• USS Abraham Lincoln moves from Asia-Pacific: US officials.
• Say other assets to arrive in ME in coming days.
• Trump says Iran ‘can’t do the nuclear’.

WASHINGTON: A US military aircraft carrier strike group and other assets will arrive in the Middle East region in the coming days, two US officials said on Thursday, even as President Donald Trump voiced hopes of avoiding new military action against Iran.

US warships, including the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, several destroyers and fighter aircraft, started moving from the Asia-Pacific last week as tensions between Iran and the United States soared following a severe crackdown on protests across Iran in recent months.

One of the officials said additional air defence systems were also being considered for the Middle East. The United States often increases troop levels in the region at moments of heightened tension, something experts note can be entirely defensive in nature.

However, the US military staged a major build-up last summer ahead of its June strikes against Iran’s nuclear programme, and later boasted about how it kept its intention to strike a secret.

Trump had repeatedly threatened to intervene against Iran over the recent killings of protesters there, but demonstrations dwindled last week and Trump’s rhetoric on Iran has since eased. He has shifted his focus to other geopolitical issues, including his pursuit of Greenland.

On Wednesday, Trump said he hoped there would not be further US military action in Iran, but said the United States would act if Tehran resumed its nuclear programme.

“They can’t do the nuclear,” Trump told CNBC in an interview in Davos, Switzerland, referring to major US air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025. “If they do it, it’s going to happen again.”

It has now been at least seven months since the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, last verified Iran’s stock of highly enriched uranium. Its own guidance says such checks should be carried out monthly.

Iran must file a report to the IAEA on what happened at the sites struck by the United States and on nuclear material believed to have been there, including an estimated 440.9 kg of uranium enriched to up to 60% purity, close to the roughly 90% weapons-grade level. That is enough material, if enriched further, for 10 nuclear bombs, according to an IAEA yardstick.

It remains unclear whether protests in Iran could surge again. The demonstrations began on December 28 as modest protests in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar over economic hardship and quickly spread nationwide.

Microsoft is hit by a major outage that has crippled its 365 products for thousands of users.

The outage affected business communities widely.

Reports of technical failures began coming in early afternoon on Thursday, January 22, impacting core productivity platforms such as Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams.

The DownDetector confirmed over 45,000 reports were recorded for Microsoft 365 and around 40,000 for Outlook.

This hindered sending or receiving emails, accessing files, or joining team meetings.

The outage is confirmed by Microsoft officials.

The company’s 365 X (formerly Twitter) account stated that investigators “identified a portion of service infrastructure in North America that is not processing traffic as expected.”

Officials added that the team is working to restore the infrastructure to recover the service traffic.

Prior to one day, users experienced a similar outage that was attributed to a third-party networking issue.

As of now, Microsoft support teams are working to resolve the issue for the affected systems; however, a specific timeline has not been provided yet.

Microsoft advises its customers that updates are available on its official Cloud status webpage.

Drake is now furious as he fighting back after a court threw out his defamation case against Universal Music Group.

The 39-year-old rapper filed an appeal officially on January 21 in U.S. Court of Appeals while showing that he isn’t ready to give up just yet on the heated high-profile lawsuit over Kendrick Lamar’s diss track Not Like Us.

The case dramatically started in January 2025 where he said that the song hurt his reputation because it called him a “certified pedophile.”

However, Drake also argued that Universal’s promotion of that track made things even worse but now Kendrick is not part of the lawsuit.

A federal judge dismissed the case in October 2025, claiming that the lyrics were opinions, not facts.

Drake’s team disagreed to judge’s conclusion as they went on to add that the song presented its words as clear facts and that it misled fans through its marketing while causing even more damage.

For the unversed, Drake first filed a notice of appeal in November 2025, officially starting the process.

Moreover, the never-ending case which has been sparking buzz for so long now continued to draw a lot of attention in the music world.

All of Drake and Kendrick’s fans and industry insiders are now talking about where the thin line is.