Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of US politics in the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
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.
In a surprising twist, a White House event in honor of Women’s History Month ended with a medal being presented to… Donald Trump.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
Iran begins laying mines in strait of Hormuz, surprising Trump administration - reports
Iran started to lay mines in the strait of Hormuz on Thursday, a crucial Persian Gulf passage for 20% of the world’s oil supply, US officials told the New York Times.
While Donald Trump has boasted that the US military has destroyed Iran’s navy, officials said that Iran has started using smaller boats to place mines and enforce the closure of the strait it has imposed on its gulf neighbors, sending oil prices sky high.
Iran’s move to close the crucial shipping passage has long been an expected move by war planners in previous administrations, but apparently took the Trump administration by surprise.
CNN reported on Thursday that senior Trump administration officials told lawmakers in recent classified briefings that they did not plan for the possibility of Iran closing the strait in response to strikes by the US and Israel.
“Planning around preventing this exact scenario… has been a bedrock principle of US national security policy for decades,” a former US official who served in Republican and Democratic administrations told CNN. “I’m dumbfounded.”
Updated
