News

Images geolocated by NBC News showed a command and control E-3 Sentry jet heavily damaged after the Iranian strike that also wounded soldiers.

The destruction by Iran of a warning and control system aircraft on an American base in Saudi Arabia on Friday could affect the U.S. military’s ability to monitor threats — and raises questions around its preparedness for a “longer war,” experts say.

Images verified by NBC News after they surfaced online appear to show much of the back end of the E-3 Sentry jet was destroyed at the Prince Sultan Air Base, the tail lying at an angle on the ground surrounded by debris.

Several American service members were injured in Friday's strike on the facility, which sits around 80 miles southeast of the kingdom's capital, Riyadh. At least one aircraft was also damaged in the strike, two U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed to NBC News.

Donald Trump is interested in calling on Arab countries to pay for the cost ‌of the Iran war, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Monday, adding talks with Tehran to end the conflict are progressing well.

Leavitt, asked at a news briefing whether Arab countries would step up to help pay for the war, said she would not get ahead ​of the Republican president but that it was an idea that Trump had.

"I think it's something the President ​would be quite interested in calling them to do," Leavitt said.

As many as 20 U.S. service members were wounded and two E-3 Sentry aircraft were damaged in an Iranian strike on an air base in Saudi Arabia on Friday, according to a U.S. official.

The official was speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

This comes as Trump has repeated the assertion that Iran wants a deal while he has also ordered thousands of U.S. troops to deploy to the Middle East and even warned the U.S. may try to seize Iran's Kharg Island — or blow it up.

I dont want to live in this reality any more.

The two have a complicated history, but were apparently on friendlier terms at the start of the Trump Administration.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have a complicated history. In 2023, the two vowed to fight each other in a cage match that never happened. But by early 2025, when both were cozying up to Donald Trump, they were apparently on more friendly terms.

In February of that year, Zuckerberg texted Musk approvingly about his work with the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). "Looks like DOGE is making progress," the Meta CEO texted. "I've got our teams on alert to take down content doxxing or threatening the people on your team. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help."

The texts, which were published Friday in court documents as part of Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, are dated February 3, 2025. That's just a few weeks after Zuckerberg announced Meta's pivot away from content moderation in favor of "free expression." It's also the same day that a US Attorney said he would protect DOGE employees from "disgruntled" critics.

Key Points

Walmart is rolling out digital shelf labels and expects the technology to be in all U.S. stores by year’s end. Kroger also has begun experimenting with the technology.

The nation’s largest retailer says the digital price tags help associates do their jobs better and stresses that prices on items will be exactly the same for every consumer in every store.

Some legislators are wary of the technology’s potential to be used in dynamic pricing models that disadvantage consumers, with Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) introducing a bill to ban it.

Judicial independence is under threat as populist politicians target judges and authoritarian governments attempt constitutional reforms

JD Vance, the vice-president of the United States, said this weekend that he considers aliens to be “demons”.

As the war in Iran continues, petrol and grocery prices soar and chaos continues at US airports as a partial government shutdown endures, Vance appeared on the conservative Benny Show podcast, released Saturday, to promise that he would spend time looking into what he called his “obsession” with UFOs and extraterrestrial visitors.

Johnson, who bills his show as the place for “cutting, behind-the-scenes insight into the global conflict for freedom”, wondered if Vance, who has been noticeably quiet about Donald Trump’s war in the Middle East that he is said to oppose, had yet looked at any of the files about unidentified flying objects – known these days as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) – which the president has promised to release.

“I actually haven’t,” Vance replied, mustering significantly more enthusiasm than for any previous question about the US-Israel military strikes on Iran.

“I have not been able to spend enough time on this, but I am going to. Trust me, I’m obsessed with this.”

The God-fearing vice-president’s fixation, it was further revealed, extended to the question of the existence of extraplanetary beings, and where they might fit into a wider conversation about religion.

“I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion,” he said.

“Let me say, we’ve won,” he told a rally in Kentucky on 11 March. “I think we’ve won,” he said on the White House south lawn on 20 March. “We’ve won this war. The war has been won,” he said in the Oval Office on 24 March. “We are winning so big,” he promised a fundraising dinner on 25 March.

Donald Trump keeps declaring victory in Iran. But saying it over and over does not make it so. While the US president insists that his military campaign in the Middle East is a historic success, the world is bracing for a conflict that continues to metastasize and could wreak havoc on the global economy.

The war is turning into the ultimate test of an operating principle that has guided Trump for decades: construct a narrative, declare it to be true and relentlessly force the world to submit to it. It has proved effective in Manhattan boardrooms, on reality television and even at the heart of power in Washington.

But in Iran, Trump’s unique brand of “truthful hyperbole” has collided with the truthful truth. His reality distortion field has run into a brick wall.

“This is war and you can’t just will a win into existence in war,” said Tara Setmayer, cofounder of the Seneca Project, a women-led political action committee. “The American people are not on board with what’s going on because he cannot articulate an argument for why we’re there or what victory actually looks like.”

The move is the latest in a series of actions Colorado has undertaken amid shakeup in federal health policy

DENVER — Colorado has been accepted into a network of more than 360 institutions as the state seeks to stay ahead of emerging public health threats following the withdrawal of the U.S. from the World Health Organization earlier this year.

“We are thrilled to join the World Health Organization’s GOARN network, especially during a time when federal public health guidance is becoming less consistent,” Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement Wednesday. “Disease does not stop at borders, and this partnership helps ensure Colorado is better prepared to protect people and respond quickly to emerging threats.”

The WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert Response Network, or GOARN, is a global partnership established by the international public health body in 2000. Its goal is to facilitate data sharing and expertise from hundreds of institutions “for rapid identification, confirmation of and response to public health emergencies of international importance.”

When asked if he considers himself a Zionist, the governor did not respond directly: “I revere the state of Israel,” he answered. “I’m proud to support the state of Israel. I deeply, deeply oppose Bibi Netanyahu’s leadership, his opposition to the two-state solution and deeply oppose how he is indulging the far right as it relates to what’s going on in the West Bank.”

Experts, market watchers and the authorities in Iran have accused the U.S. President of engaging in market manipulation surrounding the Iran war by timing military announcements around market opens and closes.

On top of that, there have been questions of possible insider trading in connection to Trump’s moves. Last Monday, a spike of highly suspicious and extremely lucrative oil futures trades and prediction market bets took place minutes before Trump posted about the war winding down.

It follows a pattern seen before around tariff policy, and the attack on Venezuela. To parse the accusations of market manipulation and insider trading, we’re joined by Mike Bird, the Wall Street editor at The Economist and co-host of The Economist’s Money Talks podcast.

archive article: https://archive.is/XwTpM

The Defense Department is trying to quickly find vendors who are able to ship pre-made shelters to protect troops in the Middle East as the United States’ war with Iran continues.

The department is looking for information from private contractors who can provide “prefabricated, transportable, hardened shelter systems designed to protect personnel from blast and fragmentation threats,” according to a new federal contract notice posted Monday.

About 97% of toilet paper is produced domestically, according to the Japan Household Paper Industry Association, with no reliance on the Middle East.

Following the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, gas prices, grocery bills and mortgage rates have all climbed

The US-Israel war against Iran has sent shockwaves through global markets, leaving many Americans grappling with a growing financial squeeze on everyday living costs.

Following the US-Israeli strikes on Iran – prompting retaliatory attacks on US allies in the region and Iran’s decision to close the Strait of Hormuz, a critical maritime passage – costs have surged across the US. Gas prices, in particular, have spiked sharply, with the national average rising by roughly 30% over the past month. Grocery bills, mortgage rates and fertilizer costs have also climbed.

Now, many Americans are being forced to reassess their finances and cut back drastically on basic necessities such as food, clothing and electricity.

Spain has closed its airspace to U.S. planes involved in the Iran war, Defense Minister Margarita Robles said Monday, marking another step in the country’s opposition to the U.S. and Israel’s conflict in the Middle East.

Spain had already said the U.S. could not use jointly operated military bases in the Iran conflict, which Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has described as illegal, reckless and unjust.

Defense Minister Robles said Monday the same logic applied to the use of Spanish airspace in the conflict.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh sounded like a fired-up prosecutor last year as he shot off a withering series of nuts-and-bolts questions about how President Donald Trump would carry out his plan to rewrite of the way birthright citizenship has been understood in the United States for more than a century.

Kind of begs the question of what the point of the blockade has been all along?

In at least five cases, customers sought medical attention to remove bristles “from their digestive tract or throat,” a federal agency said.

Affected models are shown here