, promised Congress transparency in May. The report has been nearly complete for months but has still not been released. The Pentagon continues to cite the ongoing investigation. Questions from more than 120 lawmakers about the role of artificial intelligence also remain unanswered publicly. Senator Jack Reed accuses the department of deliberately withholding the investigation’s findings. Republican Senator Thom Tillis is also demanding a briefing for Congress.

At the Pentagon, the case is still open. In Minab, the families have long since buried their children.

Four More Dead in the Caribbean: US Military Continues Strikes on Boats

On Saturday, the US military carried out another strike on a boat in the Caribbean and said it had killed 4 people. The US military’s Southern Command said confirmed intelligence had established that the vessel was involved in drug trafficking. The military provided no evidence to support that allegation in its statement. The footage shows a projectile approaching a boat. Moments later, 4 people are dead, and the available information offers no further details about their identities or their possible involvement in drug trafficking.

The Trump administration describes people aboard such vessels as “narco-terrorists” and has been carrying out a military campaign against suspected smuggling boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since last year. Just 10 days earlier, the military reported another strike in the Caribbean that killed 3 people. Since the campaign began, American strikes on vessels have killed more than 220 people. The administration is treating suspicion of drug trafficking as grounds for deadly military force, with no indication in the available statements that the people targeted had faced any court proceedings.

Human rights organizations describe the strikes as extrajudicial killings. Washington is sticking with its approach. Southern Command cites intelligence findings to justify the latest operation, but the public has been given no information that would allow it to verify the allegations against the 4 people killed. The boat has been destroyed, and its occupants can no longer speak for themselves. The next report from the Caribbean could once again consist of a short video, a military statement, and a death toll.

Russian Drones Kill 3 Children and a Mother: 2 of the Children Were Only 3 Years Old

A mother and her two 3-year-old children were inside their home when a Russian drone struck. All 3 were killed. In another district of the Kyiv region, a separate attack struck a girl. She later died in the hospital. According to Ukrainian authorities, the latest wave of Russian attacks has claimed four lives, including three children. Behind that number are two children who had barely begun to discover the world and a mother who lived with them under the same roof. The war reached them in the place where a child should be able to sleep without the sky becoming a threat.

According to regional governor Tymur Tkachenko, the attacks lasted for more than a day. A total of 31 sites were damaged across 5 districts. The southwestern Fastiv district was hit hardest: Authorities recorded damage at 24 sites there, including homes and industrial buildings. Utility facilities were also struck. Damage was reported on the grounds of an agricultural enterprise and to vehicles as well. While people were still trying to take stock of the destruction, the confirmed death toll rose to 4.

For weeks, Russia has repeatedly attacked the Ukrainian capital and the surrounding Kyiv region with drones. The latest deaths show what these continuing attacks mean for families trying to live in their homes and preserve some semblance of an ordinary life. There was no saving the mother and her two children after the drone struck. The girl from the other district made it to a hospital but died there from her injuries. In the Kyiv region, officials are now recording the damage at 31 sites. Four people are missing from that tally forever.