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WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court is allowing President Donald Trump to continue building a $400 million ballroom at the White House, ruling a day after a lower court judge continued to block above-ground construction on the site of the former East Wing.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit late Friday put on temporary hold the order by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon halting part of the project. The panel scheduled a hearing for June 5 to review the case.

In his ruling Thursday, Leon continued to block above-ground construction of the 90,000-square-foot (8,400-square-meter) ballroom addition while allowing only below-ground work to continue on a bunker and other “national security facilities” at the site.

Sarah Fitzpatrick, the reporter behind the bombshell exposé about Kash Patel’s alleged conduct, said she stands by her story after he threatened to sue

White House officials are “openly discussing” who will be the next FBI director amid a bombshell report about current leader Kash Patel’s alleged excessive drinking and other concerning conduct.

Patel has threatened to sue The Atlantic after journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick’s report alleged the FBI director is deeply paranoid about being fired and often drinks to excess, alarming officials at the agency and beyond. Fitzpatrick responded that she stands “by every word of this reporting” and told MS NOW: “We have excellent attorneys.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45775791

🇺🇸 "Law that has allowed U.S. intelligence agencies to collect... overseas communications without needing search warrants is set to expire"

Here is a completely wild thought: instead of changing or renewing it, how about the USA stops ignoring people's basic rights worldwide? 🤪

U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll announced plans to deploy small modular reactors (SMRs) on Guam and other facilities in the Indo-Pacific region. According to him, the installations are expected to be operational at bases no later than 2028. The main goal of the project, called Janus, is to provide fully autonomous power supply for remote garrisons, where civilian grids are chronically overloaded and unreliable. The issue of electricity shortages is particularly acute in island territories such as Guam, which serves as a key hub for U.S. forces in the region. Defense experts openly state that the deployment of SMRs is aimed at preparing for a potential confrontation with China. As Beijing expands not only its nuclear arsenal but also its long-range strike capabilities to disrupt traditional maritime supply routes, the dependence of bases on diesel fuel deliveries is becoming a critical vulnerability. Pentagon analysts have repeatedly noted that, in the event of a conflict, communication lines to Guam would come under direct threat from the missile forces of the People’s Liberation Army. Under such conditions, only compact nuclear installations capable of operating for several years without refueling and without the need for constant fuel deliveries can ensure the uninterrupted functioning of radars, communications systems, and other infrastructure in isolation. In May 2025, a presidential order set a deadline to launch the first such reactor at a military site by September 30, 2028. As early as October, the U.S. Army officially began implementing the Janus program, which involves adapting civilian SMR technologies for military needs. Local lawmakers in Guam and environmental groups point to another concern: they argue that storing nuclear fuel on an island within range of Chinese missiles is too dangerous, and that in the event of a military conflict, it could inevitably lead to large-scale radioactive contamination of the territory.

https://neutronbytes.com/2025/10/19/army-goes-nuclear-microreactors-set-for-us-bases-by-2028/

The US Navy has denied reports of food shortages on board two major vessels participating in the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Yesterday USA Today reported crew aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli were not getting enough to eat.

One photo taken by a Marine showed a mostly empty lunch tray with a single scoop of shredded meat and one tortilla.

This is what active military serving near Iran get to eat. Is he having door dash granny deliver it?

Sixteen bets made $100,000 accurately predicting the timing of the US airstrikes against Iran on 27 February. Later, a single user would make over $550,000 after betting that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would topple, just moments before his assassination by Israeli forces. On 7 April, right before Donald Trump announced a temporary ceasefire with Iran, traders bet $950m that oil prices would come down. They did.

These bets and other well-timed wagers accurately predicted the precise timing of major developments in the US-Israel war with Iran, creating huge windfalls and raising concerns among lawmakers and experts over potential insider trading.

Betting – once largely siloed to sporting events – has now spread to include contracts on news events where insider information could give some traders an advantage.

The proliferation of online betting markets like Polymarket and Kalshi has allowed bets on virtually any news event. It’s also easier than ever to buy commodity derivatives like oil futures, where traders gamble on what the price of oil will be in the future.

Leaders of some US federal agencies and some members of Congress said they want to crack down on suspicious trading taking place across different marketplaces, but it’s unclear how much leeway regulators will make.

“Is the problem that we don’t have legislation or that we don’t have enforcement capabilities?” said Joshua Mitts, a law professor at Columbia University. “To have a law that can’t really be enforced effectively given the technological limitations, it’s sort of putting the cart before the horse.”

An age of political outrage has eroded Americans’ capacity for shock. But the response by Trump and other Republican leaders and supporters to criticism from Pope Leo XIV against the war in Iran has tested that proposition.

The pope has been broadly and consistently critical of war, but pointedly critical of the American attacks in Iran. On Palm Sunday, the pope, who is an American, condemned the use of religion to justify violence. God “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war”, he said at mass in St Peter’s Square.

(Taylor Marshall, an outspoken Catholic conservative with a considerable YouTube following) ascribed Trump’s conduct this week to the president’s fundamental difficulty processing the soft power of an American pope, and the challenge that poses to Trump’s sense of self as the most powerful person in the world.

The pope “is in charge of 1.4 billion – not million, billion – people and he has the nerve to interject his moral authority into the activity of President Trump? I really think that is the origin story. It’s a philosophical conundrum that President Trump was never prepared for and I think he’s still trying to figure out how to navigate it.”

In June, a sharp-suited Austrian executive from a global surveillance company told a prospective client that he could “go to prison” for organizing the deal they were discussing. But the conversation did not end there.

The executive, Guenther Rudolph, was seated at a booth at ISS World in Prague, a secretive trade fair for police and intelligence agencies and advanced surveillance technology companies. Rudolph went on to explain how his firm, First Wap, could provide sophisticated phone-tracking software capable of pinpointing any person in the world. The potential buyer? A private mining company, owned by an individual under sanction, who intended to use it to surveil environmental protesters. “I think we’re the only one who can deliver,” Rudolph said.

What Rudolph did not know: He was talking to an undercover journalist from Lighthouse Reports, an investigative newsroom based in the Netherlands.

The road to that conference room in Prague began with the discovery of a vast archive of data by reporter Gabriel Geiger. The archive contained more than a million tracking operations: efforts to grab real-time locations of thousands of people worldwide. What emerged is one of the most complete pictures to date of the modern surveillance industry.

Iran has learned that the Strait of Hormuz is its strongest deterrent

Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz just hours after the first tankers managed to pass through.

The country’s joint military command said on Saturday that it’s “control of the Strait of Hormuz has returned to its previous state … under strict management and control of the armed forces.”

A military spokesperson accused the US of not meeting its obligations after Donald Trump refused to lift America's own blockade of Iranian ports.

The Trump administration can continue building a $400m White House ballroom at the site of the former East Wing, a US appeals court ruled on Friday.

The three-judge panel of the US court of appeals for Washington DC granted the administration a stay of an order days earlier that had aimed to halt most aboveground construction. That earlier order had resulted from a lawsuit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which challenged whether Donald Trump had the authority to raze the East Wing and construct the ballroom without congressional approval.

The US district judge Richard Leon had initially halted construction of the ballroom in March – because of that lack of congressional approval – before an appeals court ordered him to reconsider the national security implications of the pause.

The Trump administration had argued that suspending construction of the new facility is “threatening grave national-security harms to the White House, the president and his family, and the president’s staff”.

The number of immigrants who have died while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody has reached an all-time high this fiscal year.

Twenty-nine people have died in ICE custody since October, the start of the federal government's fiscal year, already surpassing 2004's toll of 28, the previous record, according to government data.

The most recent death was of 27-year-old Aled Damien Carbonell-Betancourt, a Cuban man held in ICE custody in Miami, Florida. According to an initial report released by ICE on the evening of April 16, Carbonell-Betancourt was found unresponsive in his cell on the morning of April 12. The report lists the cause of death as a "presumed suicide," but the official cause remains under investigation.

Elon Musk has long been in an on-again, off-again relationship with the moon. Though just last year he called it “a distraction”—saying his focus was shifting exclusively to Mars—he now seems to be rekindling things with our natural satellite. And regardless of his own feelings about the moon, NASA is paying him to get us there again.

The Artemis II mission, which returned just a week ago, set a new record for the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth. But looping around the moon—as the four astronauts did during their nine days in space—is not the project’s paramount goal. By 2028, NASA plans for astronauts to touch down on the lunar surface, and while they’ve now demonstrated we can still shoot for the moon, landing there is another story.

No human has set foot on the moon since 1972, and the landing gear that facilitated the Apollo missions isn’t compatible with the modern rockets or NASA’s goal of longer-term exploration—humans have spent a total of just over three days ambling around the lunar surface. Since the inception of the Artemis project, NASA has contracted with SpaceX, currently Musk’s most profitable company, to design more expansive landing equipment.

“NASA helped build out SpaceX,” says Casey Drier, who leads the space policy team at the Planetary Society. In some ways, he sees this relationship as an exemplar of how NASA aims to interact with private companies; the partnership, he says, “has significantly lowered launch costs, increased reliability, and pursued real innovation in reusability.”

But SpaceX contracting also represents a worst-case scenario. A former NASA financial officer found that while the company had driven down the cost of launching things into space, it wasn’t passing those savings along to NASA. Even adjusting for inflation, SpaceX has been charging NASA more each year for the same services. And it can keep raising prices, because it has put competing ventures out of business. This one company “now facilitates US access to space,” Drier says.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45703025

KEY POINTS

Donald Trump said Thursday that gasoline prices are “not very high.”

A Quinnipiac University national poll of registered voters showed that 65% of U.S. voters blame Trump either “a lot” or “some” for the rise in gas prices seen since the beginning of the Iran war.

Trump said those prices are not as high as what was expected from the war, which he said was aimed at denying Iran the ability to produce a nuclear weapon.

First-of-its-kind case targets ICE agent who allegedly pointed a gun ‘at the heads of community members’ during Operation Metro Surge

Prosecutors in Minnesota have criminally charged a federal immigration officer with assault in what appears to be a first-of-its-kind case following surges of agents into cities under Donald Trump’s administration.

Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. faces two counts of second-degree assault for allegedly threatening victims with his firearm, according to a criminal complaint announced by Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty on Thursday.

Morgan is accused of speeding up alongside a victim’s car, pulling out a gun and repeatedly pointing it at people inside during a February incident.

Local law enforcement has issued a warrant for Morgan’s arrest. If convicted, he could face up to 36 months in prison.

Beginning in early March, Virginia voters, particularly members of the Black community, began receiving mailers that compared a proposal by Democrats to temporarily redraw the state’s congressional districts to the Jim Crow era.

One mailer featured images of the KKK in white hoods and teenagers running from police in the 1960s. “Just like Jim Crow, they want to silence your voice,” it read. “Our ancestors fought to represent us. Now Richmond politicians are trying to take our districts away.”

Other mailers used past quotes from Gov. Abigail Spanberger and former President Barack Obama critiquing gerrymandering to make it seem as if they opposed the redistricting referendum on April 21, which could net Democrats up to four new seats if voters approve it. In fact, both support the initiative.

The mailers were sent by a little-known group, the Justice for Democracy PAC, that was founded by former state delegate A.C. Cordoza, who served two terms as the only Black Republican in the Virginia legislature before losing his seat last November.

Air Canada has temporarily suspended service from Toronto and Montreal to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport as the war in the Middle East drives up fuel costs.

The airline regularly monitors and reviews flights to make sure routes are profitable, a spokesperson said in a statement to CBC News on Friday.

"As jet fuel prices have doubled since the start of the Iran conflict and some lower profitability routes and flights are no longer economic, we are making schedule adjustments accordingly," the Air Canada spokesperson said.

May he have all of the kindness that he showed to others.

Utah has emerged as a major center of measles infections in the US, as an outbreak that has been building for some time continues to expand.

State officials reported a total of 602 measles cases on Wednesday tied to an outbreak that started last year and is still ongoing, including 19 newly identified infections, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (Cidrap). Recent exposures have been reported at several preschools and elementary schools.

About one-third of those infected have experienced symptoms severe enough to require visits to emergency rooms, reported the New York Times, largely due to intense dehydration from vomiting and diarrhea.

Out of the 602 total cases, 405 have occurred since the beginning of this year, with 75 reported in just the last three weeks. So far, 49 individuals have needed hospitalization. A significant majority of those infected – 513 people, or 85% – were not vaccinated against measles.

A new analysis finds that tech giant Palantir Technologies paid $0 in federal income taxes last year, despite raking in hundreds of millions in taxpayer money to build out a mass network to surveil Americans in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Palantir, which has landed multiple massive contracts under the Trump administration, made $1.6 billion in net income last year.

It grew so much last year that it joined the list of the 20 most valuable U.S. companies, with its stock more than doubling in value in the first half of 2025 alone. In a report to shareholders, the company said it was “crushing” expectations in terms of growth, with revenue growing 93 percent year over year at the end of 2025.