LIVE updates: US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons

US Attorney-General Todd Blanche says there is new information about the shooter responsible for the assassination attempt against Donald Trump during his 2024 campaign in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Blanche has been briefing reporters at the White House after Trump’s earlier comments on social media - made without evidence - that the attempt was a “Democrat plot”.

“It is new information about the shooter and about his background, about his history. And that’s stuff that we didn’t know before. So that’s the new information,” Blanche said.

The president wrote on Truth Social that former FBI director Christopher Wray, whom Trump appointed in his first term but later grew to dislike, “should pay a price” for how the department responded to the assassination bid.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has recounted a joke from US President Donald Trump that he says sums up the current relationship between the two countries.

Carney was speaking at a Toronto investment summit about his visit to the White House in 2025, reports the BBC.

Following talks, Trump presented him with a gold key to the White House.

Carney said the president told him he could bring the key and he would be let into the building, but that “maybe they’ll shoot you”, an exchange Carney said “sort of sums up” the Canada-US relationship.

The North American neighbours are engaged in a bitter trade war sparked by harsh US tariffs on Canadian goods.

The war against Iran has cost the US Department of Defence more than $US38 billion ($53 billion) through to August 1, and will continue costing up to $US3 billion a month or more depending on the intensity of the conflict, according to an assessment released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

It said the war is expected to contribute to US inflation into the first quarter of 2027, making inflation roughly 0.5 percentage points higher than previously estimated.

That’s driven largely by the reduction of oil and natural gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz and disruptions to shipping through the Red Sea.

The head of the FBI, Kash Patel, has been accused by Democrat legislators of covering up the Epstein files when he fronted the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Nine months after the first batch of the Epstein files were publicly released, Patel continues to face questions about what was, and was not, contained in those files.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse questioned the FBI director about 37 pages that were withheld from the public release.

CNN previously reported that dozens of FBI records were missing from the initial public release of the documents, including three interviews that were related to a woman who accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her decades ago.

Trump has long denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein or any allegation of sexual misconduct.

Patel said he wasn’t aware of the 37 pages that Whitehouse was referencing.

“We have complied with the statute and the court orders and produced three and a half million pages of documents for the first time ever,” the director said.

Welcome to our rolling coverage of US politics and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

For the first time ever, the American government has publicly confirmed it has space weapons in the Earth’s orbit.

The head of the FBI, Kash Patel, has been accused by Democrats of weakening the federal crime-fighting agency and covering up the Epstein files.

And the US war against Iran has cost the Pentagon more than $US38 billion ($53 bn), and will continue costing up to $US3 bn a month depending on the intensity of the conflict, a new nonpartisan report says.