Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but the Guardian’s round-the-clock coverage of the crisis in the Middle East continues. Here are the latest developments in US politics:
After a private meeting at the White House with Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, Donald Trump seemed to renew his threats against the defensive military alliance for not helping fight the US-Israeli war on Iran, and hinted he could again try to seize Greenland from Nato member Denmark.
Before Trump stepped into his meeting with the Nato secretary-general, and as the ceasefire with Iran seemed to be falling apart on its first day, the president found time to continue a social-media feud with his former ally Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Speaking to reporters in Hungary, the US vice-president, JD Vance, claimed not to recognize the name of the Vatican ambassador to the US when he was asked about reports that a Pentagon official had reprimanded that Catholic diplomat, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, over the American-born pope’s opposition to US militarism.
At a Pentagon press conference, Pete Hegseth said that Iran “begged for this ceasefire”, and claimed that Operation Epic Fury “decimated” Iran’s military.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said Democrats would force a vote on a war powers resolution to limit the administration’s military campaign in Iran when Congress returns from recess next week.
The US justice department announced that the FBI arrested Courtney Williams, a military veteran who later worked in support of Delta Force, a covert commando unit, after she was indicted for “alleged transmission of classified national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it, including a journalist”.
Trump, who announced with some fanfare last year a doubling of tariffs on imported steel, plans to use tens of millions of dollars worth of donated foreign steel to build his $400m White House ballroom, the New York Times reported.
Japanese television forced to explain to viewers that Taco jokes about Trump have nothing to do with octopus
Donald Trump’s last-minute decision this week to put off his threatened strikes on Iranian infrastructure led to a raft of jokes on social media based on what the Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong calls his “Taco theory”, the principle that the president’s pattern of bluster and retreat on a host of issues from tariffs to war can usually be described this way: “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
But as the clock ticked ever closer to Trump’s Tuesday night deadline for what he insisted would be an end to Iranian civilization, that Taco acronym caused a lot of confusion in Japan, because the term sounds exactly like the Japanese word for octopus, tako.
To clear up that confusion, Japan’s Fuji News Network devoted an entire segment to helping viewers understand the origins of the term, and how it might be used to predict the volatile president’s behavior.
Updated
