Federal funding for President Donald Trump's massive ballroom was on the line before Congress on Wednesday, but the chief of the project was readying for an annual Russian economic conference, which some are calling "Putin's Davos." This is the first time the U.S. has attended since Russia attacked Ukraine. Rodney Mims Cook told the Russian press that Trump and the State Department permitted him to travel to Russia for the economic forum in St Petersburg. BBC News Moscow reporter posted on X that Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was "unaware" that Cook was attending the forum. Cook was nominated by Trump to take over the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. All of the members of the board were fired in 2025 and Trump appointed their replacements. They then voted to approve the ballroom project and Trump immediately bulldozed the East Wing of the White House during 2025's government shutdown.According to his conversation with Russian media, Cook said that his presence at the forum had nothing to do with his position in the Trump government; rather, he was there as a Christian to help restore churches in Russia, Reuters reported. Yet, according to Max Seddon, Moscow Bureau chief for the Financial Times, Cook brought graphics showing off the ballroom. "Cook, it turns out, is an ardent Russophile. He has been involved [in] restoring medieval Russian churches for decades. His own house in Georgia is designed in the Russian style. He says he is friends with many senior Russian elite figures. He seems absolutely thrilled to be there," added Seddon. He was also photographed with Russian religious leaders.Others who attended the forum include Andrew Tate and his brother, along with far-right streamer Candace Owens. Tate is facing criminal charges in Romania for sexual assault, human trafficking and establishing an organized crime group to exploit women.
President Trump is expected to announce that his administration will put about $700 million to bolster coal. Trump is set to use wartime authority under the Defense Prevention Act to dole out $425 million to 13 existing coal plants and $75 million for an export terminal in California. He is also expected to announce $185…
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will head to Capitol Hill on Thursday for his second day of testimony on President Donald Trump’s proposed budget. BESSENT CLARIFIES THREAT AGAINST BILL PULTE: HE SAID HE WAS GOING TO ‘KICK HIS A**’ Bessent will field questions from members of the House Ways and Means Committee at 10 a.m., following […]
The Supreme Court handed down a bombshell order on Tuesday night that made racial gerrymandering effectively impossible to challenge in court, expanding upon last month’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais to eliminate the last vestiges of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—and with it, the primary mechanism for protecting multiracial democracy in the American South.Tuesday’s 6-3 order in Allen v. Milligan, which was technically unsigned, allows Alabama—and, in the future, other states—to enact legislative maps even if a federal court rules that they were enacted with racially discriminatory intent. This decision goes well beyond the court’s ruling in Callais, which focused on VRA claims under Section 2 about gerrymandered maps with a racially discriminatory effect.The decision gives carte blanche to Southern state lawmakers to eliminate majority-Black districts as soon as they feasibly can—or, in Alabama’s case, even if it is not actually feasible or practical. (More on that later.) In 1957, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered Southern states to desegregate their schools “with all available speed.” In 2026, the court’s conservative majority is demanding the elimination of Black electoral power in the South on the same time scale.“In addition to being wrong on the merits, the Court’s decision inflicts two grave harms on the public,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. “It debases the democratic process by upending Alabama’s entire election in the name of permitting Alabama to discriminate against Black Alabamians. It also corrodes the rule of law by rewarding Alabama’s gamesmanship and outright defiance of court orders.”Allen v. Milligan may sound familiar because we have been here before. The Supreme Court already heard the case as a Section 2 challenge to Alabama’s post-2020 congressional districts in 2023. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined with the court’s three liberals to uphold a district court ruling that required Alabama to draw a second majority-Black congressional district.Though the decision was a surprise victory for voting-rights groups, given the Roberts Court’s hostility to the VRA, there were also warning signs lurking beneath the surface. The majority opinion by Roberts merely stated that the district court had “faithfully applied the court’s precedents” while going out of its way to endorse those precedents.“The concern that §2 may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States is, of course, not new,” Roberts concluded. “Our opinion today does not diminish or disregard these concerns. It simply holds that a faithful application of our precedents and a fair reading of the record before us do not bear them out here.” In hindsight, the ruling reads more like a stay of execution than a grant of clemency.Let us take stock of how we got here. Conservatives have long sought to limit the VRA’s power. In the 1980 case Mobile v. Borden, the Supreme Court held that a “facially neutral” voting practice only violates Section 2 if it is enacted with discriminatory intent. While that may have been relatively easy to prove in the Jim Crow era, Congress also intended to root out more subtle and insidious forms of racially discriminatory voting practices.To that end, Congress amended the VRA in 1982 to reverse the Supreme Court’s ruling and specifically prohibit laws that had a discriminatory effect, regardless of intent, under Section 2. The high court accepted Congress’s vote-dilution framework in the 1986 case Thornburg v. Gingles and laid out a multi-part test to determine when and how racial-gerrymandering claims could succeed. (Borden and Gingles did not involve racial-gerrymandering claims per se, but the impact on them is identical.)Since Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined the high court in 2005, the Supreme Court has grown steadily more hostile to the Voting Rights Act. In 2013, the court’s conservative majority struck down the VRA’s preclearance formula in Shelby County v. Holder because the justices thought it was outdated and violated the “equal sovereignty of the states,” a bespoke principle to which the court has never returned. That ruling freed many jurisdictions, mostly in the South, from seeking preapproval from federal courts or officials before changing their voting laws. A wave of voting restrictions soon followed.In the 2021 case Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the court took aim at Section 2 as applied to state voting laws. Alito, writing for the court, threw up a wave of new constraints on Section 2 claims to state election laws. Transmuting Fox News talking points into the law of the land, he even claimed that states could overcome Section 2 challenges to voting laws by invoking the phantasmal threat of voter fraud. “The majority creates a set of extra-textual exceptions and considerations to sap the Act’s strength, and to save laws like Arizona’s,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent.
Lebanese government agrees ceasefire with Israel but Israeli drone strikes continue. Plus the story of the man who launched Cuba’s first independent magazineGood morning.Israel and Lebanon have agreed to implement a ceasefire to end hostilities, the Trump administration has announced – but it comes with caveats. Not only is the deal contingent on a complete cessation of fire from the Iran-aligned Hezbollah armed group, and on the evacuation of all its fighters from the area south of the Litani River, but Hezbollah has not been part of the talks.Where has Israel been targeting? William Christou in Beirut reports that three hospitals in southern Lebanon have been attacked by Israel in under a week, wounding more than 150 people and killing nine. Analysts and human rights experts have said the attacks on healthcare facilities were aimed at degrading the conditions for life in south Lebanon.What did Israel say about it? The military said it had struck “Hezbollah infrastructure in the area of Tyre” and acknowledged a hospital was “affected incidentally”. It accused Hezbollah of “taking over” one of the hospitals it struck.Is that number significant? Yes, the 90-day threshold is important because the 1973 War Powers Resolution lays down that a president must seek congressional approval to continue waging war after hostilities have continued that length of time. Trump’s White House has rejected that argument, citing a temporary ceasefire that has been in place since 8 April – although it has been broken several times by the US, Israel and Iran. Continue reading...
