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BBC News with Danielle Jalowiecka.
Israel says it's launched a new broad wave of airstrikes on the Iranian capital, Tehran. The action took place hours after it said it had attacked a site linked to developing nuclear weapons. Iran has always said its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. The new attack came as the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave his first news conference since the war began. Lucy Williamson is in Jerusalem. It was a fairly triumphalist tone struck by Benjamin Netanyahu in that press conference, listing what he said was all the strategic gains made in the war, despite the fact that the regime change he's been calling for hasn't happened. He talked about the enormous achievements that were changing the balance of power in the Middle East and beyond. "This is no longer the same Iran, no longer the same Middle East, and this is not the same Israel," he said. The U.S. military says an American aerial refueling aircraft has crashed in western Iraq. More details from Simi Jolaoso in Washington. Two aircraft were involved in this incident which happened in friendly airspace, one of them being a KC-135 refueling aircraft. We know that it went down over western Iraq and the U.S. Central Command have now deemed it lost, but the second aircraft landed safely. We know it wasn't due to hostile fire or even friendly fire and that rescue efforts are ongoing. The U.S. military has now lost at least four aircraft during the war in the Middle East. Israel has told people in a new part of southern Lebanon to leave immediately, almost doubling the area under a mass evacuation order. The Israeli defense minister told the army to prepare for expanded operations inside Lebanon as it fights the Iranian-backed armed group Hezbollah. Israeli airstrikes continued to pound the capital Beirut, including a downtown neighborhood and a university campus. Oil prices have risen again, with the benchmark Brent crude settling above $100 a barrel for the first time since 2022. U.S. stock markets are still falling, with the Dow Jones sliding 1.57 percent on the day. Michelle Fleury is in New York. Oil traders are essentially bracing themselves for what will be a long period of challenges. And if you listen to experts in the field, the one thing they say is that if things last for about three weeks or so, that becomes particularly challenging, not just because the shipments that can't get through the Strait of Hormuz, but at that point you get into the problem of storage, that a lot of the local producers on the ground in the Gulf no longer have storage room and that's when you actually start to see destruction of production. And that is kind of the next leg of worry for those in the industry. You're listening to the latest world news from the BBC. A gunman who killed one person and wounded two others at a university in Virginia in the U.S. had previously been jailed for trying to support the Islamic State. Security officers identified him as 36-year-old Mohamed Bailor Jalloh. The former National Guardsman was released from prison two years ago. The FBI is investigating Thursday's shooting at Old Dominion University as an act of terrorism. North Korea has reportedly accused Japan of heightening regional security risks by accelerating the deployment and development of long-range missiles. North Korean state media reported the government as saying Tokyo's military build-up amounts to preparations for a future attack. KCNA dismissed Japan's claim that the build-up was for self-defense. For the first time in six years, a passenger train has arrived in Beijing from North Korea. The service to and from Pyongyang was suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic. The journey takes around 25 hours, with fares reportedly starting at around $150. Trains are set to run four days a week, with a shorter service from the Chinese border city of Dandong. NASA says the first crewed mission to the Moon in more than 50 years could blast off as soon as the beginning of April. Artemis II is due to send four astronauts around the Moon, although they won't land on the lunar surface. It was originally planned to launch last month, but was delayed by technical problems. Here's our science editor Rebecca Morelle. NASA's mega-Moon rocket has spent the last few weeks in the Vehicle Assembly Building in Cape Canaveral in Florida. Engineers have been working to fix a helium leak, which they say they've managed to repair. The 100-meter-tall rocket will now be rolled back out to the launch pad next week. The earliest it can blast off is the 1st of April, but work needs to be successfully completed before NASA makes the final decision whether to go ahead with this date. And that's the latest BBC News. |