Greetings! Happy Good Friday to those celebrating.

Let’s get into today’s top stories.

🇮🇷 American airpower just met a harder sky. Iran shot down two American military aircraft Friday. One crew member was rescued. At least one more remained missing as search teams worked. Officials said one fighter jet went down inside Iran. Iranian state media separately said an A-10 crashed in the Persian Gulf. Neither the White House nor the Pentagon offered much public detail. Trump said the losses would not change negotiations because, in his words, it is war. The same day, Iranian reports said strikes on the unfinished B1 bridge killed 8 people and wounded 95. For a president who said Iran had been completely decimated, the air war just answered back.

🇧🇭 Bahrain’s old fault lines are cracking again. Bahrain says it is defending order during wartime. Critics say it is reviving the grammar of repression. The flashpoint is Mohamed al-Mousawi, a Shiite Bahraini whose body was returned with bruises, slash marks, and signs consistent with torture. He had served about 11 years of a 21-year sentence before a 2024 royal amnesty. Rights groups say he disappeared after prayers on March 19th. His family was called to retrieve his body on March 27th. Bahrain says the injuries are misleading and says he died of a heart attack; the national spy service lost arrest powers after the 2011 uprising, then regained them in 2017. With war against Iran inflaming a Sunni-ruled, Shiite-majority kingdom, dissent is contagion.

🔥 Southern California got wind, smoke, and exit orders. A fast-moving wildfire broke out Friday east of Moreno Valley in Riverside County. Officials call it the Springs Fire. It started late morning; by evening, it spread to around 5.5 square miles. Evacuation orders and warnings followed as winds pushed smoke across the area. Crews began to gain some containment by nightfall: the fire’s cause is still under investigation. Officials did not say how many households were under warning or order. For residents, that distinction matters less once the sky turns brown. California still has a gift for making ordinary weather feel like an alarm bell with flames.

🗽 Mamdani wants bad landlords, but first needs names. Zohran Mamdani says his rental ripoff hearings are the opening move against predatory landlords. The problem is that tenants often know the building but not the owner. Reporting says many of the city’s worst actors still hide behind limited liability company shells. A state bill that would have made ownership easier to trace was vetoed after landlord pressure. So the crackdown begins with a map missing names. For a mayor who promised rupture, City Hall still mixes newcomers with old municipal hands. Mamdani's administration includes former real estate lobbyists and private equity execs, and he has reversed course and broken a campaign promise once committing $1B to expand the CityFHEPS housing voucher program. The mayor's budget fights leave public schools, libraries, and cultural programs exposed; meanwhile, the DeBlasio-era multi-borough megajail plan the mayor continues to pursue sits around $16B and remains behind schedule. In New York, even a war on bad landlords can end up looking like a paperwork siege.

🏦 Trump’s budget turns war into fiscal doctrine. Trump’s 2027 budget asks for $1.5T in defense spending. That is a 44% jump. The White House says the moment demands it. The same document cuts nondefense spending by 10%. Agriculture would fall 19%. Housing and Urban Development would drop 13%. Health and Human Services would lose about 12%. The budget also boasts about slashing what it calls woke programs. In this draft, domestic need is treated as softness and military expansion as realism. A government that says it cannot afford much at home has suddenly found lavish confidence for everything with a runway or a launch code.

🎖️ Hegseth wants more guns on bases, not fewer. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says troops will be allowed to bring personal weapons onto military installations. His memo tells commanders to presume such requests are necessary for self-protection. Any denial must now be written and explained in detail. Hegseth framed the old rules as unconstitutional caution. He said bases had effectively become gun-free zones. Supporters hear deterrence. Critics hear more firearms in already stressed environments. The policy arrives after years of questions following shootings on American bases, including a 2009 massacre that killed 13 people. It also arrives in a country that keeps answering violence by widening access to weapons. At the Pentagon, the Second Amendment is now being drafted into daily base policy.

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That’s all for today!

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