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The high court ruled 6-3 today to pause a Massachusetts district judge's order that had blocked the administration's framework for quickly removing illegal immigrants with final removal orders to countries other than their homeland. Three justices dissented. The Court will hear full arguments on the case in December, with a final ruling expected next year.
The Conference Board's consumer confidence index dropped 6.7 points to 81.9 in September from 88.6 in August — the weakest reading since 2014. Households turned sharply more pessimistic on business conditions, jobs and their own finances as gas nears $4.50 a gallon and diesel tops $6.50. It lands six weeks out from the midterms, with cost of living polling as voters' top issue.
The president and vice president launched America.gov today, a chatbot-driven landing page consolidating nearly 30,000 federal websites — Medicare plan comparison, student loan checks, USPS address changes and more. Officials say there's no login, no tracking and no recorded conversations. First-time passport applications are slated to come online in 2027.
New disclosures say the former special counsel's team acquired at least 4,782 checks from Americans who donated to Trump between September 2019 and August 2023 — most of them small-dollar. A companion report says Smith's office also obtained communications tied to The Federalist and more than a dozen other outlets.
The IRGC insisted today it still holds leverage over the Strait of Hormuz even as the US Navy stays parked in the region, and Tehran blasted Trump over both the strait and its nuclear program. Trump, who rejected Iran's seven-day reopening proposal, says record volumes of oil moved through the waterway this weekend. Qatari mediators are shopping a fresh draft to both sides.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that a thwarted plot targeting the UK airbase hosting US forces involved a foreign actor, pointing toward Iran. The IRGC publicly named RAF Fairford in July as one of several British bases it considered a legitimate target.
The UN's Yemen envoy sat down with Iran-backed Houthi negotiators in Oman today, calling the group's recent surge "unprecedented" and "dramatic" as they strike Saudi Arabia and take ground along the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Turkey, Pakistan, the UK, France, Greece, Spain and Italy have all offered Riyadh material support. Separately, Treasury sanctioned 10 people and entities tied to Iranian military procurement networks spanning China, Hong Kong, Pakistan and Turkey.
SpaceX's Starship rode 33 Raptor engines to low Earth orbit yesterday morning, completed one full orbit, deployed a batch of Starlink satellites, and splashed down in the northern Pacific about three hours and eight minutes after launch. It's the milestone the program has been chasing for years — and a variant of that upper stage is slated to put NASA astronauts back on the moon by 2028.
NASA detailed its Dragonfly mission, which will fly a rotorcraft across dozens of sites on Saturn's moon Titan after arriving in 2034. The lander will sample organic surface material to gauge Titan's habitability and trace how far prebiotic chemistry has progressed on the only other world in the solar system with liquid on its surface.
Off the coast of Norfolk, England, divers have been exploring marine-covered flint and stone structures rising out of the seabed — believed to be Shipden, a medieval settlement lost to the waves centuries ago. Some walls still stand eight to ten courses of stone high after 700 years underwater.
