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Israel said Tuesday it killed a senior Hezbollah militant responsible for drones and missiles, even as it freed Lebanese prisoners as a "goodwill" gesture to the country's new president.

Despite a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, Israel has continued to carry out air strikes in Lebanon, claiming they are necessary to prevent the Iran-backed militant group from rearming or re-establishing a presence along its northern border.

"Earlier today, the IAF (air force) conducted a precise intelligence-based strike in the area of Nabatieh in southern Lebanon, eliminating Hassan Abbas Ezzedine, the head of Hezbollah's aerial array in the Bader regional unit," the military said in a statement.

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It said it carried out a second strike on Tuesday in the Froun area, targeting several militants.

"Several terrorists were identified in a site used by Hezbollah in the area of Froun in southern Lebanon," the military said. "An IAF aircraft struck the suspects."

Lebanon's official National News Agency reported that two people were killed in the Israeli strikes.

"An enemy Israeli drone strike targeting a car on the Deir El-Zahrani road resulted in one fatality," the news agency said, citing the health ministry.

It later reported that a second person was killed in an Israeli air strike on a vehicle in the Froun area.

Although a truce reached on November 27 largely ended more than a year of hostilities — including two months of full-scale war in which Israeli ground troops crossed the border — Israel has continued to launch periodic strikes in Lebanese territory.

Israel was initially expected to withdraw from Lebanon by February 18, after missing a January deadline, but it has maintained a presence in five strategic locations.

The ceasefire also required Hezbollah to pull back north of the Litani River, about 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the border, and to dismantle any remaining military infrastructure in southern Lebanon.

- Border disputes -

In a separate development on Tuesday, Israel announced it had agreed to release five Lebanese citizens detained during its war with Hezbollah.

"In coordination with the United States and as a gesture to Lebanon's new president, Israel has agreed to release five Lebanese detainees," a statement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun's office said four of the prisoners had been freed on Tuesday and the fifth would follow on Wednesday.

Their release followed a meeting earlier Tuesday in the Lebanese border town of Naqoura, attended by representatives of Israel, Lebanon and mediators France and the United States.

"During the meeting, it was agreed to establish three joint working groups aimed at stabilising the region," the prime minister's statement said.

"These groups will focus on the five points controlled by Israel in southern Lebanon, discussions on the Blue Line and remaining disputed areas, and the issue of Lebanese detainees held by Israel."

The Blue Line is the UN-patrolled demarcation line that has served as de facto border since 2000.

In an interview with Lebanese news channel Al Jadeed, US Deputy Special Envoy for the Middle East Morgan Ortagus emphasised Washington's efforts to resolve the border issue.

"We want to get a political resolution, finally, to the border disputes," Ortagus said.

"When it comes to the border agreement, the land border agreement, there are 13 points -- I think that six are still problematic," she said.

Ortagus said Israel had "withdrawn from over 99 percent of the territory".

"I feel fairly confident that... we can have final resolution on the five points and ultimately on the remaining issues related to the Blue Line".

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow went after congressional Republicans for quietly barreling forward with a tactic that effectively hands President Donald Trump their power to rescind his tariff policies on a silver platter.

The host devoted her opening monologue on Tuesday to a Republican plan to cede their ability under the National Emergencies Act to end Trump’s tariffs, which Maddow said are causing the American public and businesses across the nation “very real pain and loss of money.”

“So Republicans in Congress have the power to stop Trump from doing what he's doing on tariffs,” Maddow said. “What will they do with that power? The Democrats are going to force them to take a vote on this."

“They’re literally ceding their power. Giving it up. 'We don't want that power,'” Maddow said as she told viewers that Republican leaders "slipped language into a procedural measure that would prevent any such resolution to end the tariffs from receiving any vote this year.”

She added: “They literally had the power to stop Trump from doing something that is hurting the country materially every single day. They have the power to stop him from what he's doing, and so what did they decide to do with that power? They decided to give that power away, so they no longer have that power, so they don't have to decide what to do with it.”

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And, Maddow said, “it gets better” as Republicans found a way to “save themselves from the terrible dilemma of whether or not to cast a recorded vote.”

“Republicans had to figure out some way out of this trap,” she said. “The national emergency law says Congress can end the emergency – he declared a national emergency in order to give himself the ability to proclaim these tariffs.”

“The national emergency law says if a resolution to end the emergency is introduced in Congress, Congress must consider that. They have to start the process of voting on it within 15 days. So now we know Democrats are introducing that resolution that starts the clock ticking. That means Congress is going to have to vote on this in 15 days – tick tock – in order to get around that binding requirement in the law.”

So, she pointed out, Republicans “proclaimed that between now and the end of this Congress, that is just one long day. That’s just one day. The whole rest of the Congress. I am not kidding.”

Watch the clip below or at this link:

Baird financial services analyst Ben Kallo warned that Tesla CEO Elon Musk's political antics could be destroying the valuation of his company.

During a Monday morning report, CNBC host Carl Quintanilla offered investors bad news about Tesla's stock value.

"Tesla posing its 7th straight week of declines," he announced. "It's longest losing streak on record. Shares are now trading at their lowest level since the election. It is the worst performing stock in the S&P 500 so far this year."

Kallo explained why the company was struggling.

"It's going to continue to perpetuate the narrative of Musk destroying demand out there," he told Quintanilla.

"Yeah, well, is that just noise and just a narrative, or is that actually observably happening right here?" Quintanilla asked.

"Well, I think that, you know, when people's cars are in jeopardy of being keyed or, you know, set on fire out there, even people that support Musk or are indifferent to Musk might think twice about buying a Tesla," Kallo said. "But I do think that with the production ramp impacting deliveries, that's the bigger thing that will continue that narrative of demand at risk."

ALSO READ: 'Absolutely unconscionable': Ex-Republican demands Trump removed from office after fight

"And so I think that we have at least a couple of months until we determine if he's attracting more buyers or losing more buyers, which I've seen the argument out there from my fellow analysts all over the place," he continued. "But there's a lot of uncertainty here."

"It's very plausible that demand is being destructed. I would say in Europe, even more plausible."

Watch the video below or at this link.

President Donald Trump is rebuilding a key international constituency: Anti-Americans, one columnist wrote Monday.

Adrian Woolridge, global business columnist for Bloomberg, noted that anti-American sentiment is en vogue as Trump alienates international leaders.

Woolridge cited the March YouGov poll showing positive sentiment toward the U.S. has fallen 28 points since Trump was elected, and the columnist expects these numbers to continue falling.

"Trump embodies everything critics of the US have always warned about, multiplied several times over. Yankee arrogance? He and Vance, in the Oval Office, shamelessly bullied the leader of a nation victimized by the Russian president’s aggression. Yankee imperialism? Trump bragged to a cheering Congress that he will take over Greenland 'one way or another.' Yankee incompetence? His tariffs are destabilizing global stock markets and downgrading his own economy," wrote Woolridge.

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He noted that for centuries, the U.S. has aided anyone seeking to provide "stability and security" and to lead and spread democracy and "free-market capitalism."

"Those justifications are turning into dust," Woolridge wrote, lamenting that the U.S. is now the "source of global instability" with "erratic" swings.

"Under Trump, the US is groveling to the world’s biggest enemy of liberal democracy, Putin, and injecting massive instability into global markets," said Woolridge. If Trump continues on this path, the columnist predicted it'll only worsen for the U.S.

He also thinks that if Trump continues on his current course, anti-American sentiment will likely be "transformative" in Europe. Meanwhile, the columnist said, Trump's coattails will likely drag down populist politicians along with him.

Nigel Farage is one of the best examples, he said. The leader of Britain’s Reform Party is already pulling back on his attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky after a contentious Oval Office meeting. Now, Farage says Vice President J.D. Vance is "wrong, wrong, wrong" on British troops.

"Both the Labour and Conservative parties think Farage’s closeness to Trump could prove to be an electoral problem for Reform," he said.

In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was on a huge down-swing, and analysts assumed that the Conservatives were headed for an October victory in the upcoming election. "That's no longer a foregone conclusion," wrote Woolridge.

"The genie of anti-Americanism is now not only out of the bottle but doing immense damage to the country’s long-term interests," he closed.

Read the full column here.

A longtime columnist is leaving the Washington Post after a clash with the newspaper's publisher over an op-ed she wrote criticizing owner Jeff Bezos' changes to the opinion pages.

Columnist and associate editor Ruth Marcus announced her departure Monday, saying she can no longer stay at the paper where she's worked for four decades after she said chief executive and publisher Will Lewis spiked her column that was critical of Bezos' mandate to the opinion section, reported NPR.

"Jeff's announcement that the opinion section will henceforth not publish views that deviate from the pillars of individual liberties and free markets threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable," Marcus wrote in her resignation letter.

More than 75,000 digital subscribers canceled within 48 hours after Bezos imposed the changes last month, and opinions editor David Shipley stepped down over the order.

ALSO READ: 'A lot of damage control' at the White House after Musk blow-up: MSNBC's Lemire

"Will's decision to not … run the column that I wrote respectfully dissenting from Jeff's edict – something that I have not experienced in almost two decades of column-writing –underscores that the traditional freedom of columnists to select the topics they wish to address and say what they think has been dangerously eroded," Marcus wrote.

Bezos blocked the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris for president, which caused 300,000 digital subscribers to cancel within days, and the Amazon executive has moved closer to Donald Trump since the election.

"I love the Post," Marcus wrote in her resignation letter. "It breaks my heart to conclude that I must leave. I have the deepest affection and admiration for my colleagues and will miss them every day. And I wish you both the best as you steer this storied and critical institution through troubled times."

A leader of protests at Columbia University against Israel's war in Gaza was arrested by immigration officers, a campus union said Sunday, after US President Donald Trump vowed to deport foreign pro-Palestinian student demonstrators.

Mahmoud Khalil, one of the most prominent faces in the campus's protest movement that erupted in response to Israel's conduct of the war, was arrested Saturday, the Student Workers of Columbia union said.

"On Saturday, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officers detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian recent Columbia graduate and lead negotiator for last spring's Gaza solidarity encampment," the union said in a statement.

US campuses including Columbia's in New York were rocked by student protests against Israel's war in Gaza following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack. The demonstrations ignited accusations of anti-Semitism.

Protests, some of which turned violent and saw campus buildings occupied and lectures disrupted, pitted students protesting Israel's conduct against pro-Israel campaigners, many of whom were Jewish.

Khalil, who remains in immigration enforcement detention, held permanent residency at the time of his arrest prompting thousands of people to sign a petition calling for his release, the union statement added.

"We are also aware of multiple reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents accessing or attempting to access Columbia campus buildings on Friday and Saturday, including undergraduate dorms," the union said.

Columbia did not directly address Khalil's arrest in response to inquiries, but in a statement said "there have been reports of ICE in the streets around campus."

"Columbia has and will continue to follow the law. Consistent with our longstanding practice and the practice of cities and institutions throughout the country, law enforcement must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas, including University buildings," Columbia said.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump railed against the student protest movement linked to the conflict in Gaza, and vowed to deport foreign students who had demonstrated.

He also threatened to cut off federal funding for institutions that he said were not doing enough to combat anti-Semitism.

His administration announced Friday it was cutting $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University, accusing it of failing to protect Jewish students from harassment.

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