Key events
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth is set to give another morning media briefing, updating on the US war on Iran, alongside general Dan Caine.
You can follow along at 8am ET via our Middle East live blog, which will have all the news lines here:
Trump threatens major retaliation against Iran after attacks on Gulf states
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Donald Trump threatened a major retaliation after Iran launched multiple attacks early Friday on Gulf Arab states, including dozens of drones at Saudi Arabia.
It came after Iran’s new supreme leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei issued a warning to its neighbours about hosting American bases.
Writing on his Truth Social media platform, the US president said:
Iran’s Navy is gone, their Air Force is no longer, missiles, drones and everything else are being decimated, and their leaders have been wiped from the face of the earth.
Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today.
He added:
They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them.
What a great honor it is to do so!
Meanwhile, four of the six crew members onboard a US military aircraft that crashed in western Iraq were killed, the US military said as rescue efforts continued for the remaining two.
The KC-135 military refuelling plane crashed in western Iraq on Thursday, in an incident the military said involved another aircraft but was not the result of hostile or friendly fire.
In other developments:
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The US Senate failed to pass a funding bill to reopen the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), amid a partial shutdown that has lasted almost a month.
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In a surprising twist, a White House event in honor of Women’s History Month ended with a medal being presented to… Donald Trump.
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The US temporarily suspended sanctions on the sale of Russian oil issuing a Treasury Department license to allow the sale of Russian crude oil and petroleum products loaded on vessels through April 11. “Looks like we fought Iran and Russia won,” Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii observed.
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Two Democratic senators, Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen, called for the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, “to be fired immediately” over the killing of dozens of seven to 12-year-old Iranian schoolgirls in a missile attack on the first day of the US-Israeli war on Iran.
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The suspect who killed one person and injured two others at Old Dominion University was identified by authorities as Mohamed Jalloh, a former member of the army national guard who pleaded guilty in 2016 to attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State.
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The FBI said it is investigating the ramming of a car into a Michigan synagogue as “a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community”.
