An F-15E Strike Eagle weapons load crew team attaches an AIM-120D to a pylon July 15, 2019, at Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Chris Thornbury)
WASHINGTON — An American F-15E fighter jet has been downed by Iranian forces while operating over the country, a US official confirmed to Breaking Defense.
A search and rescue operation for its crew is underway, the official said. Videos posted online show a C-130 and two Black Hawk helicopters flying low in what observers say appears to be southwestern Iran, whose operations would seem consistent with a search-and-rescue mission.
An F-15E flies with two crew, a pilot and weapon systems officer. Unconfirmed photos circulating on social media appeared to show the wreckage of a US Air Force F-15 aircraft, and Iranian media has claimed the government took the jet down and that a search is underway for the pilots.
US Central Command (CENTCOM) did not immediately respond to Breaking Defense’s request for comment.
The aircraft’s loss would be the first time a manned American jet was known to be downed over enemy territory during the war in Iran, dubbed Operation Epic Fury by the Pentagon. The US has lost 16 unmanned MQ-9 Reaper drones over the course of the conflict, CBS reported.
The jet’s downing comes after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday claimed that an “increase in air superiority” has permitted large and relatively vulnerable B-52 Stratofortress bombers to conduct its first “overland missions” into Iran during the war.
The fighter jet downed over Iran would be the fourth F-15E lost in Epic Fury.On March 1, three F-15Es were shot down over Kuwait in what CENTCOM called an “apparent friendly fire incident.” All six crew members involved in that incident ejected and were safely recovered.
A US Air Force F-35 stealth fighter was also reportedly struck by Iranian ground fire March 19, but the pilot was able to safely land the aircraft despite shrapnel wounds. CENTCOM has not publicly confirmed that incident.
Two American KC-135 Stratotanker air refueling aircraft were also separately involved in a March 12 accident over Iraq. One tanker crashed, killing six crew members aboard. The other aircraft landed safely. CENTCOM said that the event was not due to enemy fire.
In a nationwide address April 1, President Donald Trump asserted the US was “very close” to achieving its military objectives in Iran, while pledging to “hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.” He did not articulate a clear timeline for the conflict to end.
“We are going to finish the job, and we’re going to finish it very fast,” he said.
Seymour Hersh, the journalist who correctly predicted the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities and broke the Nord Stream story, says Trump’s speech was a ground war announcement: “Trump was telling the world that the ground war is on as of today.Thousands of Navy SEALs and Army Rangers are either en route or soon will be to zones within striking range of the Strait of Hormuz.”
He says Trump could have 50,000 fighters ready to clear the Strait or dig out enriched uranium from tunnels under the nuclear sites.
Hersh has one of the best track records in investigative journalism. He doesn’t say things like this casually. If he’s right, then Trump’s speech wasn’t about ending the war. It was about starting the next phase of it, one the public hasn’t been told about yet.
Norman T. Roule is, for many in and out of government, a go-to source for understanding Iran and the Middle East. He is a 34-year veteran of the CIA and, from 2008–2017, was the national intelligence manager for Iran at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He lived many years in the Middle East. It’s an important moment in the region as the Iranian war continues. We will talk about many things, including the status of the war, President Trump’s speech to the nation, regime change, the relationship between the United States and Israel, how the war started and how it ends, the Straits of Hormuz, the price of oil, and the global economy. A Charlie Rose Global Conversation
The Rundown:Google reportedly plans to power a new AI data center in Texas with a gas power plant that could emit about 4.5M tons of CO₂ a year, in what critics say is a major rollback from its earlier 2030 carbon‑free energy goals.
The details:
Google confirmed it is partnering with Crusoe on the Goodnight data center campus in Texas, where Crusoe has filed for a 933 MW gas plant.The data center could cost nearly $30B, and the gas plant could emit roughly 4.5M tons of CO₂ annually — more yearly emissions than San Francisco.Unlike Google’s recent gas deal in Illinois, the Goodnight plant reportedly has no carbon capture technology whatsoever.Google confirmed the partnership but says no offtake agreement for the gas plant has been signed.
Why it matters: Google built its brand on climate leadership — it pioneered 24/7 carbon-free energy and has signed more than 22 gigawatts of clean energy power purchase agreements. A bare-gas, no-capture plant of this scale is a different animal entirely, but Google says surging AI demand is outpacing the clean energy buildout.
Brain-training games promise to enhance our cognitive skills, but their effectiveness remains a controversial topic. What does research tell us about activities that actually benefit our brains? Discover the scientifically proven strategies to boost your mental functions and preserve your cognitive health.
The cognitive decline associated with aging worries many people, prompting them to look for ways to keep their brains in shape. In response to this concern, the brain-training industry has flourished, offering games that supposedly enhance our mental abilities. But do these apps truly live up to their promises? Cognitive neuroscience researchershave studied the real impact of various activities on brain function, revealing promising approaches for preserving mental agility.
Enhance cognitive skills
The limitations of traditional brain-training games
Brain-training games typically rely on exercises targeting specific cognitive skills, such as attention or working memory. For example, some games ask players to quickly identify letters or numbers according to changing rules. The goal is to train the brain’s executive functions, which are crucial for mental flexibility.
However, scientific studies struggle to demonstrate the effectiveness of these games beyond the tasks they train. In 2016, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission even fined Lumosity, one of the leaders in the market, $50 million for false advertising. The transfer of skills acquired in these games to real-life situations remains limited.
Nevertheless, some games not specifically designed for brain training show surprising positive effects:
Educational game alternatives
Tetris improves mental rotation skills.
Real-time strategy games enhance cognitive flexibility.
Super Mario 64 increases the volume of the hippocampus, the brain’s memory hub.
The Synapse Project study compared the impact of various activities on adults’ cognitive functions. The results were revealing: participants who engaged in new and stimulating activities showed significant improvements in memory, processing speed, and reasoning. The chosen tasks, such as digital photography or quilting, had several key characteristics:
Enhance cognitive skills
A significant intellectual challenge.
Learning new skills.
Ongoing engagement (15 hours per week for 14 weeks).
Brain scans revealed an increase in neuronal efficiency in these participants. In contrast, the groups involved in less stimulating activities (crossword puzzles, listening to music) showed no significant improvement.
How to effectively stimulate your brain every day
To leverage these findings, here are a few recommendations for maintaining your mental agility:
Strategy
Example Application
Step outside your comfort zone
Learn a new language
Vary the types of challenges
Alternate between verbal and numeric activities
Practice regularly
Dedicate 30 minutes a day to a stimulating activity
Gradually increase the difficulty
Move to a higher level when you feel comfortable
The key is to choose activities that push you out of your comfort zone. If you’re more into literature, try math-based games. On the other hand, if you’re more comfortable with numbers, dive into verbal challenges. This approach engages the frontal and parietal lobes of your brain, enhancing its adaptability.
Brain performance insights
Beyond games, don’t forget the importance of a healthy lifestyle. Quitting smoking, managing your blood pressure, and staying physically active also contribute to preserving your cognitive functions. Combining these habits with mentally stimulating activities offers the best chance to maintain a healthy brain throughout life.
Instead of relying solely on brain-training apps, diversify your sources of cognitive stimulation. Your brain will thank you for these new challenges!
Can we teach machines to feel? Short answer: We don’t know. But we can teach them to sound like they do.
On Thursday, Anthropic published research detailing why AI models sometimes communicate as though they have feelings, finding that models tend to map patterns to emotions, often “organized in a fashion that echoes human psychology.” To put it plainly, these models have learned to mimic human emotions by replicating them in contexts where emotions arise in humans.
Though Anthropic noted that none of this research points to whether or not these models actually feel anything, the representations of emotion “are functional, in that they influence the model’s behavior in ways that matter.”
New Anthropic research: Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model.
All LLMs sometimes act like they have emotions. But why? We found internal representations of emotion concepts that can drive Claude’s behavior, sometimes in surprising ways. pic.twitter.com/LxFl7573F9
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Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian penned an open letter to “the people of the United States” on April 1, 2026, in which he implored Americans to “look beyond” misinformation that portrayed Iran as a threat to the world.
It was, perhaps, his most prominent intervention during the current conflict. Despite being the president of a country in the midst of crisis, Pezeshkian hasn’t had the highest of war profiles.
Criticized by conservatives at home for his conciliatory tone, the reformist politician has also been sidelined by Iran’s adversaries. Western media initially appeared more interested in the musings of Pezeshkian’s son, Yousef. President Donald Trump has barely mentioned Pezeshkian, other than in an oblique social media post on April 1 in which he claimed “Iran’s new regime president” had asked the U.S. for a ceasefire – something denied by Iran.
International attention has instead largely centered on the role of Iran’s supreme leader.First, it was about who would succeed Ali Khamenei after his killing in the first strikes of the war, and then what was known about his successor and son, Mojtaba Khamenei.
As a researcher of contemporary Iranian politics, I think this focus on the supreme leader over the president inadvertently confirms a trend in Iran that has been happening for years: the cementing of a political structure that increasingly resembles a centralized dictatorship.
The concentration of power around one figure sits uneasily with one of the founding impulses of the 1979 revolution that ushered in the Islamic Republic. A wide spectrum of revolutionary actors – Islamists, leftists and secular nationalists – were involved in the ousting of the shah. But they shared at least one principle: the rejection of monarchy.
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The idea that one generation could not determine the political future of the next was precisely what many revolutionaries, despite their internal differences, had fought against.
As such, the system that initially emerged in 1979 was neither a pure theocracy nor a conventional republic.The supreme leader would exercise ultimate religious and political authority, and an elected president was to embody the republican dimension of the state. This second part gave institutional form to the revolutionary promise that people, through elections, would periodically renew political authority.
In the first decade after the revolution, this balance functioned, albeit in a fragile and conflictual manner.
The authority of Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s first supreme leader, coexisted with the presidency – most notably during the brief presidency of Abolhassan Bani Sadr. Elected in 1980, Bani Sadr quickly came into conflict with clerical factions over the direction of the revolution and the conduct of the Iran-Iraq war.
Accused of political incompetence, Bani Sadr was impeached by parliament in 1981 and subsequently fled into exile.
The presidency of his successor, Ali Khamenei, marked a period of relative alignment with the supreme leader. Operating under Khomeini’s authority, Khamenei operated less as an autonomous political force than as an instrument embedded within a broader clerical and revolutionary consensus.
The dynamic between president and supreme leader was further redefined by the 1989 constitutional revision following Khomeini’s death and the elevation of Khamenei from president to supreme leader. The post of prime minister was abolished, consolidating executive authority in the presidency. At the same time, the institutional and political supremacy of the supreme leader was strengthened.
The weakening presidency
The presidency of Mohammad Khatami, who was elected in 1997, demonstrated that the office could still function as a significant locus of power. As Khatami’s tenure showed, presidents were still able to shape public discourse and policy agendas, particularly in areas such as cultural policy, foreign relations and economic management.
But a major turning point in the power of the office occurred in 2009 with the contested reelection of the hard-liner president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, amid widespread allegations of electoral fraud.
It led to mass demonstrations that became known as the “Green Movement.” The state responded with the repression of protesters, followed by a consolidation of the security apparatus – particularly the expanding influence of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps around the supreme leader.
At the same time, it marked the beginning of Ahmadinejad’s falling out of favor. His populist rhetoric and attempts to build an independent political base led to confrontations with clerical authorities in the early 2010s. It also exposed the regime’s intolerance for even a relatively autonomous presidency.
Ahmadinejad was subsequently excluded from the 2017 presidential race by the Guardian Council, a body handpicked by the supreme leader. In so doing, Khamenei made it clear that while the office of the presidency could remain, it would cease to function as an independent center of decision-making and power.
Since then, presidents have continued to be elected, but their capacity to reshape the political order has been diminished sharply.
The presidency of Hassan Rouhani briefly appeared to be an exception. His election in 2013, and the subsequent negotiation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, generated both domestic expectations and significant international attention.
Yet the durability of the agreement remained contingent on decisions taken beyond the presidency, both internationally and domestically. Its eventual unraveling during the first Trump administration confirmed suspicions among Iranian hard-liners around the supreme leader that reform, an independent power center in the presidency and diplomacy with the U.S. had been a mistake.
With even the limited form of democratic expression as embodied through an elected president suppressed, political disengagement has followed. Although voter turnout remained significant in the years immediately following 2009, a longer-term trend has seen people give up faith in elective politics in Iran. In the last election, held in 2024, just 39.9% of Iranians turned out to vote.
Consolidation of power
This diminishing of the role of the presidency and political legitimacy forms the background to any questions of succession now. But by reducing the political future of the country to the identity of future supreme leaders, observers risk normalizing the transformation of what was historically a contested and hybrid political system into one defined by a single office.
The bloody suppression of the January 2026 protests, the constraints imposed by wartime conditions and the increasing marginalization of elective institutions have all contributed to weakening the presidency.
The fallout of the current war may, of course, see a reorganization of political institutions in Iran. But for now, when Pezeshkian seeks diplomacy with Americans, the pertinent question is: Does his office still matter?
Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Photo: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
NATO is a promise, and now it’s broken, write Axios’ Dave Lawler and Zachary Basu.
The alliance was built on the premise that an attack on one member is an attack on all. President Trump has made that conditional: If you won’t help me in my war, I might not show up for yours.
Trump and his team have fumed at NATO allies for denying the U.S. logistical help or access to their airspace or military bases to carry out attacks against Iran. He called them “cowards” for refusing to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Why it matters: NATO’s mutual-defense framework doesn’t apply to the Iran war, far from the alliance’s territory. But these days could be the death knell for the most powerful and consequential alliance of the past eight decades.
Flashback: This all comes months after Trump threatened to seize Greenland, a territory of ally Denmark, and imposed tariffs on any other allies who stood in his way.
That was one of several increasingly existential crises for NATO that have erupted, then died down, over Trump’s two terms.
Friction point: Taken together, Greenland — and now Iran — have forced European leaders to confront the need for a security architecture that could stand without the American pillar.
Even if they stick to their newly robust spending commitments, it’d take several years to be able to “defend and thereby deter Russia,” and perhaps a decade to fully replace the U.S., says Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO.
“The big question is: Let’s say there is an actual armed attack on NATO. Would there be a political decision [by Trump] to come to the aid of that ally?” Daalder wonders.
Trump has given ample reason to suspect the answer might be no.
For the allies who share a border with an expansionist Russia, that’s a very worrying prospect.
Zoom in: The Iran war is shaping up as a strategic windfall for Moscow, boosting oil revenues and diverting Western attention.
Russian officials and state media are openly reveling in Trump’s attacks on the alliance, casting them as validation of Europe’s weakness and self-sabotage.
What to watch: While Trump is once again dangling a NATO departure, a 2023 law states that no president can withdraw without Congress. But courts could well side with Trump if he decided to test it, Daalder says.Share this story.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images
To see where tech policy is going in the U.S., look west: California is escalating its push to regulate AI across multiple fronts, Axios’ Ashley Gold reports.
Why it matters: California’s multi-pronged approach makes it likely that AI companies in the U.S. will treat the state’s rules as a de facto national standard, even as the White House moves to rein in state regulation.
It follows a familiar pattern: California acts first, companies adapt to keep doing business there and Congress dithers, eventually yielding to states because of gridlock.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed an AI executive order this week as state legislators advance a number of AI bills and consider other regulatory avenues for AI.
It aims to “raise the bar for AI companies seeking to do business with the state,” per the announcement, and makes procurement standards stronger.
The state will develop a plan for contracting best practices requiring companies to explain their policies on distribution of illegal content, model bias and violation of civil rights and free speech.
In a clear shot at the Pentagon-Anthropic dispute, the order also enables California to “separate the procurement authorization process from the federal government’s if needed,” the release says.Share this story.
The Source of Inner Joy – His Holiness the Dalai Lama shares his fundamental belief — that whether you are a believer or non-believer, remaining truthful and honest is the real source of inner joy. When we live with honesty, anxiety is reduced, fear is reduced, and distrust fades… pic.twitter.com/PHpME7IuWN
Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown
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