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An analysis from the CIA has seriously undermined President Donald Trump’s claims about Iran’s economic resilience.A confidential CIA analysis delivered to policymakers this week found that Iran can survive three or four months of the U.S. military’s blockade before facing more severe economic hardship, The Washington Post reported Thursday. Iran also retains significant ballistic missile capabilities, three U.S. officials familiar with the report told the Post. Despite weeks of bombing by U.S. and Israeli forces, Iran still has 70 percent of its prewar stockpile of missiles and 75 percent of its mobile launchers, one official said. Iran has also been able to recover its underground storage facilities, repair damaged missiles, and assemble new ones. The analysis suggests that Iran can survive the U.S. blockade for another 90 to 120 days, casting serious doubt on Trump’s repeated claims about Iran’s supposedly crashing economy. “They’re failing,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday. “They’re currency is worthless, their inflation is probably 150 percent, the real number is 150 percent, they aren’t paying their soldiers, they can’t pay their soldiers, their money is worthless.”In fact, Trump has been claiming Iran’s economy is in shambles for weeks. “I think Iran is in very bad shape. I think they’re pretty desperate,” he said last month, a week after the blockade was first installed.The White House has touted the combination of the U.S. military blockade on Iranian ports and the so-called Operation Economic Fury, a series of sanctions on Iran, as rendering serious damage to the country’s economic situation. But “it’s nowhere near as dire as some have claimed,” one person familiar with the CIA’s analysis said of Iran’s economic situation. Tehran has been storing its oil on tanker ships that would otherwise be empty, they told the Post. Another U.S. official suggested that Iran could extend its economic resilience even further by smuggling oil through overland routes. “There’s a belief they could begin moving some oil via rail through Central Asia,” the official told the Post. This news comes as Trump has paused Project Freedom, the U.S. military’s plan to help ships travel through the Strait of Hormuz, after losing the support of Saudi Arabia.

Florida is moving to close the infamous “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention center in the Everglades because it has grown too expensive to operate, according to The New York Times.The embattled facility—which has cost the state of Florida $1 million a day to run—has been beset with allegations of unsafe living conditions, abusive treatment, and protests from Native American groups over its environmental harms. Now the facility that was framed as a huge success by President Trump and Governor DeSantis may collapse in failure.Homeland Security officials have also deemed the facility too costly to keep running, according to a federal official who spoke with the Times, although no official decisions to close it have been made.Part of this failure can be attributed to Trump leaving DeSantis without any federal funding for the facility’s construction. While the federal government promised to reimburse Florida for hosting the detention center, no payments have yet been made. The swampy location, cruelly touted by Trump as a buffer for detained immigrants, also made it harder for workers to get supplies, sewage—and themselves— to and from the center. And while there has been no official announcement, the closure of Alligator Alcatraz would be an embarrassing development symbolic of the changing public opinion of Trump’s widely unpopular immigration crackdown.  The Department of Homeland Security and DeSantis’s office have yet to comment on the report. 

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In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision effectively endorsing gerrymanders that disenfranchise Black voters, an outbreak of racism has spread through Southern state legislatures. Tennessee Republicans are pretending Black voters in Memphis don’t exist. Florida Republicans seem to have forgotten that Floridians voted to adopt a constitutional amendment banning both political and racial gerrymanders. And then, there’s Alabama. [...]

The latest devastating health crisis facing Cuba involves mountains of trash buildup, burning piles of garbage and rampant disease.