Friday, April 03, 2026
US F-15E jet confirmed shot down over Iran as Tehran releases wreckage images | US-Israel war on Iran | The Guardian
US F-15E jet confirmed shot down over Iran as Tehran releases wreckage images
"Downing of fighter plane – the first shot down over Iran since start of war – prompts frantic US rescue effort
A US F-15E fighter has been shot down over Iran, prompting a frantic US search and rescue effort for its two-strong crew, in the first such incident since the start of the war.
Images of a tail fin and other debris were released by Iranian state media early on Friday accompanied by an initial claim that an advanced US F-35 and been hit by a new air defence system over central Iran and the pilot probably killed.
Aviation experts said the wreckage pictured was in fact from a F-15E from the US air force’s 494th squadron, based at RAF Lakenheath in the UK, though it could not at first be confirmed when and where the pictures were taken.
US officials familiar with the situation later confirmed off the record that an F-15E had been brought down and the Pentagon was scrambling to find the crew. But there was no official comment from the US military about the incident.
Subsequent footage filmed from Iran showed a US C-130 Hercules and HH-60 Pavehawk helicopters flying low and at one point refuelling together, accompanied by fresh Iranian speculation that the plane crew may have ejected and survived.
Justin Bronk, an aviation expert from the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), said the use of the specialist helicopters “suggested a combat search and rescue mission is underway to locate and extract the two aircrew from the F-15E”.
A social media account claiming to be linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards posted a picture of an ejector seat in a desert landscape, which appeared to be consistent with the ACES II type used in F-15Es. “If genuine it would suggest that at least one of the two aircrew did eject safely,” Bronk added.
The presenter on an Iranian TV channel urged residents to hand over any “enemy pilot” to police and promised a reward for anyone who did.
Iran’s Tasnim news agency reported that the pilot of the jet – still incorrectly described as an F-35 – had been taken into custody, contradicting Tehran’s initial claim that the pilot had probably died in the incident.
Overnight, the US Central Command, which is leading the attack on Iran, had denied Iranian claims that another F-35 jet had been downed over Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz. “All US fighter aircraft are accounted for,” Centcom said at the time.
No US fighter jets have been lost over Iran during the five week long conflict, though three F-15Es were dramatically shot down by a Kuwaiti air defence system in a friendly fire accident on March 1.
An F-35 fighter reportedly had to make an emergency landing at a US airbase in the Middle East after sustaining damage from the ground. A US E-3 Sentry airborne warning and control system aircraft was destroyed at the Prince Sultan airbase in Saudi Arabia on March 27 in a particular accurate Iranian strike."
White House Seeks $1.5 Trillion for Defense in New Budget Request
White House Seeks $1.5 Trillion for Defense in New Budget Request
“The White House is requesting $1.5 trillion for defense in the 2027 fiscal year, a 40% increase from the current year. This request is accompanied by a call for $73 billion in cuts to domestic programs, including climate, housing, and education. The proposed increase is framed as necessary due to the ongoing war with Iran, but both Democrats and Republicans have expressed concerns about the high level of military spending and the proposed domestic cuts.
The massive, proposed increase would be offset in part by steep cuts to domestic programs, some of which the administration describes as wasteful.
With the United States at war with Iran and embroiled in conflicts around the world, the White House said on Friday it would ask Congress to approve roughly $1.5 trillion for defense in the 2027 fiscal year. If enacted, that amount would set military spending at its highest level in modern history.
The request, which arrived on Friday as part of President Trump’s new budget, would amount to a roughly 40 percent bump from what the U.S. spent on the Pentagon this fiscal year. The administration said it would couple the proposed boost with a call for $73 billion in cuts across many domestic agencies, including the elimination of some climate, housing and education programs.
The White House released a summary of its budget request, with fuller details expected later. Together, the ideas may sum to a fiscal blueprint that could still add trillions of dollars to the brimming federal debt over the next decade, if lawmakers translate the president’s vision into law.
Mr. Trump urged Congress to approve most of the new defense money, more than $1.1 trillion, as part of their yearly work to fund the government, and to enact the remaining $350 billion using the same legislative tactic that allowed Republicans to clinch their tax cuts one year ago. He also asked lawmakers to boost federal funding to aid with border enforcement and mass deportations.
In the days before releasing the initial details of his plan, the president and his aides framed the proposed increase for defense in urgent terms, citing a need to restock munitions and other supplies amid the war with Iran. At one point, Mr. Trump indicated at a private lunch that military spending needed to be a national priority, even at the expense of federal safety-net programs and other government aid.
“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things, they can do it on a state basis,” he said, adding the focus had to be “military protection.”
But Democrats and Republicans have expressed a shared unease recently about raising military spending to the extent that Mr. Trump has suggested, fretting that the administration has failed to keep them updated about the status of the Iran war, now in its fifth week.
Nor have lawmakers responded favorably to some of the president’s proposed cuts for agencies and programs that serve American families and businesses. Only months ago, Democrats and Republicans approved spending packages for the current fiscal year that rejected some of the same domestic cuts, which Mr. Trump endorsed as part of his 2026 submission.
This fiscal year, the White House said it would cut domestic spending by $73 billion, or about 10 percent. The administration also said it would ask Congress for a series of boosts to federal law enforcement, including more than $40 billion for the Justice Department, a 13 percent increase.
Tony Romm is a reporter covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The Times, based in Washington.“
As H-1B Visa Program Changes, Skilled Foreign Workers Consider Leaving U.S.
As H-1B Visa Program Changes, Skilled Foreign Workers Consider Leaving U.S.
The Trump administration’s changes to the H-1B visa program, including a $100,000 fee and a weighted lottery system prioritizing higher salaries, are causing skilled foreign workers to reconsider their careers in the U.S. Despite the upheaval, companies are still filing H-1B visas, particularly for highly qualified candidates.
The pathway to building a career in the United States for many highly educated and skilled foreign workers was once clear: Earn a degree from an American university or college, and then be recruited by a company willing to sponsor one of the 85,000 H-1B visas awarded annually to fill specialized roles and grant work status for up to six years.
Now that reliable route is shifting as the Trump administration has made fundamental changes to the way the visas are granted.
The New York Times spoke to three international workers caught in the middle: an Indian woman who, after receiving her master’s degree in biotechnology from Northwestern University, struggled to find a company that would sponsor her for temporary employment; a Chinese-Mongolian marketing analyst in New York who was laid off and is now hustling to find an employer to sponsor her visa; and a Taiwanese software engineer in Seattle who dealt with anxiety because of shifting immigration policies amid widespread tech layoffs.
The H-1B program allows U.S. companies in major industries like technology and medicine to submit visa applications for foreign candidates, who are then entered into a lottery system. Though the visa program has been around since 1990, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services began using a random selection process in 2013 to handle the surplus of applications. Since then, demand has continued to soar.
Last September, the Trump administration imposed a $100,000 fee on new H-1B applicants, stirring confusion around the program. Then in late February, another hurdle was introduced: The Department of Homeland Security turned this game of chance into one that prioritizes higher salaries.
Now, if there are more H-1B applicants than spots available, U.S.C.I.S. will conduct a weighted lottery system based on new criteria: wage levels that are calculated with government employment and wage data, which include factors like job title and location. This new process gives applications tied to higher wages an advantage in the lottery system.
The D.H.S. says the new rule is meant to better protect job opportunities for Americans and to deter companies from filing H-1B petitions for low-skilled, low-paid positions, a practice the Trump administration says has led to the abuse of the program.
“There’s definitely a panic level that we hadn’t seen in the past with clients,” said Matthew Maiona, a Boston-based immigration lawyer who has over 30 years of experience representing both employers and employees in sectors like I.T. and engineering.
“H-1Bs are not a cheap way of doing things,” he said. “You have to pay all the filing fees and legal fees, and you’re also paying a prevailing wage that’s set by the Department of Labor.”
These changes have impelled some foreign workers to rethink their careers in the United States. Those we spoke to said that it felt nearly impossible to find U.S. employers over the last year that would sponsor their H-1B visas for roles in biotechnology and marketing analytics.
Despite the upheaval in the H1-B program, as well as the struggling job market, Mr. Maiona said his firm hadn’t seen a decline in companies filing H-1B visas this year; but he noted that there had been a decrease in employers filing H-1B petitions for entry-level roles. “If you’re making a piece of software and the best qualified person is an H-1B, I’ll say 99 percent of the time the company is going to hire that person with the best qualifications,” he said.“
Pam Bondi broke the DOJ to please Trump. It wasn’t enough to save her.
Pam Bondi broke the DOJ to please Trump. It wasn’t enough to save her.
“Pam Bondi, Trump’s former Attorney General, was fired for failing to prosecute Trump’s political enemies despite her efforts to align the DOJ with his authoritarian vision. Her tenure saw a focus on targeting Trump’s adversaries, but the resulting prosecutions were weak and often unsuccessful. Bondi’s actions damaged the DOJ’s reputation and led to a mass exodus of career attorneys, leaving her successor with significant challenges.
The newly ousted attorney general bent over backward to defend Trump’s most indefensible policies and attack his enemies to the detriment of the Justice Department.
When Pam Bondi agreed to be attorney general under President Donald Trump, she knew what was being asked of her. Trump made no secret of his desire to transform the Justice Department from an impartial, independent law enforcement agency into a weapon for revenge against his political adversaries. She was to treat Trump’s enemies as targets of the U.S. government.
Bondi showed no hesitation in that regard and hit the ground running once confirmed — but it was not enough for Trump. On Thursday, she became the second member of Trump’s Cabinet to be fired this year. MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian reported Bondi was fired mostly because Trump “grew dissatisfied with her inability to deliver on prosecuting his perceived enemies.”
Notwithstanding Bondi’s multiple glaring errors and own goals, most of the forces working against her were outside of her direct control. Even as she failed in Trump’s main objective for her, in her desperate attempts to make good on the president’s wishes, she still managed to do serious harm to the DOJ. The choices Bondi made in the name of appeasing Trump damaged its reputation, hollowed out its staff, and left her successor even less poised to uphold the nations’ laws fairly and evenly.
For all Trump’s ire about Bondi’s failures to prosecute his perceived enemies, it’s hard to see what more she could have done to slake his thirst for revenge. After all, her hands were tied by a simple fact: There is no law against making the president mad. Bondi still devoted a significant portion of the department’s resources toward finding something, anything, to use against Trump’s political foes in court, especially after Trump publicly admonished her to move faster.
The resulting prosecutions were almost all too weak to hold up in the face of the court’s scrutiny. Some could not even clear the low bar of a grand jury indictment. An ambitious but severely inexperienced prosecutor installed by Bondi got a grand jury to indict former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, but those indictments were overturned. Subsequent efforts to pin them with alleged crimes have gone nowhere. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is reportedly under investigation, but there have been few updates in that matter since November.
The attempts from U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro to go after former President Joe Biden and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powellhave fared little better. Probes into Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for allegedly impeding law enforcement have drawn no charges. In fact, the most successful of the indictments against Trump’s antagonists, a classified documents retention case against his former national security advisor, John Bolton, came from an investigation the Biden administration launched.
There was little else in Bondi’s record at Main Justice to buoy her in the face of this failure in Trump’s eyes. The administration’s disastrous handling of the files surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and convicted child sex abuser, fell squarely on her shoulders. While the scandal surrounding the so-called Epstein files had no good outcome, given how much of it was based on conspiracy theories, Bondi’s fumbling only added fuel to the fire.
Weeks into her tenure, Bondi insisted in a memo to federal lawyers that they “are expected to zealously advance, protect, and defend their client’s interests.” She meant that to be as Trump’s interests, of course, not the federal government’s orAmericans’. But her ironfisted attempts to instill loyalty and devotion for Trump in DOJ lawyers failed spectacularly. We have seen a massive rush to the exits from career DOJ attorneys, and those who have stayed have scrambled to handle an onslaught of cases brought against the administration.
The dearth of Civil Division lawyers willing to defend Trump’s policies is a function of how indefensible those policies are. Federal courts have been flooded with immigration cases, many of which have seen lawyers stammering to explain to judges how the plaintiff’s rights haven’t been violated. The Civil Rights Division, once a jewel of the federal government and a defender of access to the ballot box, has now adopted a mission that includes blocking Americans from the polls.
All of this was done to please Trump and align the DOJ with his authoritarian vision. Bondi’s failure, then, was not a lack of enthusiasm but her inability to bend the justice system past its breaking point. Despite a boost from a pliant majority on the Supreme Court, there were simply too many roadblocks keeping her from persecuting the people on Trump’s list of targets.
With Bondi gone, acting Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will step up until a replacement is confirmed. Early reporting points to Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin as a likely candidate. Zeldin may perform better under the spotlight of a congressional grilling than Bondi and may prove himself to be more creative in stretching the law to attack the people Trump wants to attack. But absent a total rewrite of America’s criminal code to better suit Trump’s wishes, he will have the same problems pleasing Trump that Bondi had.”
Thursday, April 02, 2026
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