presented by BP.

Hello, I'm Jack Blanchard.

And I'm Nahal Tusi. It's Wednesday, June 18th.

And this is the Playbook podcast. And as you can hear, Dasher Burns is not with us this morning.

I'm delighted, though, that we've got Nahal Tusi with us.

Hello, Nahal. Nahal is our senior foreign affairs correspondent here at Politico and author of

the Compass column. So what better person to be joining us in a week like this. Nahal, you must be

having a very busy week indeed. It is relentless. I was asking my editor earlier. I was like,

can we just get five minutes worth of a break? Just five minutes? Nobody gets five minutes break at the moment, unfortunately. Okay, let me talk us quickly through the three main stories driving the day before we get into the big thing. Everyone's talking about in DC, everyone talking about it around the world. The situation in Iran, at the time

we are recording this, we are still waiting to see what action Donald Trump is going to take.

As Israel and Iran continue to trade blows, we will get into that in just one moment.

Two other headlines just to flag for you this morning.

Lots and lots of conversation in DC as well about immigration following

the arrest yesterday of the New York City mayoral candidate Brad Lander arrested by ICE.

Of course, follows Senator Alex Padilla being handcuffed last week by federal agents as well,

and that is going to dominate a lot of conversation, especially on the Hill today.

The third thing that's going to be

big news domestically is the economy, because the Fed chair Jerome Powell will be announcing

the latest news on interest rates today, and he'll be holding a press conference this afternoon,

and you can probably expect to hear Donald Trump mouthing off about him being too slow at lowering

interest rates once again. But let's face it, there's only one big

story in town today, Nahal, and it's a story we've been following all week. We're still waiting

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