Friday’s top story: Trump gave initial approval for retaliatory strikes against Iran but pulled back, according to reports. Plus, the Senate votes to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia

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Good morning, I’m Mattha Busby with today’s essential stories.

Trump plays down drone attack but reports say strikes were approved

Donald Trump reportedly gave initial approval for the military to launch strikes on Iran in retaliation for Tehran shooting down a US drone, before pulling back at the last minute. Planes were in the air and ships were in position when word came to stand down on Thursday night, the New York Times quoted an unnamed official as saying.

‘Loose and stupid’. Trump had earlier seemed keen not to raise tensions further, suggesting that the shooting down of a US drone could have been carried out by a “loose and stupid” Iranian officer without authorization from Tehran. He also emphasized that the aircraft had been unmanned.

Trump set to veto Senate vote to block Saudi arms sales

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trump discusses arms sales in a meeting with the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

The Republican-controlled upper house voted narrowly to block the Trump administration from selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, but the president has already promised to veto the measures. The White House said stopping the sales “would send a message that the United States is abandoning its partners and allies at the very moment when threats to them are increasing”. The UK court of appeal ruled on Thursday that British arm sales to the country were unlawful, and accused ministers of ignoring whether airstrikes that killed civilians in Yemen broke humanitarian law.

Business. The latest arms sales, worth an estimated $8bn, include precision-guided munitions and other bombs. Senator Bob Menendez said: “These are bombs that we know have killed thousands of civilians in Yemen, patients in hospitals, children on school buses.”

Major global investor dumps shares in US climate crisis laggards

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Members of the oil police stand guard near the West Qurna-1 oilfield near Basra in Iraq, which is operated by ExxonMobil. Photograph: Essam Al Sudani/Reuters

An ethical investment operation by the UK’s largest asset manager, Legal and General, has cut five companies – ExxonMobil, the insurer Metlife, the spam-maker Hormel Foods, the US retailer Kroger and the Korean Electric Power Corporation – from an umbrella of funds worth £5bn. Meryam Omi, L&G’s head of responsible investment, said investor engagement with companies could be a powerful tool if there were consequences, and that although it retained shareholdings in the blacklisted companies within other much larger funds, it would vote against board appointments.

Laggards. Legal and General’s blacklist of climate laggards already includes China Construction Bank, the carmaker Subaru, Japan Post Holdings, the Canadian retailer Loblaw, the US food and service conglomerate Sysco Corporation and Russian oil firm Rosneft, which is part-owned by BP.

Hope Hicks: Trump adviser prevaricates in marathon testimony

Facebook Twitter Pinterest White House lawyers manoeuvred Hope Hicks away from answering questions 155 times at a closed-door hearing. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP

The Democrat-controlled house judiciary committee has released a 273-page transcript detailing their fruitless attempts to interrogate Hope Hicks, a former longtime aide to Trump who resigned as communications director in March 2018, having previously worked at the Trump organization. White House lawyers manoeuvred Hicks away from answering questions 155 times during a closed-door hearing on Wednesday, on issues as diverse as seating arrangements in the Oval office and the firing of the former FBI director James Comey.

‘Odd’. In a rare moment of candour, Hicks said she thought Trump’s order to his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to urge Jeff Sessions to “unrecuse” himself from the Russia investigation was odd.

Crib sheet

A video showed a UK government minister grab an environmental protester who disrupted a speech by the chancellor and march her out of the room, holding her forcefully by the back of the neck, sparking calls for him to resign.

Friday is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and to mark the occasion – for which about 10,000 people gathered at Stonehenge – a live camera feed of was set up and will remain in place, allowing people to tune in to sunrise at the Neolithic monument wherever they are.

Moderate Democrats intensified their campaign against Bernie Sanders, who they say is unelectable. Sanders put forward a strident defense of democratic socialism last week, and has argued that the party’s turn toward corporatism helped Trump’s rise.

Shark fin imports are to be outlawed in Canada. The country became the first in the G7 to effectively ban shark fin soup after years of failed legislative attempts. More than 133,000kg of shark fins were imported last year.

Must-reads

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The island of Sommarøy in Norway is campaigning to be the world’s first time-free zone. Photograph: Steve Woods Photography/Alamy

We want to do ‘what we want, when we want’, Norwegian islanders declare

Got the time? No, sorry, there isn’t any. The 350 people living on the island of Sommarøy – where the sun rises on 18 May and does not set again until 26 July – are campaigning to be declared the world’s first time-free zone.

The riot before Stonewall: the trans women who put their lives on the line

Fed up with being harassed, a group of trans women in San Francisco stood up to police inside a popular queer gathering spot in 1966, sparking a chaotic riot and an unprecedented moment of trans resistance to police violence. A group of younger trans women are making sure people never forget and have designated the area the world’s first-ever “trans cultural district”.

Heightening inequality: UberCopter to launch in New York

“I think it’s ridiculous,” said Kate Stack, a theatre worker in midtown Manhattan near a heliport, of Uber’s helicopter service from Wall Street to JFK from $200 a person each way. “It just seems unnecessary. I don’t think it will help a lot of the people. Rich people get into the sky and avoid traffic, and the rest of us have to sit in the car and wait.”

Never gonna give you up: how plastic seduced America

The latest piece in our United States of Plastic series explores the origins of our addiction. Synthetic materials took over our economy, our lifestyles and our imaginations because they did their jobs so well, writes the historian Susan Strasser, going back beyond the advent of toilet paper to decipher the idea of disposability. Plus, an investigation shows how Americans’ plastic recycling is dumped in landfills.

Comment

Like Trump’s call to make America great again, the delusional nostalgia of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden harks back to a fantastical vision of the past, writes Moira Donegan.

One of Biden’s favorite fictions about the past is that there was an era when gender relations were less contentious, and when it was appropriate to treat women and girls with patronizing dismissiveness.

Sport

USA avenge the 2016 Olympics defeat to Sweden with a 2-0 victory in the final group match of the Women’s World Cup that puts them top of their group – with Lindsey Horan and Tobin Heath, almost, on the scoresheet. They will play Spain in the next round on Monday.

NBA draft 2019: Zion Williamson goes No 1 to Pelicans, Ja Morant goes No 2 to Memphis Grizzlies and RJ Barrett goes No 3 to the New York Knicks.

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