By Lauren Kent, CNN

(CNN) — Iran’s conventional navy warships might be largely destroyed, but analysts say that’s never where its true sea power lay.

The country’s ability to credibly threaten commercial ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz actually hinges on multiple layers of cheap and unconventional warfare systems – drones, mines and a fleet of small attack boats, which are harder to detect than traditional naval assets.

Dubbed the “mosquito fleet” by military analysts, these small vessels deployed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and crucially the missiles, guns and other weapons those boats can deploy, present a huge strategic challenge to the United States military as it attempts to mitigate threats across a huge area of sea.

It’s essentially guerrilla warfare on the water, with the geography also favoring Iran as there is no alternative route for ships needing to pass through the narrow Strait of Hormuz chokepoint.

“The number of vessels that would be required to provide area defense for commercial shipping, which is ultimately what this is about, would be quite significant,” said Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow on sea power at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence (RUSI) think tank. “And of course, that can prove immensely resource intensive.”

The IRGC’s use of small boats goes back decades, particularly after the US military proved it could decimate Iran’s traditional navy during operations in the Persian Gulf in 1988. Since then, “the regular Iranian Navy was always something of a parade ground force, whereas the IRGC’s Navy, which was built around asymmetrical assets that the Iranians thought would actually be useful in a war… was always the more strategically important asset,” Kaushal said.

These small skeleton-crew vessels and drone boats are “quite low profile” because of how close to the water line they are, the analyst said, so radar systems often end up detecting them too late. To effectively track those threats, the US needs to deploy assets like helicopters and drones.

The IRGC Navy also deploys repurposed civilian vessels, like fishing dhows, for covert activities like minelaying, adding complexity to any monitoring operation, according to a report from the DC-based Hudson Institute.

“This overall architecture is designed to impose friction and attrition rather than to seek or win a decisive naval engagement,” the Hudson Institute noted.

“The IRGCN (Navy) designs and manufactures its vessels to remain affordable, evade sanctions, and be easily replaceable in wartime,” the report said. That approach allows Iran to imperil other countries’ vessels “at a relatively low cost while placing an adversary’s high-value assets – and the global maritime economy – at risk.”

Some of Iran’s asymmetric threats, like the mines themselves and so-called ‘midget submarines,’ are more straightforward for the US Navy to combat. Those small ‘midget’ subs tend to operate out of well-known Iranian ports, making them easier for the US to target if it chooses to, Kaushal said.

Plus, the US has unmanned undersea vehicles that it can deploy to scan the sea floor and identify mines, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, in an interview with CNN. But identify

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By Evan Perez, Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN

(CNN) — Jason Reding Quiñones, the top federal prosecutor in Florida’s southern district, arrived in Washington, DC, last month for a meeting with top Justice Department officials as White House pressure continued to build over bringing criminal charges against one of President Donald Trump’s top political foes.

For months, Reding Quiñones had been promising that his office would deliver on one of Trump’s top priorities: pursuing criminal charges against a number of former government officials — chief among them former CIA Director John Brennan — who were involved in investigations of him from 2016 to 2024, according to people briefed on the investigation.

Prosecutors in Reding Quiñones’ office opened the meeting with an even firmer assessment of the investigation, which they previously warned was not a strong case.

With Reding Quiñones sitting near her, Maria Medetis Long, the seasoned prosecutor who has led the probe since its start, told acting Deputy Attorney General Colin McDonald and Trent McCotter, his top deputy, that the case against Brennan was too weak to bring, and the evidence didn’t support the charges of lying to Congress that Justice officials and House Republicans have sought, people briefed on the matter said.

Not everyone in the room agreed with Medetis Long, some of them said. Her assessment got a frosty reception, particularly since for months Reding Quiñones had sought to reassure his bosses in Washington that the case, while slow-moving, was making progress.

“That’s not good enough,” was the message she received, according to two people briefed on the meeting.

By this time, Attorney General Pam Bondi had already been fired — in part because of the slow pace of the prosecutions Trump wants.

In April, at an earlier meeting with Bondi, on the day Trump fired her, Reding Quiñones had told her that prosecutors in his office could bring the charges over lying to Congress against Brennan by the end of the year, people briefed on the matter said. The broader conspiracy case, however, appeared moribund at the time.

The probe into Brennan is a major test as the former CIA director has been a vocal critic of Trump and helped to oversee the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that concluded Russia sought to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election, one of the president’s biggest political grievances.

A push to prosecute other perceived Trump enemies James Comey, the former FBI director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general, in Virginia faltered after a judge tossed the indictments against them. Federal prosecutors in North Carolina have since brought new charges against Comey alleging a social media post showing sea shells arranged to display the numbers “86 47” represented a criminal threat against Trump. Comey has denied he intended to threaten the president.

Now, with Acting Attorney Todd Blanche under the president’s tight leash as he seeks to keep the job, the latest update from Florida set the stage for a major shakeup to deliver on what Reding Quiñones has been promising since last fall.

Medetis Long was removed from overseeing the investigation days after she delivered her assessment at the meeting in Washington. Blanche then put Joe diGenova, a longtime Washington lawyer, in Florida on the case. DiGenova is a former Washington, DC, US attorney who briefly represented the president in one of the probes that he is now investigating.

Since then, any perceived progress on the investigation has been essentially reset, with investigators starting anew to build a broad case against Trump’s biggest target.

The Justice Department declined comment on ongoing investigations.

The department previously said o

By Alicia Wallace, CNN

(CNN) — When the April jobs report is released at 8:30 a.m. ET, it is expected to show that the US labor market added 65,000 positions.

If so, that’s roughly one-third of the 178,000 jobs created in March.

While in comparison the April total may seem like a sharp deceleration or a tepid month of employment growth, when viewed in isolation, it could seem solid or resilient — maybe even normal.

There are plenty of logical explanations for the stark shift and the undulating payroll numbers for the first few months of 2026; however, there’s also something much bigger afoot: The job market is in the throes of an evolution.

“The labor market is absolutely transforming, and it’s not going to look the same as our pre-2020 trends,” Nicole Bachaud, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter, told CNN in an interview.

There’s not a clear picture yet, she said, of what the new normal is.

The US job market and the broader economy have been subject to a slew of exogenous shocks during the past six years – chief among them being a once-in-a-century global pandemic.

In the backdrop, however, is a series of changes more structural in nature (some of which have even been helped along by those outside shocks):

• The US population is aging. Labor force growth is slowing as members of the large Baby Boomer cohort retire; industries such as health care and social services have greatly expanded as a result.
• There’s been a sharp reduction in net immigration. Trump administration policies of immigration restrictions and mass deportations have shifted the trajectory of what was a decades-long driver of labor supply. This shift also reduces labor demand through a drop in consumer spending.
• Technological innovations, notably artificial intelligence, are reshaping jobs, industries, and the economy. Although still early days, the adoption of AI is contributing to changes in the occupational mix; has been directly cited as a reason (or, perhaps, scapegoat) for layoffs; and has shown potential to influence economy-shaping dynamics such as productivity and wages.

A roller coaster-like effect

Getting a firm read on the labor market in 2026 has been like riding a roller coaster: The economy added an estimated 160,000 jobs in January and lost 133,000 jobs in February before bouncing back to that March total. (These monthly tallies are still subject to revision.)

The volatility can be partly attributed to several factors, including weather, labor strikes, lower-than-typical post-holiday layoffs, and recalibrations to how the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates payroll changes at new and closed businesses (referred to as the birth-death model).

Those fluctuations in the top-line payroll number could very well continue in the months to come, largely because of the birth-death model changes, said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM US.

“In fact, we moved away from really placing an emphasis on any given month, and we’re looking at a smooth three-month average now,” he said.

From January through March, the average monthly gain is sitting at 68,333.

The consensus estimates, at 65,000 jobs added, fall right in line with that average.

The unemployment rate is expected to remain at 4.3%, FactSet estimates show.

Job growth slows as structural changes take hold

April’s projected job growth, however, is likely still running “above trend,” noted Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon, which is forecasting a total of 45,000 jobs were added last month.

“The e