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• Iran informed Turkey in advance of its planned operation against Israel, a Turkish diplomatic source told Reuters on Sunday, adding that Washington had conveyed to Tehran via Ankara that any action it took had to be “within certain limits.”
• Turkey, which has denounced Israel for its campaign on Gaza, said earlier on Sunday that it did not want a further escalation of tensions in the region.
  
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• The Turkish source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan had spoken to both his US and Iranian counterparts in the past week to discuss the planned Iranian operation, adding Ankara had been made aware of possible developments.
  

• Middle East de-escalation efforts
• Earlier this week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to Fidan to make clear that escalation in the Middle East was not in anyone’s interest.
• “Iran informed us in advance of what would happen. Possible developments also came up during the meeting with Blinken, and they (the US) conveyed to Iran through us that this reaction must be within certain limits,” the source said.
  
• “In response, Iran said the reaction would be a response to Israel’s attack on its embassy in Damascus and that it would not go beyond this.”
  
• Iran, which neighbours Turkey, had vowed retaliation for what it called an alleged Israeli strike on its Damascus consulate on April 1 that killed seven officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
• Turkey’s foreign ministry later confirmed the contacts in a statement, saying Ankara had called for restraint and warned of a regional war if tensions escalated further.
  
  
• It said Ankara would continue efforts to prevent further conflict and escalation in the region.
• A Turkish security source said CIA chief William Burns had spoken to Ibrahim Kalin, head of Turkey’s MIT intelligence agency, over the Eid al-Fitr holidays and asked him to act as a “mediator” in the Israel-Iran tensions.
• The two discussed ceasefire efforts in Gaza as well, the source said, without elaborating.

• Taiwan’s biggest earthquake in at least 25 years killed nine people on Wednesday and injured more than 900, while 50 workers travelling in minibuses to a hotel in a national park were missing.
• Some buildings tilted at precarious angles in the mountainous, sparsely populated county of Hualien, near the epicentre of the 7.2 magnitude quake, which struck just offshore at about 8 a. m. (0000 GMT) and triggered massive landslides.
• Linda Chen, 48, said her apartment in downtown Hualien city had been so badly damaged in an earlier earthquake in 2018 that they had to move house. But her new apartment block was damaged too in the latest earthquake.
• “We worry the house could collapse anytime. We thought we had already experienced it once in Hualien and it would not hit us again, because God has to be fair,” she said.
• “We are frightened. We are so nervous.”
• The city’s mayor, Hsu Chen-Wei, said all residents and businesses in buildings that were in a dangerous state had been evacuated. Demolition work was beginning on four buildings, the mayor said.
• The power of the quake was captured live as news anchors delivered their bulletins, steadying themselves against giant screens as their sets swayed and lighting rigs rocked back and forth overhead.
• The earthquake hit at a depth of 15.5 km (9.6 miles), as people were headed for work and school, setting off a tsunami warning for southern Japan and the Philippines that was later lifted.
• Video showed rescuers using ladders to help trapped people out of windows. Strong tremors in Taipei forced the subway system to close briefly, although most lines resumed service.
• Fire authorities said they had already evacuated some 70 people trapped in tunnels near Hualien city, including two Germans.
• But they had lost contact with 50 workers aboard four minibuses heading to a hotel in a national park, Taroko Gorge, they said, and rescuers were looking for them. Another 80 people are trapped in a mining area, though it was not immediately clear if they were inside a mine.
• On a highway through the mountains, huge boulders from a landslide were strewn across the road. The Fire Bureau of Taichung City Government said it rescued a man in his 50s who was unconscious in a truck.
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• A woman who runs bed-and-breakfast accommodation in Hualien city said she scrambled to calm her guests who were scared by the quake.
• “This is the biggest earthquake I have ever experienced,” said the woman, who asked to be identified only by her family name, Chan.
• The government put the number of injured at 946.
• “At present the most important thing, the top priority, is to rescue people,” said President-elect Lai Ching-te, speaking outside one of the collapsed buildings in Hualien.
• The rail link to the area was expected to re-open on Thursday, Lai, who is set to take office next month, told reporters.
• The White House said the U.S. stood ready to provide any assistance necessary.
• Taiwan’s air force said six F-16 fighter jets had been slightly damaged at a major base in the city from which jets are often scrambled to see off incursions by China’s air force, but the aircraft are expected to return to service very soon.
• In Japan, the weather agency put the quake’s magnitude at 7.7, saying several small tsunami waves reached parts of the southern prefecture of Okinawa, while downgrading its tsunami warning to an advisory.
• In the Philippines, seismology officials warned coastal residents in several provinces to move to higher ground.
• Chinese state media said the quake was felt in the southeastern province of Fujian, while a Reuters witness said it was also felt in the commercial hub of Shanghai.
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• Aftershocks could still be felt in Taipei, with more than 50 recorded, weather officials said.
• Most power has been restored after the quake, electricity utility Taipower said, with the island’s two nuclear power stations unaffected.
• Taiwan’s high-speed rail operator said no damage or injuries were reported on its trains, although services would be delayed as it made inspections.
• A major supplier of chips to Apple and Nvidia Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co said it had evacuated some fabrication plants and safety systems were operating normally.
• It said later its workers were safe and had returned to their workplaces shortly after the earthquake. It said impacted facilities were expected to resume production during the night.
• TSMC’s Taipei-listed shares ended down 1.3%, but the benchmark index largely brushed off the quake’s impact to close down 0.6%.
• The official central news agency said the quake was the biggest since one of magnitude 7.6 in 1999 that killed about 2,400 people and damaged or destroyed 50,000 buildings.
• Taiwan weather officials ranked Wednesday’s quake in Hualien as “Upper 6”, or the second-highest level of intensity on a scale ranging from 1 to 7.
• Such quakes collapse walls unless they are made of reinforced concrete blocks, while people cannot stand upright and must crawl in order to move, experts say.
• This article was updated.
  

• Special counsel Jack Smith strongly criticized a recent order by the judge presiding over the case of former President Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents, saying that her request for jury instructions from his office and Trump’s lawyers is based on a “fundamentally flawed legal premise.”
• In a court filing Tuesday, Smith argued that the legal premise behind Judge Aileen Cannon’s request is “wrong” and that it would “distort” the trial, potentially leading to a directed verdict in Trump’s favor. The special counsel urged Cannon to “promptly” decide whether the legal premise in question represents a “correct formulation of the law,” and indicated that federal prosecutors would appeal if the judge rules against them.
• Cannon last month directed Trump and the special counsel to submit jury instructions framed with two competing scenarios concerning the Presidential Records Act as it relates to the charges brought against Trump under the Espionage Act accusing him of mishandling of classified documents.
• The first scenario Cannon outlined allows the jury to review records and determine which documents Trump retained are “personal” or “presidential” under the Presidential Records Act. In the second scenario, Cannon instructed lawyers to draft instructions based on the assumption that presidents have the “sole authority” under that act to lawfully retain documents at the end of their term by declaring them as “personal” or “presidential” records, aligning with Trump’s defense in the case.
• “Both scenarios rest on an unstated and fundamentally flawed legal premise — namely, that the Presidential Records Act (‘PRA’), and in particular its distinction between ‘personal’ and ‘Presidential’ records determines whether a former President is ‘authorized,’ under the Espionage Act to possess highly classified documents and store them in an unsecure facility,” Smith’s team wrote in the filing.
• The Presidential Records Act requires the return of presidential records at the end of a president’s term, but says they can keep their personal records, which is described as documents containing “highly personal information, such as diaries, journals, and medical records.”
• In a Tuesday filing responding to Cannon’s order, Trump’s lawyers maintained that the Presidential Records Act gives Trump the authority to decide whether a record is personal or presidential, that all of the records found in his possession could be considered personal despite classification markings, and that that Trump’s determination that they’re personal records can’t be second-guessed by the courts.
• One of their proposed jury instructions was for the judge to tell jurors “if President Trump designated a document as a ‘personal record’ under the Presidential Records Act, then the classification status of that document, if any, is not relevant to your evaluation of whether the government has met its burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the document you are considering is a ‘Presidential record.’”
• Smith’s office said such an instruction would be a grievous mistake and characterized Trump’s defense using the Presidential Records Act as pure fiction.
• “Trump’s entire effort to rely on the PRA is not based on any facts,” prosecutors said. “It is a post hoc justification that was concocted more than a year after he left the White House, and his invocation in this Court of the PRA is not grounded in any decision he actually made during his presidency to designate as personal any of the records charged.”
• “During its exhaustive investigation, the Government interviewed Trump’s own PRA representatives and numerous high-ranking officials from the White House — Chiefs of Staff, White House Counsel and senior members of the White House Counsel’s Office, a National Security Advisor, and senior members of the National Security Council,” they wrote. “Not a single one had heard Trump say that he was designating records as personal or that, at the time he caused the transfer of boxes to Mar-a-Lago, he believed that his removal of records amounted to designating them as personal under the PRA. To the contrary, every witness who was asked this question had never heard such a thing,” and Trump and his attorneys repeatedly referred to the documents he had possessed as “presidential records” well after he left the White House.
• Trump’s lawyers, meanwhile, said in their proposed instructions to the jury that to find Trump had “knowingly” taken control of classified documents, the government would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did so “voluntarily and intentionally and not because of a mistake or by accident.”
• “Medical science has not yet devised an instrument which can record what was in one’s mind in the distant past,” the proposed instructions read. “Rarely is direct proof available to establish the state of one’s mind. State of mind may be inferred from what a person says or does: his words, his actions, and his conduct, as of the time of the occurrence of certain events. The intent with which an act is done is often more clearly and conclusively shown by the act itself, or by a series of acts, than by words or explanations of the act uttered long after the occurrence.”
• Trump faces multiple charges in the classified documents case, including willful retention of national defense information, false statements and representations, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record and corruptly concealing a document.
• The former president has pleaded not guilty to all counts. His co-defendants in the case, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, have also pleaded not guilty to related charges. Trump in February moved to dismiss the classified documents indictment in Florida, arguing that on the basis of presidential immunity he cannot be prosecuted.
• Cannon last month denied Trump’s motion to dismiss the case as constitutionally vague and expressed skepticism over his lawyers’ argument for tossing out the case based on the Presidential Records Act.