Good morning, everyone. I'm Kate Baldwin. It's Wednesday, March 11th. Here are the five things you need to note to start your day.

Number one, the Strait. Three boats in the Strait of Hormuz were hit overnight, struck off Iran's coast by unknown projectiles.

No injuries have been reported, but one of the cargo ships was reported to be on fire.

This is a potentially very serious turn in the war with Iran if targets now move to this

critical shipping channel that's been effectively shut down over the threat for the past

10 days.

Remember, nearly 20 million barrels of fuel a day move through the

strait. U.S. intelligence sources say Iran has laid a few dozen mines in the waterway already,

and it still has up to 90% of its mine-laying boats, meaning hundreds more could quickly

be deployed. The Pentagon says U.S. forces have, though, destroyed 16 mine-laying Iranian vessels.

While more details are clearly coming out from that, Iran is claiming it's launched its most intense and heaviest operations since the start of all of this.

The regime released new video of missiles launching you see there and also new video

geolocated by CNN showing explosions near Tehran's airport. Add it all up guys, the costs

are mounting. The seven U.S. service members have now been killed, 140 more injured. And gas prices continue to rise up nearly 40 cents in

just one week in the U.S. Still Republicans on the Hill say publicly, they're not worried.

And it will take a couple of weeks, but gas prices will come back down. So this is a temporary

blip in an extraordinary trend of return to American energy dominance.

Number two, the tornadoes. More than 55 million people are under a severe storm risk on the East Coast now today

from the same very powerful storm system that brought at least 10 tornadoes in the central U.S. yesterday.

The images coming out are terrifying.

Look at this.

A massive funnel cloud was seen on the ground just south of Chicago, Illinois.

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