What happened
Iran’s secretive new leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, yesterday vowed vengeance on the U.S. and Israel for their ongoing strikes and said Iran would continue throttling the world’s oil shipments. The statement, Khamenei’s first since being named supreme leader earlier this week, was read on state TV. He has not been seen publicly since the war began. 

Who said what
“We will not refrain from avenging the blood of your martyrs,” Khamenei’s warned. Iran will “continue” to use “the leverage of closing the Strait of Hormuz” and is considering “opening other fronts in which the enemy has little experience and would be highly vulnerable.” Iranian attacks have left the strait “littered with damaged tankers, charred and abandoned,” Leila Molana-Allen said at PBS “News Hour,” and Khamenei’s statement “dismissed any hope of Iran backing down from its unrelenting attacks in the Gulf.” 

With Khamenei still hidden, the “central question remains unanswered,” CNN said: “Who is truly calling the shots?” According to Israeli officials, “Khamenei was in the compound” with his “father, mother, wife and daughter” when they were killed in the war’s opening hours, Axios said, and “he was wounded but survived.” The new leader is “likely in a secure, secret location to avoid a threatened Israeli operation to kill him,” The Associated Press said.

What next?
“Iran’s Navy is gone, their Air Force is no longer, missiles, drones and everything else are being decimated,” President Donald Trump said on social media this morning, and it is “a great honor” to be “killing” their leaders. “Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today,” he added. As the war enters Day 14, oil prices are once again above $100 a barrel and “stocks sank worldwide over fears that the conflict could drag on longer than hoped,” the AP said.

What happened
The Senate yesterday approved bipartisan legislation aimed at making housing more affordable and accessible. The bill, sponsored by Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), passed 89-10. The legislation’s “roughly 40 provisions” encourage local governments to expand housing development, make it easier to build and finance modular and manufactured housing, remove regulatory barriers and bar institutional investors from buying single-family homes, with exceptions, CNN said. “Taken together, it’s one of the most significant housing initiatives in three decades.”

Who said what
“The age of affordability is now and the solution to affordability is, in fact, us,” Scott said before the vote. “We need more housing of every kind,” Warren said, and this bill “will help drive down prices.” The housing vote “marked a rare moment of bipartisanship” in a “deeply divided” Congress, Reuters said, and it allows lawmakers in both parties to “campaign for re-election this year by highlighting efforts to ​ease the burden of high living costs.” But first it has to pass the House, which approved a narrower housing bill in January.

Legislation “aimed at making housing more affordable should be a slam-dunk for Republicans’ affordability message,” but instead it’s “exposing GOP disarray on the very cost-of-living issues voters care most about,” Politico said. President Donald Trump, who pushed for the institutional investor ban, “could step in to break the impasse” between Senate and House Republicans, but he told House Republicans this week “that nobody cares about housing issues.”

What next?
Trump has “indicated his support” for the Senate bill, The New York Times said, but he has also “cast considerable doubt in recent days on its chances of enactment,” saying he won’t sign any legislation until Congress sends him strict voting restrictions unlikely to pass in the Senate.