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Preliminary intelligence assessments provided to European governments indicate that Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile remains largely intact following US strikes on its main nuclear sites, two officials have said.

The people said the intelligence suggested that Iran’s stockpile of 408kg of uranium enriched close to weapons-grade levels was not concentrated in Fordow, one of its two main enrichment sites, at the time of last weekend’s attack.

It had been distributed to various other locations, the assessments found.

The findings call into question US President Donald Trump’s assertion that the bombing had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme.

In an apparent reference to Fordow, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Thursday: “Nothing was taken out of [the] facility. Would take too long, too dangerous, and very heavy and hard to move!”

The people said EU governments were still awaiting a full intelligence report on the extent of the damage to Fordow, which was built deep beneath a mountain near the holy city of Qom, and that one initial report suggested “extensive damages, but not full structural destruction”.

Iranian officials have suggested the enriched uranium stockpile was moved before the US bombing of the plant, which came after days of Israeli strikes on the country.

At a Pentagon press briefing on Thursday, US defence secretary Pete Hegseth sidestepped questions about whether Iran had taken the uranium out of Fordow before the strikes.

When pressed by reporters, Hegseth said: “I’m not aware of any intelligence that I’ve reviewed that says things were not where they were supposed to be, moved or otherwise.”

The US used bunker-buster bombs to attack Fordow and Natanz, Iran’s other main uranium enrichment facility, on Sunday. It fired cruise missiles at a third site, Isfahan, which was used in the fuel conversion cycle and for storage.

Trump has dismissed a provisional American intelligence assessment, leaked to US media, that said Iran’s nuclear programme had been set back by only a matter of months.

Hegseth lambasted the media on Thursday for focusing on the report, which the US Defense Intelligence Agency had later stressed was a “preliminary, low-confidence assessment”.

The Israel Atomic Energy Commission said this week that it had assessed that US and Israeli strikes had “set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years”.

But experts have warned that if Tehran has retained its stockpile of enriched uranium and set up advance centrifuges at hidden sites, it could still have the capacity to produce the fissile material required for a weapon.

Rafael Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told French Radio on Thursday that Iran’s nuclear programme had “suffered enormous damage”, though he said claims of its complete destruction were overblown.

Iran insists its programme is for peaceful civilian purposes.

Fordow was the main site for enriching uranium up to 60 per cent purity, a small step away from weapons grade. Experts said the 408kg stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 per cent had been stored at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan before Israel launched its war against Iran on June 13.

Iran’s total stockpile of enriched uranium was more than 8,400kg, but most of that was enriched to low levels.

Satellite images of Fordow after Sunday’s bombing show tunnel entrances apparently sealed with earth and holes that may be the entry points of the US’s 30,000lb precision-guided bunker busters. Access roads also appear damaged.

Grossi said this week that Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi had sent a letter to the IAEA on June 13 warning that Iran would “adopt special measures to protect our nuclear equipment and materials”.

Grossi said the UN nuclear watchdog’s inspectors, who have been unable to visit the plants since Israel launched its assault on Iran, should be allowed to return to the sites to “account for the stockpiles of uranium, including, most importantly, the 408kg enriched to 60 per cent”.

The US had not provided definitive intelligence to EU allies on Iran’s remaining nuclear capabilities following the strikes, and was withholding clear guidance on how it plans future relations with Tehran, said three officials briefed on the discussions.

EU policy towards Tehran was “on hold” pending a new initiative from Washington on seeking a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis, the people said, adding that conversations between Trump and EU leaders this week had failed to provide a clear message.

The Trump administration had been holding indirect negotiations with Tehran before the war in the hopes of a deal to curb its nuclear activities.

Trump said on Wednesday that Washington would talk to Tehran next week, but he also suggested a deal might not be needed following the strikes on Iran’s nuclear plants.

“It is completely erratic,” said one of the people. “For now, we are doing nothing.”

On Thursday, the Supreme Court delivered a decision that could be a death knell for Planned Parenthood health centers across the nation. 

In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court’s conservative supermajority decided that the federal Medicaid Act does not give an individual the right to bring a civil rights lawsuit challenging the termination of a specific Medicaid provider from that state’s network. 

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic is its latest assault on reproductive health care. The case also marks another victory for the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Christian conservative litigation shop behind the Dobbs decision, in which the high court reversed Roe v. Wade and ended the federal right to an abortion. (ADF lawyers represented the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services in Medina.)

Supporters of Planned Parenthood have long feared that the case could pave the way for states across the country to kick the largest provider of women’s health care nationwide out of their Medicaid networks too. Now, that seems like a distinct possibility. 

Seven years ago — before Roe v. Wade was overturned, before President Donald Trump was elected again, and before a Republican-controlled Congress was poised to approve the largest-ever cuts to federal funding for Planned Parenthood — South Carolina Republican Gov. Henry McMaster sought to kick the organization out of his state’s Medicaid network. 

There are two Planned Parenthood health centers in South Carolina; together they serve an estimated 6,000 patients a year. But back in 2018, McMaster issued an executive order directing South Carolina’s Medicaid agency to look for ways to keep Planned Parenthood  — which provides birth control, STI testing, and cancer screenings, in addition to abortion services — from receiving any public money at all. “Taxpayer dollars must not directly or indirectly subsidize abortion providers,” he said at the time. 

Federal law already bars Medicaid money from going toward abortion care except in the most limited set of circumstances, and abortion is now banned in South Carolina at 6 weeks gestation with very few exceptions, but McMaster continued his crusade — even after court after court ruled against him. 

Back in 2018, a South Carolina woman — a Medicaid recipient who received her health care at a Planned Parenthood center — sued, saying that McMaster’s order deprived her of her right to choose her own health care provider, a right that was guaranteed by the federal Medicaid Act. Two years later, in 2020, the woman, Julie Edwards, won and the fight McMaster picked with Planned Parenthood looked to be over. 

But, two years after that, a new decision from the Supreme Court revived the case, and on Thursday, the Court’s majority ruled against Planned Parenthood. 

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote, “Today’s decision is likely to result in tangible harm to real people.” She was joined in her opinion by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. 

“At a minimum, it will deprive Medicaid recipients in South Carolina of their only meaningful way of enforcing a right that Congress has expressly granted to them,” Jackson added. “And, more concretely, it will strip those South Carolinians — and countless other Medicaid recipients around the country — of a deeply personal freedom: the ‘ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable.’” 

Thursday’s loss before the Supreme Court was a first for the plaintiffs. Susanna Birdsong, the general counsel and vice president of compliance for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, tells Rolling Stone that prior to this decision, “We won at every stage of the litigation.” Most recently, the Fourth Circuit re-examined the case and reached its original conclusion: that the federal Medicaid act allows patients to choose their provider — any qualified provider — and the state of South Carolina couldn’t arbitrarily tell a person like Julie Edwards that she cannot choose an otherwise qualified provider.

Now, Birdsong says that Planned Parenthood is “looking at all of our options” — legally and otherwise — “to continue to fight for our patients.”

“While I’m deeply disappointed that the court ruled the way that they did — and I think wrongly decided that the Medicaid Act does not confer this right… There are other potential ways to challenge what the state is trying to do here,” Birdsong adds. 

Condemnation of the decision, meanwhile, was swift and loud from reproductive rights advocates across the country. 

Destiny Lopez, CEO of the Guttmacher Foundation, a reproductive policy institute, called the decision “a grave injustice.” 

“At a time when health care is already costly and difficult to access, stripping patients of their right to high-quality, affordable health care at the provider of their choosing is a dangerous violation of bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom,” Lopez added, citing Guttmacher data that showed that one in three patients who sought out birth control in 2020 received it from a Planned Parenthood. 

“Today’s decision favors extremists who’d rather let someone die of cancer than let them get a cancer screening at Planned Parenthood,” Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said in a statement. “The decision will put fuel on the fire of the multi-year campaign to deny Medicaid patients their right to see Planned Parenthood providers for contraceptives, STI testing, and other non-abortion services. Right now, Congress is seeking to replicate South Carolina’s ban nationwide, putting politics above patients in making health care decisions.”

Planned Parenthood has previously estimated that if South Carolina won the case, nearly 200 of their health centers in 24 states across the country would be threatened with closure, with the vast majority — 90 percent — of those closures to occur in states where abortion is legal.

The state of Texas has already removed Planned Parenthood from both its publicly-funded family planning program and its Medicaid network. The results have been stark. According to a report released earlier this month, the percentage of enrollees accessing care dropped from 90 percent in 2011 to 59 percent in 2023. Over the same 12-year period, the use of birth control accessed through the program declined by 56 percent.

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Meta’s use of millions of books to train its artificial intelligence models has been judged “fair” by a federal court on Wednesday, in a win for tech companies that use copyrighted materials to develop AI.

The case, brought by about a dozen authors, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Kadrey, challenged how the $1.4tn social media giant used a library of millions of online books, academic articles and comics to train its Llama AI models.

Meta’s use of these titles is protected under copyright law’s fair use provision, San Francisco district judge Vince Chhabria ruled. The Big Tech firm had argued that the works had been used to develop a transformative technology, which was fair “irrespective” of how it acquired the works.

This case is among dozens of legal battles working their way through the courts, as creators seek greater financial rights when their works are used to train AI models that may disrupt their livelihoods — while companies profit from the technology.

However, Chhabria warned that his decision reflected the authors’ failure to properly make their case.

“This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” he said. “It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”

It is the second victory in a week for tech groups that develop AI, after a federal judge on Monday ruled in favour of San Francisco start-up Anthropic in a similar case.

Anthropic had trained its Claude models on legally purchased physical books that were cut up and manually scanned, which the ruling said constituted “fair use”. However, the judge added that there would need to be a separate trial for claims that it pirated millions of books digitally for training.

The Meta case dealt with LibGen, a so-called online shadow library that hosts much of its content without permission from the rights holders.

Chhabria suggested a “potentially winning argument” in the Meta case would be market dilution, referring to the damage caused to copyright holders by AI products that could “flood the market with endless amounts of images, songs, articles, books, and more”.

“People can prompt generative AI models to produce these outputs using a tiny fraction of the time and creativity that would otherwise be required,” Chhabria added. He warned AI could “dramatically undermine the incentive for human beings to create things the old-fashioned way”.

Meta and legal representatives for the authors did not immediately reply to requests for comment.