Top U.S. and Iranian officials are slated to meet this weekend in Oman for the first negotiations under the Trump administration aimed at halting Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program. Plans for the talks, which come amid expanding U.S. and Israeli bombing campaigns against Iran-backed proxies in the region, were confirmed Tuesday by Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.

Mr. Araghchi said he’ll meet with Mr. Witkoff in Oman. The comment came a day after Mr. Trump told reporters during a White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that his team is “dealing with [the Iranians] directly.”

Both the U.S. and Israel have threatened to carry out airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities if Iran does not halt its nuclear program, which has been built up for decades in violation of repeated U.N. Security Council resolutions. Tehran has threatened to pursue a nuclear bomb amid chaotic developments in the region over the past year that saw Israeli forces largely dismantle Hezbollah, Tehran’s top proxy militia, while Mr. Trump has expanded a U.S. bombing campaign against Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen.

The pace of Russian territorial gains into Ukraine has decreased in the first quarter of 2025, according to an assessment by British military intelligence analysts, which was underscored by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s confirmation for the first time on Monday that Ukrainian troops are now active inside Russia’s Belgorod region.

The development marks a new twist in the largely stalemated ground war. Ukrainian troops initially captured Russian territory last year in the Kursk border region. The more recent Ukrainian advance into Belgorod comes as Russian forces continue to regain territory in Kursk, about 50 miles to the north.

The British military intelligence assessment, meanwhile, said Russian forces likely seized about 55 square miles of Ukrainian territory during March, but that their rate of advance has dropped month by month since November 2024. Most of the advances in March occurred in Ukraine’s central Donetsk oblast.

Huntington Ingalls Industries, the largest military shipbuilder in the United States, and the South Korea-based Hyundai Heavy Industries, the largest shipbuilding company in the world, have agreed to collaborate on accelerating production in support of defense and commercial priorities.

The strategic partnership announced Monday at National Harbor in Maryland at Sea-Air-Space — the largest global maritime expo in North America — comes as the Trump administration pushes a sweeping action plan for the U.S. commercial and defense industry to catch up to China’s shipbuilding capacity, which has dramatically outpaced that of the United States in recent years.

Brian Blanchette, president of Ingalls Shipbuilding, said in a statement that the agreement reflects the company’s commitment to explore all opportunities to expand U.S. shipbuilding capacity in support of national security. “By working with our shipbuilding allies and sharing best practices,” he said, “we believe this [memorandum of understanding] offers real potential to accelerate delivery of quality ships.”

Mr. Trump’s executive order to accelerate the development of a Golden Dome for America is a proportionate response to a rapidly evolving catastrophic threat landscape in which U.S. adversaries are aggressively building out their hypersonic missile capabilities, according to a sponsored article by L3Harris Technologies.

“The first step forward is to proliferate proven, precision fire-control sensing,” states the article, which offers an in-depth look at L3Harris’ development of space-based capabilities that “connect sensors to shooters through resilient communications, enabling missile defense and next-generation kill webs.”

“In 2024, L3Harris launched the Missile Defense Agency’s Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor (HBTSS) and the Space Development Agency’s Tranche 0 Tracking Layer satellites,” the article states. “These proven on-orbit advanced space satellites detect, track, and provide engagement options to protect the nation from missile attacks — at a fraction of the cost of legacy space architectures.”

The article underscores how Mr. Trump’s executive order calls for acceleration of the HBTSS, which will provide an “early win” by delivering much-needed sensing capability to inform engagement. “L3Harris has shown that the technology works, the manufacturing capabilities exist,” the company writes. “We’re ready to scale production to meet urgent needs.”

The advent of entrepreneurs building and flying reusable rockets is ushering in an era of “exponentially lower costs, opening the space and high-speed flight frontiers and echoing how railroads once opened the American West,” write retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Steve Kwast and retired Air Force Lt. Col. Jess Sponable.

“Establishing a human presence on the moon and Mars is possible for the first time since the Apollo era. The confirmation of an entrepreneur as NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, is a great first step, but it is not enough,” they write. “The culture of entrepreneurship needs to be baked into the agency’s leadership and personnel with ambitious goals.” 

“By leveraging entrepreneurial companies, NASA can autonomously land a starship on Mars and uncrewed habitats on the moon with crews to follow,” Mr. Kwast and Mr. Sponable write. “Aggressive schedules should be established with uncrewed landings as early as 2028. The fast pace and lack of crews will ensure safety, limit cost and enforce the change to an entrepreneurial culture.”

• April 8-9 — Sea Air Space 2025 Conference and Exposition, Navy League of the United States

• April 8-10 — 40th Space Symposium, Space Foundation

• April 10-11 — Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats, Vanderbilt University

• April 17 — Persistent Access, Persistent Threat: Ensuring Military Mobility Against Malicious Cyber Actors, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

• April 30 —The Hill & Valley Forum