* Loveday Morris, Ruth Eglash, and Louisa Loveluck report that now that Trump is pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement, the world is already a safer place:
The Israeli military said it had struck dozens of Iran-linked military targets in Syria on Thursday in response to rocket fire, marking a significant escalation in regional hostilities a little more than a day after the U.S. withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal.
Israel said the attacks followed a volley of rockets directed at Israeli positions in the Golan Heights, which caused no casualties.
The Israeli military blamed the attack on Iran’s Quds Force, a special forces unit affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and said this marked the first time that Iranian forces have fired directly on Israeli troops.
Syrian and Iranian news outlets accused Israel of firing the first shot, saying it was Syria that had responded after Israel targeted the Syrian town of Quneitra with artillery fire and missiles. There was no official response from the Iranian government.
Meanwhile, John Bolton tries to figure out how we can get in on this action and start bombing somebody.
* Aaron Davis and Shawn Boburg give you a whole new reason to think that Sean Hannity is a jerk:
For years, Fox News host Sean Hannity has poured his fortune into a surprising side venture: a vast portfolio of rental properties in working-class neighborhoods. He described those holdings in compassionate terms when they came to light last month, saying he invests in places that “otherwise might struggle to receive such support.”
But a Washington Post analysis shows that managers at Hannity’s four largest apartment complexes in Georgia have taken an unusually aggressive approach to rent collection. They have sought court-ordered evictions at twice the statewide rate — in a state known for high numbers of evictions and landlord-friendly laws — and frequently have done so less than two weeks after a missed payment.
Property managers at the complexes sought to evict tenants more than 230 times in 2017, court records show. At one, a 112-unit subdivision in a suburb west of Atlanta, 94 eviction actions were filed last year, records show.
Well that is … not surprising at all.
* David Nakamura and Carol Morello report that President Trump says Kim Jong Un “was really excellent” in letting three American prisoners free.
* Sarah Kreps, Elizabeth N. Saunders, and Kenneth Schultz examine whether Trump’s breast-beating on North Korea will help him or hurt him in the negotiations.
* And David Sherfinski reports that new NRA president Oliver North says that the “civil terrorism” aimed that the organization is so bad, “You go back to the terrible days of Jim Crow and those kinds of things — even there you didn’t have this kind of thing.”
Oh, totally. Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers never had to deal with what the NRA does, amirite? I mean sure, they were murdered, but it’s not like people were mean to them on Twitter or anything.