This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here’s the latest:

• The Department of Justice announced an internal audit of its compliance with a law mandating the release files from the investigations of Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sex offender who socialized with Donald Trump for nearly two decades.

• The Trump administration has moved to reclassify marijuana, more than four months after Trump signed an executive order directing the attorney general to move it from schedule I to schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act.

• Trump, apparently abandoning his attempt to frighten Iran’s leaders into negotiating by channeling Richard Nixon’s “madman” theory, ruled out the use of nuclear weapons in his conflict with Iran.

• Trump has decided to invite wanted war criminal Vladimir Putin to the G-20 summit in December at Trump’s Doral golf resort, the Washington Post reports.

• Trump confirmed that the government is considering a plan to bail out or ‘“just buy” Spirit Airlines, but confused Barack Obama with Joe Biden, and Jet Blue with People Express, which has been defunct since 1987.

• India’s foreign ministry denounced comments from the rightwing US commentator Michael Savage, posted on social media by Trump, which argued against awarding birthright citizenship to the US-born children of immigrants “from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet”.

On Thursday, India’s foreign ministry denounced comments from the rightwing US commentator Michael Savage, posted on social media by Donald Trump, which argued against awarding birthright citizenship to the US-born children of immigrants “from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet”.

Trump also shared video of the monologue from Savage.

India’s foreign ministry spokesman, Randhir Jaiswal, called the Savage remarks Trump promoted, “obviously uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste”.

By endorsing Savage’s diatribe against the American-born children of Chinese or Indian immigrants, whom he claimed are “coming here by airplane in the ninth month of their pregnancy” and have “almost no loyalty to this country”, Trump appears to have ignored the claim to citizenship of several people close to him.

Trump’s father, for instance, was born to a non-citizen immigrant mother who arrived in New York five months pregnant only because her husband was denied permission to resettle in Bavaria, as she wished, because he was accused of dodging military service and the family was ordered deported.

Trump’s mother, an immigrant from Scotland, was also not yet a citizen when she gave birth in the US to his two older siblings.

More recently, the current second lady of the United States, Usha Vance, was born to Indian immigrant parents in San Diego, making her a citizen under the 14th Amendment to the US constitution, which Trump has challenged through an executive order currently before the US supreme court.

Although Trump’s solicitor general, John Sauer, argued before the court that the order would not be applied retroactively, if it was to be upheld by the court (as seems unlikely), the citizenship of children born to non-citizen parents, even those on visas that give them a legal right to live in the US, could be cast into doubt.

A strict application of that order to repeal birthright citizenship could potentially be used to strip citizenship from not just the vice-president’s wife but also Trump’s 2024 rival, Kamala Harris, who was born in Oakland to parents on student visas.

Donald Trump confirmed that the government is considering a plan to bail out or ‘“just buy” Spirit Airlines, the troubled budget carrier that could be forced into liquidation by spiking jet fuel prices caused by his war with Iran.

Asked by a reporter if his administration was going to buy Spirit, an idea that was denounced by two Republican senators on Wednesday, Trump said: “we’re thinking about doing it, helping them out, meaning bailing them out, or buying it- I think we just buy it.”

But before the president got around the answering the question, he took a little excursion, by first misstating who was president when Spirit’s proposed merger with Jet Blue was blocked by a federal judge in 2022, and then confusing Jet Blue with People Express, a carrier that went out of business in 1987.

“So Spirit is an airline that’s had some trouble,” Trump said. “They were going to merge with People Express or one of them a number of years ago and Barack Hussein Obama decided it was a bad idea. How did that work out? It was out bad for both of them. That would have been a natural merger.”

To untangle Trump’s confusion: Joe Biden was president in 2022, not Barack Obama; a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan blocked Spirit’s merger with Jet Blue, not People Express, which stopped operating 22 years before Obama became president.

In 1988, the year after People Express went defunct, Trump launched a failed airline of his own, the Trump Shuttle, which flew between New York, Boston and Washington DC for two years before going our of business in 1990, when jet fuel prices spiked after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Earlier in the White House event on Thursday, as the ambassadors of Lebanon and Israel looked on, Trump responded to a question from a Lebanese reporter on the role of Saudi Arabia in the byzantine politics of Lebanon by praising the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman and then pivoting into a sharply partisan attack on his Democratic predecessors.

“We’re the hottest country anywhere in the world,” Trump said, repeating something he claims the Saudi prince told him last year. “We suffered years of abuse by people that were grossly incompetent, like Biden, like Obama. Obama was incompetent. He was a great divider,” Trump said.

Donald Trump posted a photograph of himself meeting the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, in the Oval Office on Thursday on his social media platform.

According to Trump, he met Bass and Kathryn Barger, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors “to discuss the progress made on the horrific fires that ravaged Los Angeles, and the surrounding area.”

After giving himself a large helping of credit for that progress, Trump criticized banks, and suggested that his administration “will be looking into their actions,” and singled out Wells Fargo. “The Banks must treat those people, who so horribly lost their Homes in this tragic fire, very fairly and well,” Trump wrote.

Bass and Barger issued a joint statement on the meeting, which was illustrated, but only on the website of Barger, a Republican, by a photograph of them smiling as they stood on either side of a seated Trump. The two LA leaders said:

“This afternoon, we met with President Trump and Administration officials to advocate for families who lost everything. We had a very positive discussion about FEMA and other rebuilding funds, as well as the support of the President to continue joining us in pressuring the insurance companies to pay what they owe – and for the big banks to step up to ease the financial pressure on LA families.

“Our job is to fight for our communities. When it comes to this recovery, our federal partners are essential, and we are grateful for the support of the President.”

Mark Greenblatt, who was the inspector general for the US Interior Department before Donald Trump fired him in January, has released a statement calling for the Department of Justice’s office of the inspector general to carry out its audit of the justice department’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act “without undue influence”.

Greenblatt, who was appointed as inspector general during Trump’s first term in 2019, investigated the clearing of Black Lives Matter protesters from Lafayette Park outside the White House in 2020, for a photo op featuring the president holding up a Bible, and the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.

In his statement, Greenblatt called the announcement of an audit of the partial release of documents from the federal investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sex offender who socialized with Trump for nearly two decades, “an important and much needed development.”

“This is exactly the kind of independent oversight the American people expect, especially in a case involving powerful individuals, vulnerable victims, and deeply serious alleged crimes,” he continued. “When Congress mandates transparency, it is essential that agencies carry out that directive completely and without undue influence. This audit is a critical step in ensuring that the Department is meeting both the letter and the spirit of the law.”

He added:

It is critically important the audit is thorough and independent. This effort must examine not just what information has been released, but how decisions are made about what is withheld or redacted.

The American people deserve confidence that these judgments are being made fairly and without political considerations. Independent oversight is most important when public trust is on the line. A rigorous, fact-based review will help ensure accountability and reinforce confidence in the process.

The stakes here are clear: whether transparency laws will be enforced as intended and whether the public can have confidence that no one is beyond scrutiny.

As he attempts to wind down the regional war in the Middle East he kicked off in February by joining Israel in attacking Iran, Donald Trump just hosted the ambassadors of Lebanon and Israel in the Oval Office, and invited television cameras in to capture the foreign officials praising him.

The ambassadors agreed to extend a ceasefire in Lebanon, which has been bombarded and invaded by Israel as it seeks to degrade the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, and Trump pledged to support the Lebanese government’s efforts to govern without the support of Hezbollah, which also has a political wing with significant support in the country.

As +972 magazine, an independent Israeli and Palestinian outlet, reported last year, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, was born and raised in the United States.

Leiter thanked Trump for bringing him together with the Lebanese ambassador and cast Israel’s objective as “liberating Lebanon” from what he called Hezbollah’s “occupation” of the country. Hezbollah is, however, a Lebanese movement which only came into being in 1982 in response to a previous invasion and occupation of Lebanon by Israel.

Before he emigrated to Israel at the age of 18, and joined the Israeli military, Leiter was, +972 reported, “a member of the far-right Jewish Defense League, a violent vigilante group founded by the extremist American rabbi Meir Kahane.”

After moving to Israel, the same publication noted, “Leiter joined Kach, the fascist political party and movement that Kahane had founded after his own immigration. Initially conceived as an international branch of the JDL, Kach eventually transformed into an authentic Israeli outfit that spawned its own political credo: Kahanism. Leiter was later nominated as a leader of the radical Jewish settlement in Hebron, before becoming a leader in the wider settler movement.”

In 1994, after another American immigrant to Israel who was also a Kach member and Kahane follower, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Palestinians at a mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron, +972 explained, “both the Israeli and US governments classified Kach as a terrorist organization.”

The US removed Kach from its list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2022, during the Biden administration.

During an Oval Office meeting on Thursday, Lebanon’s ambassador to the United States, Nada Hamadeh Moawad, thanked Donald Trump for brokering a ceasefire to restrain Israel from bombing her country, and added a reference to Maga for good measure.

“I want to really say thank you to the United States, under your leadership, for all your effort to help and to support Lebanon,” she said. “And I think with your help, with your support, we can make Lebanon great again.”

Video of the comments was quickly shared on social media by the Trump White House.

Writing on his social media platform, Donald Trump just announced that the ceasefire “between Israel and Lebanon” will be extended by three weeks.

The president said that the extension was agreed after he hosted an Oval Office meeting with unnamed “High Ranking Representatives of Israel and Lebanon” that was attended by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the US ambassadors to Israel and Lebanon.

Trump also wrote that the US “is going to work with Lebanon in order to help it protect itself from Hezbollah”, the Islamist militant and political group backed by Iran that Israel has blamed for its recent invasion and bombing of Lebanon.

“I look forward in the near future to hosting the Prime Minister of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu, and the President of Lebanon, Joseph Aoun,” Trump wrote.

Benjamin Netanyahu, is a frequent visitor to the Trump White House the president addresses by his nickname, Bibi. Netanyahu, who reportedly convinced the president to attack Iran during his last visit, has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in connection with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, but the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the court and does not enforce its warrants.

Having said for years that ejecting Russia from meetings of the world’s largest economic powers, over its annexation of Ukrainian territory in 2013, was a mistake, Donald Trump has reportedly decided to invite the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to the Group of 20 leaders’ summit scheduled for December at Trump’s Doral golf resort in Miami, the Washington Post reports.

The Post, citing unnamed administration officials, reports:

In a statement, the State Department said that President Donald Trump “has been clear that Russia is welcome to attend all G-20 meetings as the United States focuses on delivering a successful and productive summit.”

“No formal invitations have been issued at this time, but Russia is a G-20 member and will be invited to attend ministerial meetings and the leaders’ summit,” said a senior administration official.

The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023, accusing him of responsibility for “the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation”. However, the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the court and does not enforce its warrants.

At the Group of 7 meeting in Canada last year, Trump brought up the issue of Russia’s exclusion, unprompted.

“The G-7 used to be the G-8. Barack Obama and a person named Trudeau didn’t want to have Russia in, and I would say that that was a mistake because I think you wouldn’t have a war right now,” Trump said.

“But it used to be the G-8 and now it’s, I guess, what’s that, nine years ago, eight years ago it switched over,” Trump said, incorrectly, of the expulsion of Russia in 2014 over its annexation of Crimea.

“They threw Russia out, which I claimed was a very big mistake, even though I wasn’t in politics then,” he added. “I was very loud about it. It was a mistake in that you spend so much time talking about Russia and he’s no longer at the table, so it makes life more complicated. But you wouldn’t have had the war.”

In fact, the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine by Russia, and Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine through the use of proxy forces that year, started the war.

Donald Trump, apparently abandoning his attempt to frighten Iran’s leaders into negotiating by channeling Richard Nixon’s “madman theory, ruled out the use of nuclear weapons in the conflict with Iran in response to a reporter’s question on Thursday in the Oval Office.

Asked by a reporter during the event if his dark threats to end Iranian civilization meant that he would consider using a nuclear weapon, Trump said: “No.”

“No. We don’t need it. Why would I need it?” he continued before attacking the reporter for asking.

“Why would a stupid question like be asked?” Trump said.

“Why would I use a nuclear weapons when we’ve totally, in a very conventional way, decimated then without it?” the president added. “No, I wouldn’t use it. A nuclear weapon should never be allowed to be used by anybody.”

Video of Trump’s remarks was later posted on social media by the US state department and shared by the White House press secretary.

In the past, Trump has repeatedly expressed a horror of nuclear weapons, which he said stemmed from a warnings delivered by his uncle John, a longtime professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“My uncle used to tell me about nuclear before nuclear was nuclear,” Trump said during his 2016 campaign for the presidency.

“I hate nuclear more than any. My uncle was a professor was at MIT, used to tell me about nuclear,” Trump told Anderson Cooper during a CNN town hall event in 2016.

During the second world war, John Trump, then serving on the wartime National Defense Research Committee, was asked to analyze a batch of technical papers found in the New York hotel room of Nikola Tesla when the Serbian-American inventor died in 1943.

Before his death, Tesla had publicly claimed to have invented a so-called “death beam”, so John Trump was asked to evaluate the papers “for the purpose of determining if any ideas of significant value in the present United States war effort could be found”.

He reported that Tesla’s writings in the last years of his life “were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”

Donald Trump is now taking questions from reporters in the Oval Office, repeating his claims that the war in Iran is going well. He called a reporter who asked why the war is still going on “such a disgrace” and noted that the war had not yet lasted as long as the Vietnam war.

Minutes earlier, while showing off plans to renovate the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the president made the odd decision to remind the public that he once gave a speech at the site, in the same location where Martin Luther King Jr delivered his famed “I have a dream” speech. As he has for years, Trump argued that he attracted a larger crowd for his speech, at a Fourth of July celebration in 2019, than the civil rights leader did in 1963.

Trump’s decision to bring up his 2019 speech was unusual because the most famous part of that Trump address was when, badly misreading remarks on a rain-soaked teleprompter, he gave a wildly inaccurate account of US military history.

After claiming that the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary war was “named after” George Washington in 1775, he went on to say that, during the War of 1812: “Our army manned the ampert, it ranned the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do”.

Trump said that the deal with the pharmaceutical company Regeneron to lower drug prices is a huge accomplishment that should lead to midterm election success.

“By itself, we should win the midterms,” Trump said during the White House event.

“That should be front page news, but it won’t be,” Trump added.

Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, has released the text for an extension of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa).

The language includes a three-year extension of the provision and some amendments. These include a monthly FBI review of any US citizens included in collected communication by intelligence agencies, and an investigation by the department’s inspector general for a review of any civil liberties that may have been compromised.

A reminder that section 702, which is now set to expire on 30 April, allows national security agents to collect and review texts and emails sent to and from foreigners living outside the US without a warrant. If Americans are talking to a non-US target living abroad, there is potential for them to get swept up in the investigation.

Notably, the new text released by Republicans does not include the need for a warrant to obtain communications, which had been a demand from several conservative hardliners and Democrats alike.

The legislation will now head to the House rules committee, where it may face further right-wing opposition, before it can end up on the floor for a vote.

Donald Trump, for his part, has pushed GOP lawmakers to “UNIFY” and pass a “clean” Fisa extension, while baselessly claiming he’s been a victim of section 702’s privacy vulnerabilities.

During a House appropriations committee hearing as part of Donald Trump’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year, Howard Lutnick was grilled about his relationship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Represenative Madeleine Dean, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, asked whether the president expressed “concerns” about the commerce secretary’s relationship with Epstein. Lutnick refused to comment.

A reminder, the commerce secretary was a longtime next-door neighbor of Epstein in New York. He has previously claimed that he distanced himself from Epstein in 2005.

However, the justice department’s release of case files showed that Lutnick had two engagements with Epstein years past that. He attended a 2011 event at Epstein’s home. And Lutnick’s family had lunch with Epstein on his private island in 2012 – four years after Epstein was sentenced to 13 months in jail for procuring a minor for prostitution.

Lutnick admitted to the 2012 lunch during his 10 February testimony before the Senate appropriations committee. “I did have lunch with him, as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation,” Lutnick said. In that testimony, Lutnick also insisted that he “barely had anything to do” with Epstein. CBS also reported that Lutnick and Epstein both appeared to have stakes in a now-shuttered advertising company, Adfin, as recently as 2014. Inclu­sion in the files does not imply wrong­do­ing.

However, during today’s hearing, the commerce secretary refused to answer Dean’s questions about whether he had any further business ties with Epstein beyond Adfin.

Dean noted that three female cabinet secretaries have been ousted from Trump’s White House: Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem and Lori Chavez-DeRemer. “If President Trump has even a shred of concern about accountability for Jeffrey Epstein’s enablers,” Dean said to Lutnick, “he would fire you too”.

The New York Times is reporting that the justice department has identified 384 foreign-born Americans whose citizenship it wants to revoke as part of its efforts to speed up denaturalizations by assigning the cases to prosecutors in multiple US attorney’s offices across the country.

Civil litigators in 39 regional offices would soon be assigned to file denaturalization cases against the individuals, according to an official who spoke with The Times.

Matthew Tragesser, a DOJ spokesman, told the news outlet that officials were “pursuing the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in history” from the department of homeland security. “The Department of Justice is laser focused on rooting out criminal aliens defrauding the naturalization process,” he added.

“Citizenship fraud is a serious crime; anyone who has broken the law and obtained citizenship through fraud and deceit will be held accountable,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, told The Times.

The justice department’s watchdog announced an investigation today into the DoJ’s compliance with a law mandating the release of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s investigative files.

The office of inspector general, which operates independently of the justice department, said it would “evaluate the DOJ’s processes for identifying, redacting, and releasing records in its possession as required by the act.”

That legislation, passed in November, forces the department to open its files on the sex trafficking investigations into Epstein and his former associate, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Donald Trump told the BBC that next week’s state visit from King Charles and Queen Camilla could “absolutely” repair US relations with the UK.

In a phone interview, Trump also called King Charles a “fantastic man”.

“I know him well, I’ve known him for years,” the president added. “He’s a brave man, and he’s a great man. They would absolutely be a positive.”

This comes after a once cordial relationship with UK prime minister Keir Starmer has turned icy – following the latter’s unwillingness to support the US-Israel war in Iran. Publicly, Trump has said that Starmer is “no Winston Churchill” and been vocal about his disappointment with the UK’s attitude to the conflict.

The president told the BBC that his relationship with Starmer would only “recover” if the prime minister changed course on immigration.

Trump and first lady Melania Trump will host King Charles and Queen Camilla at the White House on Monday 27 April, and the King will then address Congress on Tuesday 28 April before continuing his tour in Virginia and New York. This will be the first state visit of a British monarch since 2007 when King Charles’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II travelled to the US.

Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, slammed recent comments by the panel’s Republican chair James Comer that members are “split” on whether to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell, the accomplice of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“[Maxwell] is a sexual abuser who facilitated the rape of women and children. This is a shameful way to treat survivors. Oversight Democrats are united in opposing any pardon,” Garcia wrote on social media.

This comes after Comer told Politico that while the committee is divided over whether to grant clemency to Maxwell, he “thinks it looks bad”.

“Honestly, other than Epstein, the worst person in this whole investigation is Maxwell,” the Kentucky Republican told the outlet.

Donald Trump said he has ordered the US Navy “to shoot and kill any boat” that is laying mines in the strait of Hormuz.

On Truth Social, he also said that US minesweepers were working “at a tripled up level” to clear any mines from the waters.

You’ve likely seen that the Senate adopted the plan for the budget blueprint for ICE and border patrol after an all-night “vote-a-rama”.

This is, in fact, not a congressional dance break.

Rather it’s the marathon endgame of budget consideration. Even though debate time expires, senators can still fire off unlimited amendment votes.

Democrats tried to add provisions ranging from lowering healthcare costs to protecting consumers from the economic fallout of the Iran war. Those amendments were symbolic, and none were adopted.

As this is being handled through the reconciliation process, the budget plan only needed a simple majority in the Senate, which it got. Now, the House will have to advance the proposal. Once that happens, committees can start writing the actual reconciliation bill, where the real spending and policy changes live.

However, that bill will face its own hurdles, and another simple‑majority vote, before anything can become law.

President Donald Trump’s administration is considering more than doubling an annual refugee limit to bring more white South Africans into the US, according to three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Trump, a Republican, paused refugee admissions from around the world when he took office in January 2025. Weeks later, he issued an executive order prioritizing the resettlement of European-descended Afrikaners, saying they faced race-based persecution in majority-Black South Africa, Reuters reported. South Africa’s government vehemently denies the claims.

The US Refugee Admissions Program was formally established in 1980 after hundreds of thousands of people fled wars in Vietnam and Cambodia. The program expanded to provide safe haven to persecuted people around the globe. Trump has used it almost exclusively to bring white South Africans into the US, part of a broader upending of norms around humanitarian protection.

In recent weeks, US officials have discussed expanding the 7,500-person refugee cap by 10,000 to allow more South Africans of Afrikaner ethnicity to obtain refugee status, said people familiar with internal planning, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share non-public government discussions.

A state department spokesperson did not confirm or deny the discussions around expanding the refugee admissions ceiling.

“If the president decides to raise the FY 2026 refugee admissions cap, he will do so at the appropriate time, and any numbers discussed at this point are only speculation,” the spokesperson said.

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

The Senate voted to adopt a $70bn budget plan to fund ICE and Border Patrol as part of a new effort to reopen the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The impasse has been going on since mid-February as Democrats have demanded policy changes in the wake of fatal shootings of two protesters by federal agents. The budget resolution would fund the two agencies for three years, through the rest of Trump’s term.

Republicans are now trying to fund the two immigration enforcement agencies through the complicated, time-consuming process called budget reconciliation, a manoeuvre that they also used to pass president Donald Trump’s package of tax and spending cuts last year with no Democratic votes.

Senate majority leader John Thune said:

We have a multistep process ahead of us, but at the end Republicans will have helped ensure that America’s borders are secure and prevented Democrats from defunding these important agencies.

The budget process only requires a simple majority in the Senate, bypassing filibuster rules that require Republicans to find 60 votes on most bills when they only hold 53 seats.

The Senate held the first series of votes through a late night ‘vote-a-rama’ session, starting on Wednesday evening and into early Thursday morning.

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said:

Instead of pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into ICE and Border Patrol, Republicans should be working with Democrats to lower out-of-pocket costs.

The Senate adopted the final resolution 50-48, shortly after 3.30am ET.

In other developments:

• The Pentagon announced, without explanation, that “Secretary of the Navy John C Phelan is departing the administration, effective immediately”. The head of the US navy, which is now enforcing a wartime blockade of Iranian ports, was replaced by a former Maga political candidate, Hung Cao, now acting secretary of the navy.

• The surprise announcement brought renewed attention to Cao’s 2023 comments that that “witchcraft” had “taken over” Monterey, California.

• Virginia’s attorney general, Jay Jones, promised to appeal an injunction issued by a circuit court judge that temporarily blocks the state from certifying the results of the Tuesday’s redistricting referendum.

• As jet fuel prices spike amid the ongoing energy crisis sparked by Donald Trump’s war on Iran, two Republican senators, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, denounced a proposed US government bailout of budget carrier Spirit Airlines.

• Representative David Scott, a Democrat from Georgia, has died at the age of 80. He is the fifth member of Congress to die in office within the last year.