By SHEIKH SAALIQ and KRISHAN FRANCIS

GALLE, Sri Lanka (AP) — An Iranian warship that was sunk by a U.S. submarine near Sri Lanka had participated in naval exercises hosted by India before heading out into international waters in the Indian Ocean on its way home, New Delhi said.

The sinking underscored the scope of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and its spread in the Middle East and beyond. It also ignited a debate in India about maritime security in the Indian Ocean — a region where New Delhi maintains a significant naval presence.

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On Wednesday, Sri Lanka’s navy recovered 87 bodies and rescued 32 Iranian sailors from the IRIS Dena, which sank in international waters off the coast of the island nation — a rare instance of a submarine torpedoing a ship since World War II.

Sri Lanka’s navy said it had responded to a distress signal from the IRIS Dena, but by the time it reached the location, there was no sign of the ship, just patches of oil and sailors floating in the water. The rescued mariners were taken to a hospital in the town of Galle, on Sri Lanka’s southern coast.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the sinking illustrates the U.S.-Israeli military operation against Iran is stretching beyond its borders and described the IRIS Dena as a “prize ship.” President Donald Trump has said one of the key objectives of the war is to wipe out Iran’s navy.

A video released by the U.S. Department of Defense on X showed the moment of the torpedo attack. The Iranian ship appears to be hit by an underwater explosion that causes it to break apart, as a large plume of water rises up in the air.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi accused the U.S. Navy of committing an “an atrocity at sea” in sinking the frigate and said on social media on Thursday that the United States “will come to bitterly regret” the attack.

Araghchi said the IRIS Dena had been carrying “almost 130” crew.

India’s navy and defense ministry said the Iranian warship had participated in the International Fleet Review and the multilateral naval exercise MILAN 2026, organized by the Indian navy in the port of Visakhapatnam from Feb. 15 to Feb. 25. The ministry said 74 countries had joined the events.

The Iranian warship was seen sailing at sea during the exercises in a Feb. 17 post on X by the Indian navy. Another image showed several of its crew members posing on deck with the Iranian flag in the background.

Araghchi stressed that the frigate had been “a guest” of India’s navy. The Indian government has not yet publicly commented on the incident.

Another Iranian ship enters Sri Lanka’s territorial waters

Sri Lanka’s media minister and government spokesperson, Nalinda Jayatissa, told parliament on Thursday that another Iranian ship has entered Sri Lanka’s exclusive economic zone, an area beyond its immediate territorial waters where it has rights over natural resources.

Jayatissa did not provide further details about the ship or the number of people on board. He said the government was trying to “minimize the loss of lives and safeguard regional peace” but did not elaborate.

Questions in India over the sinking

India has long viewed the Indian Ocean as central to its security, with its navy regularly conducting patrols and multinational exercises to safeguard key sea lanes used for global trade and energy shipments. It has also traditionally sought to maintain a careful diplomatic balance in tensions between the U.S. and Iran while emphasizing on diplomacy and talks.

Indian opposition leaders, however, on Thursday questioned the government’s lack of response to the incident, saying the sinking of the warship so close to India’s maritime neighborhood warranted an official statement.

The opposition Indian National Congress party slammed what it called “silence” from Prime Minister Narendra Modi ‘s government.

“The conflict has reached our backyard, with an Iranian warship sunk in the Indian Ocean. Yet the Prime Minister has said nothing,” opposition leader Rahul Gandhi wrote in a post on X.

Kanwal Sibal, a former diplomat who served as India’s foreign secretary from 2002 to 2003, wrote on X that India was “far from politically or militarily responsible for the U.S. attack,” but its “responsibility is at a moral and human plane.”

“The U.S. has ignored India’s sensitivities,” Sibal said. “The ship was in these waters because of India’s invitation.”

Saaliq reported from New Delhi. Associated Press journalist Bharatha Mallawarachi in Colombo, Sri Lanka, contributed to this report.

This story has been corrected to show that the Sri Lankan spokesperson said the second Iranian vessel was in the maritime area of Sri Lanka’s exclusive economic zone, not in its territorial waters.

By MATT OTT, AP Business Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits last week was unchanged from the week before, a sign that layoffs remain at historically low levels.

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U.S. filings for jobless aid for the week ending Feb. 28 matched the previous week’s 213,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Analysts surveyed by the data firm FactSet forecast 215,000 new benefit applications.

Filings for unemployment benefits are viewed as a proxy for U.S. layoffs and are close to a real-time indicator of the health of the job market.

Last month, the Labor Department reported that U.S. employers added a surprisingly strong 130,000 jobs in January and the unemployment rate fell to 4.3% from 4.4%. However, government revisions cut 2024-2025 U.S. payrolls by hundreds of thousands, reducing the number of jobs created last year to just 181,000. That’s about one-third of the previously reported 584,000 and the weakest since the pandemic year of 2020.

The government releases its February jobs data on Friday.

While weekly layoffs have remained in a historically low range mostly between 200,000 and 250,000 for the past few years, a number of high-profile companies have announced job cuts recently, including UPS, Amazon, Dow and the Washington Post in recent weeks.

The Labor Department also recently reported that job openings fell in December to the lowest level in more than five years.

For now, the U.S. job market appears stuck in what economists call a “low-hire, low-fire” state that has kept the unemployment rate historically low, but has left those out of work struggling to find a new job.

Data over the past year has broadly revealed a labor market in which hiring has clearly slowed, hobbled by uncertainty stoked by President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the lingering effects of the high interest rates the Fed engineered in 2022 and 2023 to tamp down a spike of pandemic-induced inflation.

Economists are conflicted about whether the stronger-than-expected January job gains are a one-off or possibly the first sign of a recovering labor market, which could lead the Fed to further delay more cuts to its key interest rate.

Some Fed officials have specifically argued that last year’s weak hiring shows that borrowing costs are weighing on growth and discouraging companies from expanding. A sustained pickup in hiring could undercut that theory.

The Labor Department’s report Thursday showed that the four-week moving average of jobless claims, which smooths out some of the weekly ups and downs, fell by 4,750 to 215,750.

The total number of Americans filing for jobless benefits for the previous week ending Feb. 21 jumped by 46,000 to 1.87 million, the government said.

By LISA MASCARO, STEPHEN GROVES and MARY CLARE JALONICK

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House is preparing to vote Thursday on a war powers resolution to halt President Donald Trump’s attack on Iran, a sign of unease in Congress over the rapidly widening conflict that is reordering U.S. priorities at home and abroad.

It’s the second vote in as many days, after the Senate defeated a similar measure along party lines. Lawmakers are confronting the sudden reality of representing the American people in wartime and all that entails — with lives lost, dollars spent and alliances tested by a president’s unilateral decision to go to war with Iran.

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The tally in the House is expected to be tight, but the outcome will provide an early snapshot of the political support, or opposition, to the U.S.-Israel military operation and Trump’s rationale for bypassing Congress, which alone has the power to declare war.

“Donald Trump is not a king, and if he believes the war with Iran is in our national interest, then he must come to Congress and make the case,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Meeks said in his nearly three decades in Congress, the hardest votes he has taken have been deciding whether to send U.S. troops to war.

The roll calls are a clarifying moment for the president and the parties just days into the overseas conflict that has quickly carried echoes of the long U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many veterans of those wars have since run for office and now serve in Congress.

Republicans largely back Trump, and most Democrats oppose the war

Trump’s Republican Party, which narrowly controls the House and Senate, largely sees the conflict with Iran not as the start of a new war, but the end of a regime that for decades has long menaced the West. The operation has killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which some view as an opportunity for regime change, though others warn of a chaotic power vacuum.

Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, the GOP chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, publicly thanked Trump for taking action against Iran, saying the president is using his own constitutional authority to defend the U.S. against the “imminent threat” the country posed.

Mast, an Army veteran who worked as a bomb disposal expert in Afghanistan, said the war powers resolution was effectively asking “that the president do nothing.”

For Democrats, Trump’s war with Iran, influenced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is a war of choice that is testing the balance of powers in the U.S. Constitution.

“The framers weren’t fooling around,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., arguing that the Constitution is clear that only Congress can decide matters of war.

He said whether lawmakers support or oppose the Trump administration’s military action, they should have the debate. “It’s up to us, we’ve got to vote on it.”

While views in Congress are largely falling along party lines, there are crossover coalitions. Both the House and Senate resolutions were bipartisan, and are drawing bipartisan support and opposition. The House is also voting on a separate resolution affirming that Iran is the largest state sponsor of terrorism.

The war powers resolution, if signed into law, would immediately halt Trump’s ability to conduct the war unless Congress approved the military action. The president would likely veto the measure.

As an alternative, a small group of Democrats has proposed a separate war powers resolution that would allow the president to continue the war for 30 days before he must seek congressional approval. It is not expected to come yet for a vote.

Trump officials provide shifting rationale for war

After launching a surprise attack against Iran on Saturday, Trump has scrambled to win support for a conflict that Americans of all political persuasions were already wary of entering. Trump administration officials spent hours behind closed doors on Capitol Hill this week trying to reassure lawmakers that they have the situation under control.

Six U.S. military members were killed over the weekend in a drone strike in Kuwait, and Trump has said more Americans could die. Thousands of Americans abroad have scrambled for flights, many lighting up the phone lines at congressional offices as they sought help trying to flee the Middle East.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the war could extend eight weeks, twice as long as the president first estimated. Trump has left open the possibility of sending U.S. troops into what has largely been a bombing campaign by air. Hundreds of people in the region have died.

The administration said the goal is to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles that it believes are shielding its nuclear program. It has also said Israel was ready to act against Iran, and American bases would face retaliation if the U.S. did not strike first. On Wednesday, the U.S. said it torpedoed an Iranian warship near Sri Lanka.

“This administration can’t even give us a straight answer of as to why we launched this preemptive war,” said Rep. Thomas Massie, the Republican from Kentucky who is often an outlier in his party.

Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who had teamed up to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, also forced the war powers resolution to the floor, pushing past objections from House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Johnson has warned that it would be “dangerous” to limit the president’s authority while the U.S. military is already in conflict.

Senators sit in their desks for solemn vote

In the Senate, Republican leaders have successfully, though narrowly, defeated a series of war powers resolutions pertaining to several other conflicts during Trump’s second term. This one, however, was different.

Underscoring the gravity of the moment Wednesday, Democratic senators filled the chamber and sat at their desks as the voting got underway.

“Today every senator — every single one — will pick a side,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said before the vote. “Do you stand with the American people who are exhausted with forever wars in the Middle East or stand with Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth as they bumble us headfirst into another war?”

Sen. John Barrasso, second in Senate Republican leadership, said “Democrats would rather obstruct Donald Trump than obliterate Iran’s national nuclear program.”

The legislation failed on a 47-53 tally mostly along party lines, with Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky in favor and Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania against.

By JACQUES BILLEAUD

PHOENIX (AP) — A Haitian man confined at an Arizona immigration detention center for months died at a hospital Monday after a tooth infection was left untreated, the man’s brother said Wednesday.

Emmanuel Damas, 56, told medical personnel at the Florence Correctional Center that he had a toothache in mid-February, but he was not sent to a dentist, said Damas’ brother, Presly Nelson.

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Nelson believes the staff at the facility did not take his brother’s complaints seriously even though it was a treatable condition. Nelson said he would expect such a death in countries with less access to health care, but not the United States.

“As a country — I’m an American now — I think we can do better than that,” Nelson said.

Damas is among at least nine people who have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody this year.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment. ICE had said it hoped to issue a news release Wednesday.

Earlier Wednesday, ICE officials announced the death of Mexican national Alberto Gutierrez-Reyes, who had been in a California ICE detention center and died in the hospital Feb. 27 after reporting chest pain and shortness of breath.

Chandler City Council member Christine Ellis, a Haitian American who is a registered nurse, said she was contacted by Damas’ family after his death.

“As a medical person, I am absolutely appalled that there were medical-licensed people that were working there and allowed those things to happen,” Ellis said. “It does not make sense to me.”

A report from the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office listed Damas’ cause of death as “pending” as of Wednesday.

Damas was taken into ICE custody in September and was soon transferred to the medium-security Florence Correctional Center, where he was held for several months, including after his asylum application was denied, Ellis said.

CoreCivic, a for-profit corrections company that runs the Florence facility, deferred comment to ICE.

Associated Press reporter Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City contributed.