Donald Trump has responded to the Iran Islamic Revolutionary Guard seizing at least one British oil tanker.
After saying he was in talks with the UK, Mr Trump - who pulled America out of the Iran Nuclear Deal last year - said: "This only goes to show what I'm saying about Iran. Trouble. Nothing but trouble."
The events come a day after Donald Trump said the US Navy "destroyed" an Iranian drone in the Strait of Hormuz, a claim Iran denied.
In the midst of the international tensions, which have escalated since Iran shot down a US drone in June, the president posted a tweet about his efforts to release imprisoned rapper A$AP Rocky.
The American star is currently in a Swedish prison while police finish their investigation into a fight that took place in downtown Stockholm.
“Just spoke to Kanye West about his friend A$AP Rocky's incarceration”, Mr Trump posted online. “I will be calling the very talented Prime Minister of Sweden to see what we can do about helping A$AP Rocky. So many people would like to see this quickly resolved!”
Earlier in the day, the feud between Donald Trump and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar raged on.
The president has faced increasing criticism over his racist attacks of the Somali-born Democrat.
Despite saying he disapproved of the “send her back” chants at a North Carolina rally, Donald Trump today praised the rally attendees as "incredible patriots," and said Representative Omar is “a disgrace to our country.”
The latest political figure to defend the freshman representative is Angela Merkel.
The German Chancellor said Mr Trump's racist comments about Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib undermine America's strength" and that she stands in "solidarity" with the congresswomen.
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Iran has refuted Donald Trump’s claim that the USS Boxer, a US Navy amphibious assault ship, shot down one of its drones in the Strait of Hormuz, insisting all of its unmanned surveillance craft have returned home safely to their bases.
"All drones belonging to Iran in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz... returned safely to their bases after their mission of identification and control, and there is no report of any operational response by USS Boxer," Abolfazl Shekarchi, a senior armed forces spokesman, is quoted as saying by the Tasnim news agency.
Trump said on Thursday that the drone had flown to within "approximately 1,000 yards" of the vessel and had ignored "multiple calls to stand down" before being "destroyed" in the latest episode to stir tensions in the Gulf.
Relations between Washington and Tehran have deteriorated badly since President Trump pulled the US out of the 2015 nuclear accord last year, with matters coming to a head in June when Iran's Revolutionary Guard shot down a US Navy RQ-4A Global Hawk drone, prompting Trump to order and then cancel retaliatory airstrikes with just 10 minutes to spare.
Here's Chris Riotta's report on Trump's original announcement.
The president’s former director of communications, Hope Hicks, has been asked to return to the House Judiciary Committee to answer for inconsistencies between her testimony on the “hush money” payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal and information revealed by the unsealing of court records by federal prosecutors in New York, which indicated Trump had engaged in a flurry of phone calls with aides regarding the matter in 2016.
The records released on Wednesday detail the calls and texts, including some between Hicks and Trump and between Hicks and Trump's former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.
The Judiciary panel says the documents are inconsistent with Hicks' testimony that she had no knowledge of the payments and wasn't "present" for any conversations between Trump and Cohen about Daniels.
Trump has meanwhile attempted to distance himself from the "Send her home!" chants made against Somalia-born Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar at his rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Wednesday night - the culmination of the racist tweets row that has dominated Washington politics over the last week.
The president said he had attempted to move matters on by "speaking quickly" - which, if he did, was ineffective at best - but the admission at least indicated he appeared to feel his MAGA devotees had gone too far this time.
The chants ringing out provided many observers with an uncomfortable reminder of the "Lock her up!" cries directed against beaten opponent Hillary Clinton that rang out after Trump's election win in November 2016.
For her part, Omar returned to her constituency in Minnesota to a hero’s welcome on Thursday, retaliatory chants of "Welcome home Ilhan!" greeting her when she landed at Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.
Omar had previously reporters at the Capitol that she believes the president is a "fascist" and cast the confrontation as a fight over "what this country truly should be."
"We are going to continue to be a nightmare to this president because his policies are a nightmare to us. We are not deterred. We are not frightened," she said, referring to herself and fellow progressive "Squad" members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley, whom Trump told to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came", an attempt to capitalise on Democratic infighting that has gone badly wrong.
More damning video footage has emerged relating to the president's past, this time showing Trump bragging about kissing a married talk show host on the lips while her husband’s back was turned.
The newly unearthed segment from NBC’s A Closer Look reveals why Trump agreed to appear on Faith Daniels’ show and why he allowed her producers to film him partying with accused paedophile Jeffrey Epstein at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
The 1992 programme - which features Trump ogling young women with Epstein - resurfaced on Wednesday and shows Daniels interviewing the real estate mogul and discussing the "surprise" kiss at a charity event in New York City.
Here's Adam Forrest's report.
Trump has announced his preferred replacement for Alexander Acosta as labour secretary after the latter was forced to resign over his part in the cushy Epstein plea deal of 2008.
That man is lawyer Eugene Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
"Gene has led a life of great success in the legal and labor field and is highly respected not only as a lawyer, but as a lawyer with great experience" working "with labor and everyone else," Trump wrote of Scalia, who is currently a partner in the Washington office of the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher firm.
If confirmed, it will be a return to the department, where Scalia previously served as solicitor in President George W Bush's administration, overseeing litigation and legal advice on rule-makings and administrative law. He has also worked for the US Department of Justice.
Trump had previously announced that Acosta would be succeeded in an acting capacity by his deputy, Patrick Pizzella.
Here's Ilhan Omar's fellow Squad member - Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - with a strong line on the consequences of the president's racist rhetoric and the alarming chanting heard in Greenville.
A clip of another person Trump engaged in a drawn out and unseemly feud with - the late Arizona senator and Vietnam war hero John McCain - has gone viral in reaction to the racist tweets furore.
Shot in October 2008 when McCain was the Republican presidential candidate challenging Barack Obama, he is seen graciously putting a racist supporter in her place when she says the Democrat is untrustworthy because he is "an Arab".
Greg Evans has this for Indy100.
You must know something is wrong with your policy when it necessitates the arrest of protesting nuns, surely?
Here's Negar Mortazavi on the mess Trump has gotten himself into with Iran for Indy Voices.
President Trump said on Thursday that the administration will "take a very long look" at a massive multibillion-dollar contract the Pentagon is preparing to award for a cloud computing system, citing "tremendous complaints" he's heard about the process.
Amazon Web Services, a division of Amazon, and Microsoft are finalists for the contract estimated to be worth up to $10bn (£7.9bn) over a decade.
Trump said during an unrelated event at the White House that companies that are no longer in the running to land the deal, known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, have lodged complaints about the process.
Republican lawmakers troubled by the Pentagon's handling of the contract also took their concerns directly to the president.
"I'm getting tremendous complaints about the contract with the Pentagon and with Amazon," Trump said when he was asked about the matter during an Oval Office appearance with the Dutch prime minister. "They're saying it wasn't competitively bid."
"We're looking at it very seriously," the president said. "It's a very big contract, one of the biggest ever given having to do with the cloud and having to do with a lot of other things."
Trump said some of the "greatest companies in the world" were among those complaining about Amazon, and he said the administration will look "very closely" at the contract because "I have had very few things where there's been such complaining."
Trump is a critic of Amazon, the e-commerce retailer owned by Jeff Bezos. Bezos also owns The Washington Post and Trump has criticised the paper's coverage of the administration.
The president's comments injected new uncertainty into a project the Defense Department has said is vital to maintaining the US military's technological advantage over adversaries. Whichever company wins the contract will have the monumental task of storing and processing vast amounts of classified data. The Pentagon says it will enable troops to advance the use of artificial intelligence in warfare.
Oracle and IBM were eliminated from an earlier round of competition, leaving Amazon and Microsoft as the two finalists.
IBM said in a statement on Thursday that it "has long raised serious concerns about the structure of the JEDI procurement" and continues to believe the Defense Department "would be best served by a multi-cloud strategy" involving multiple cloud systems operated by different companies.
A federal judge last week tossed out a second challenge by Oracle alleging that the bidding process was rigged in Amazon's favor, and some in Congress have expressed concerns about potential conflicts of interest.
Republican senator Marco Rubio of Florida sent a letter last week to White House national security adviser John Bolton asking that the Pentagon delay awarding the contract, contending that the process suffered from a "lack of competition" and the use of "arbitrary criteria and standards for bidders" that could waste taxpayer dollars and "fail to provide our warfighters with the best technology solutions." Rubio had also expressed concerns about plans to award the contract to a single vendor.
The Pentagon has said it plans to award the contract as soon as 23 August.
Congressman James Langevin, a Rhode Island Democrat who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said on Thursday he has full confidence in the Defense Department's cloud strategy and that it's important that the project be allowed to move forward.
Langevin said in an emailed statement that it would be "wholly inappropriate" for Trump or any member of Congress to interfere in the procurement process, especially since the courts and the Government Accountability Office - the watchdog for Congress - have rejected challenges to the Pentagon's plans.
Daniel Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a defence-oriented think tank based in Virginia, said it's not unusual for Trump to publicly raise concerns about a defense equipment contract, as Trump did weeks before he took office over the contract with Boeing for an updated version of Air Force One.
But Goure said it's rare for Trump to actually reverse a Pentagon decision, especially one backed by a legal opinion.
"I would be incredibly surprised if the president decided to unilaterally cancel this," said Goure, whose institute receives funding from Amazon. "I think once he sees the process, or the process is explained to him and the document is explained to him, I think this will all go away."
AP
Ilhan Omar has found herself an improbable ally in the person of conservative British TV personality Piers Morgan, ordinarily one of Trump's toadiest acolytes, having previously lavished him with Arsenal shirts and replicas of Winston Churchill's trademark Homburg hat in interviews in the hope of being accepted.
Morgan writes in The Daily Mail that Wednesday night's campaign rally in North Carolina crossed the line into racism “big time”.
"The president keeps insisting he’s not a racist, and I’ve repeatedly said that in the 13 years I’ve known him, I’ve personally never witnessed him being a racist,” he says.
"But since running for the White House, his inflammatory language has flirted ever closer to crossing the line into overt racism, and now he’s crossed that line. Big time."
"Let’s be very unambiguously clear: what happened in North Carolina last night was not just racist-fueled demagoguery but bordered on fascism.
“Some raised fists, some were just children. All of them seemed united in racist rage,” Morgan said.
“There was the president of the United States whipping his supporters into a hyper-animated state of rage about a political opponent because of her ethnicity,” he added.
Amazing how this president takes a sudden interest in literature whenever the book in question benefits him or is written by his pals.
Here's more from AOC, striking a defiant note in Maryland.
Kim Kardashian - who continues her reinvention as a political activist - has thanked President Trump, secretary of state Mike Pompeo and Jared Kusner for their apparent diplomatic efforts to get American rapper A$AP Rocky released from prison in Sweden, where he has been detained on suspicion of assault.
Another strange celebrity intervention, this time from Saturday Night Live's Trump impersonator Alec Baldwin, who says the administration has become a "chronic condition" afflicting the nation.
“Among the American people, there is a level of disgust and even nausea about Trump", he tells The Guardian.
Strong words from Joe Scarborough this morning on MSNBC for Trump and his toying with the tinderbox of closed border bigotry.
Here's Labour MEP Neena Gill for Indy Voices on what it's like to be an elected official told to "go home" by racists.
Here's the latest from the president on the "send her back" chants.
There are now only three "Radical Left Congresswomen" who hate America, it appears.
