President Trump has warned Tehran of more attacks to come, after the United States and Israel launched strikes on civilian infrastructure in Iran. On Thursday, the U.S. bombed a major bridge under construction in the city of Karaj west of Tehran, then attacked it again, about an hour later, as emergency crews were assisting the wounded. Iran says the “double tap” strike on the B1 suspension bridge killed eight people and wounded nearly 100 others. The head of the construction company building the bridge said it had absolutely no military uses, and warned its destruction will worsen traffic for more than a dozen provinces in Iran.

Mr. Rahmani: “If this is help, please redefine that term for me. They destroy infrastructure to push the country backward and weaken the spirit of our people.”

Separately, Iran says U.S.-Israeli airstrikes have destroyed the Pasteur Institute of Iran, a century-old medical research center that’s played a key role in combating infectious diseases in the Middle East.
Iran’s Red Crescent says U.S.-Israeli strikes have hit more than 113,000 civilian sites, including homes and schools, killing more than 2,000 people, including women and children, with at least 21,000 injured. Maria Martinez is the head of the Red Crescent’s delegation for Iran.

Maria Martinez: “We estimate that at least 3% of the population has been displaced. This represents around 1 million families, 3 million people.”

Iran has published a list of major bridges across the Persian Gulf region it said could come under “tit-for-tat” retaliation, following the U.S.-Israeli coalition’s strike on the B1 bridge earlier in the day. Iran’s targets include bridges in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and the King Fahd Causeway linking Saudi Arabia to the island nation of Bahrain.

Iran’s threat of escalation came as it announced a wave of drone and missile attacks on Gulf nations, including U.S.-owned steel plants in the UAE and a weapons factory in Israel. Iran said one attack targeted a data center of the U.S. software company Oracle in Dubai; UAE officials denied the claim. Iran also said it struck an Amazon cloud computing center in Bahrain.

Meanwhile, Kuwait said Iran struck a power and desalination plant earlier today, hours after it struck an oil refinery, sparking a number of fires.
Separately, Yemen’s Houthis said they’d fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel, in coordination with Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

In Iraq, an Iranian-backed militia claimed responsibility for six attacks on U.S. military bases over a 24-hour period. The attacks came as two Iranian drones struck a U.S. diplomatic support facility at Baghdad International Airport on Thursday evening.

Israel’s military says it struck more than 3,500 targets across Lebanon in the month since it renewed large-scale attacks on Hezbollah while invading parts of southern Lebanon. The Lebanese Health Ministry reports 1,345 people have been killed and over 4,000 wounded since the start of the war, with 125 children among the dead.

In Gaza, a Palestinian man died from his injuries Thursday after Israeli soldiers shot him in the outskirts of Khan Younis. The killing came after two Palestinians were killed and several others were wounded in an Israeli airstrike targeting a gathering of people in Khan Younis. A relative said the strike killed a father and a toddler.

Allyan Al-Byouk: “He was in his neighborhood walking with his young son, who was 2 years old. He was carrying his son and walking in the street when a reconnaissance drone hit them directly with a missile. He and his son were martyred instantly, and their bodies were torn to pieces.”

In the United Kingdom, two leaders of the Palestine solidarity movement have been found guilty of failing to march within a designated area set by police during a massive pro-Palestine demonstration in London last year. Ben Jamal of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Chris Nineham of the Stop the War Coalition said they would appeal against the convictions. In a statement, Human Rights Watch said the verdict was intended to intimidate and silence dissenting voices to the U.K.'s ongoing support for the Israeli government's war crimes.

In France, police on Thursday detained European Parliament member Rima Hassan on suspicion of “apology for terrorism” over a social media post about a former member of the Japanese Red Army who participated in an attack on an Israeli airport in 1972. Hassan was born stateless in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria and is a member of the leftist France Unbowed party. She was a leader of a Gaza Freedom Flotilla mission that was intercepted by Israeli forces in international waters last June as they attempted to deliver food and aid to Gaza. Critics have condemned her arrest as “judicial harassment” aimed at silencing her outspoken criticism.

President Trump has fired Pam Bondi from her position as U.S. attorney general amid reports of Trump’s growing frustration with Bondi’s failure to prosecute his political enemies. Bondi is the second Cabinet member to be fired by Trump since he retook the White House, after former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was ousted in March. Trump said his former criminal defense attorney, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, would serve as acting U.S. attorney general. Meanwhile, Lee Zeldin, who currently heads the Environmental Protection Agency, is reportedly a top contender to replace Bondi.

Bondi was a Trump loyalist who oversaw the Justice Department’s disastrous handling of the Epstein files. Her firing comes just months after a heated congressional hearing in which Bondi refused to apologize to Epstein’s survivors, who were present in the room, for the DOJ’s failure to fully redact their names in the Epstein files. California Congressmember Robert Garcia said in a statement, “She will not escape accountability and remains legally obligated to appear before our committee under oath,” referring to a House Oversight Committee subpoena issued against Bondi last month.

On Thursday, Congressmember Ro Khanna said Senate Democrats should impede the nomination of a new U.S. attorney general until all Epstein files without redactions have been released.

Rep. Ro Khanna: “The Senate Democrats must insist that any new attorney general will release the remaining 3 million files with no redactions, other than protecting the survivors. The new attorney general must commit to investigating and prosecuting people who are all over these files and raped or abused these girls, and the new attorney general must commit to not using the Justice Department for political prosecutions. It is not enough to replace one Trump sycophant with another.”

We’ll have more on this story after headlines.

The White House is preparing to unveil a record-shattering Pentagon budget request of $1.5 trillion for the next fiscal year. It’s by far the largest year-over-year increase in a presidential military spending request since World War II. It includes funding for F-35 stealth fighter jets; new warships, including Virginia-class submarines; and Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, which the White House says will cost $185 billion.

Meanwhile, President Trump has said the U.S. can’t afford to pay for social programs like daycare, Medicare and Medicaid amid record military spending. Trump spoke during a White House Easter lunch on Wednesday.

President Donald Trump: “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis; you can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

A new report by Oxfam International finds the wealthiest 0.1% of the world’s people are hiding more than $2.8 trillion in offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. That’s more wealth than is owned by the poorest half of humanity, more than 4 billion people.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has fired the Army’s chief of staff, General Randy George, along with two other top generals. A Pentagon spokesperson gave no reason for Thursday’s abrupt firings. General George had served as a senior assistant to former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin under President Biden. The New York Times reports he’d recently clashed with Hegseth over Hegseth’s decision to block the promotion of four Army officers to become one-star generals — two of them are Black; the other two are women.

Meanwhile, Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee are pushing for an investigation into a Financial Times report which found Hegseth attempted to make a multimillion-dollar investment in arms company stocks just weeks before President Trump joined Israel in its attack on Iran.

The Trump administration has deported 12 people to Uganda, marking the first known arrival of immigrants expelled from the U.S. to the African country since striking a so-called third country agreement. Trump has pushed to deport immigrants from the U.S. to countries they have no ties to, as part of his brutal immigration crackdown.

The Uganda Law Society vowed legal challenges, saying those deported were “effectively dumped in Uganda through an undignified, harrowing and dehumanizing process that has reduced [the deportees] to little more than chattel, for the benefit of private interests on both sides of the Atlantic.” Other African countries have agreed to receive U.S. deportees under Trump, including Eswatini, Ghana, Rwanda and South Sudan.

A Venezuelan man is suing the Trump administration after he says he was illegally detained and deported from the United States to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT mega-prison last year. The Venezuelan immigrant, who is identified by the pseudonym “Johnny Hernandez,” is seeking $56 million in damages. Despite having no criminal record in the U.S. or Venezuela, he was arrested by federal immigration agents and then sent to El Salvador, where he says he was tortured. Brent Ward, a member of his legal team, said in a statement, “The Trump administration knowingly and unlawfully locked up an innocent person for four months in a concentration camp-like prison where he suffered torture, shooting, beatings, and solitary confinement. … Our client suffered catastrophic injuries in CECOT from which he will never fully recover.”

Environmental groups have sued the Trump administration for removing protections for endangered species in the Gulf of Mexico to allow oil and gas offshore drilling. The unprecedented blanket exemption would leave several Gulf species and ecosystems vulnerable to extinction, including the critically endangered Rice’s whale. The move was approved by a six-member committee chaired by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invoked the vote, claiming that lifting the Endangered Species Act protections in the Gulf was a matter of national security as the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has disrupted global oil supplies. The Sierra Club said in a statement, “The Trump administration is playing god with our most vulnerable wildlife by deciding which endangered species are worth saving and which can be sentenced to extinction to pad oil and gas profits.”