News news2 stories
Police are searching for at least one additional suspect after the shooting beneath the Space Needle.
Update
AP reports that police now believe the shooting may have been gang-related and that 19-year-old Junior Cee Niko Semo, who died at the scene, was one of at least three suspected participants. A 15-year-old remained in custody for investigation of first-degree assault and firearms violations; detectives were seeking another possible suspect, and no one had been formally arrested on suspicion of homicide as of Monday.
Update 2
The city’s public communication also came under scrutiny. About four hours into the response, KOMO reporter Jeremy Harris reported that a planned press conference had been delayed and that the public still had not heard directly from police or city leaders. The mayor’s office had also revised its early account from two suspects in custody to one.
KOMO reporter Holly Menino later reported that Seattle never activated its public-alert system during the active-shooter response; city officials acknowledged the omission.
The blocked order would create a federal citizenship list and restrict ballot delivery to voters on it.
Update
SCOTUSblog reports that the Supreme Court ordered the states to respond by 4 p.m. Eastern on Monday, Aug. 3. Sauer also asked for an immediate administrative stay that would temporarily lift the lower-court order while the justices consider the broader request.
Red take
Election rules work only when people trust that ballots go to eligible voters. A federal citizenship list could give states one consistent eligibility check without replacing the rest of their election systems. And because agencies have not decided how the order would work, courts are blocking a policy before they know its final form. If the order is lawful, stopping it now prevents those safeguards from even being tested.
Blue take
The risk is simple: an eligible voter who is missing from the federal list would not receive a ballot. That is why the president should not be able to impose a new nationwide gatekeeping system by executive order when election authority belongs to states and Congress. If the Court revives the order, voters could lose access first and fight to correct the government’s list later.
Quick bites11
Fauci’s diary goes public
NPRRand Paul (Sen-R Kentucky) released 1,141 pages of Anthony Fauci’s pandemic-era diary ahead of Fauci’s Senate testimony Wednesday on the origins of the coronavirus. Early entries show Fauci closely tracking his sudden celebrity and describing some of the intense press attention as “flattering.”
Update
In the thread accompanying the release, Paul highlighted Fauci’s Feb. 1, 2020 note on a 12-scientist call: two participants concluded the virus had a natural origin, while, in Fauci’s words, “the rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible.” Paul argues that the entry undercuts later portrayals of the early scientific discussion; the diary records the discussion, not a settled finding about the virus’s origin.
Thune resists recess cancellation
THE HILLPresident Donald Trump demanded that the Senate remain in session until it passes the SAVE America Act or eliminates the filibuster. The bill would require documentary proof of citizenship to register for federal elections and voter identification to cast a ballot. John Thune (Sen-R South Dakota) said he would cancel the five-week August recess only if the bill has a realistic path to passage—not merely to stage futile procedural votes.
McConnell Remains in Rehabilitation
THE HILLMitch McConnell (Sen-R Kentucky) remains in a rehabilitation facility after falling at his Washington home last month and has not been medically cleared to return to the Senate. He will miss Kentucky’s Fancy Farm picnic, the marquee political event he has attended for more than 40 years.
Professors propose quorum safeguards for independent commissions
THE HILLMore than 50 academics asked Congress to set a default quorum that prevents one appointee from governing alone, require a replacement nomination within 90 days of a firing and let claimants go to federal court when an adjudicatory commission lacks a quorum. The proposal follows the Supreme Court’s 6–3 Trump v. Slaughter decision striking down the FTC’s for-cause removal protection for commissioners exercising executive power; the FEC and CPSC currently lack quorums.
Update
Two of the scholars are also developing a judicial backstop. University of Minnesota law professor Nicholas Bednar says he and Todd Phillips have proposed a “Faithful Execution Exception to Slaughter” under which courts could enjoin presidential removals that would destroy a multimember commission’s quorum.
DHS implements five GAO priorities; total remains 39
GAOGAO identified 39 priority recommendations for DHS in May 2025. Since then, DHS implemented five and GAO closed two that were no longer valid, then added seven new priorities—leaving 39 open. GAO highlights disaster response, cybersecurity and immigration and border data as the three areas needing focused attention.
Currently showing Why DHS's open total stayed at 39Why DHS's open total stayed at 39Minnesota prediction market ban paused by federal judge days before rollout
THE HILLA federal judge paused Minnesota’s prediction-market ban, finding a federal preemption challenge likely to succeed.
Comey asks judge to dismiss threat case over “86 47” seashell post
THE HILLFormer FBI Director James Comey asked a federal judge to dismiss two charges alleging that his 2025 photo of seashells arranged as “86 47” threatened Trump. Comey argues the post was protected political speech rather than a “true threat.”
Senate advances Jay Clayton for intelligence chief, 51–43
THE HILLThe procedural vote sets up final confirmation as early as Tuesday. Clayton, a former SEC chair and Manhattan U.S. attorney, would replace acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte. Democrats had suspended talks over renewing Section 702 surveillance authority after Pulte was installed; parts of the program are beginning to expire.
Zelensky will meet senators Tuesday as Russia sanctions vote nears
THE HILLRussia-Ukraine warAll 100 senators have been invited to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Capitol on Tuesday evening, July 28. The Senate may begin voting during his visit on sanctions targeting buyers of Russian energy.
J&J agrees to $5.5 billion talc settlement
WSJJohnson & Johnson agreed to pay $5.5 billion to resolve remaining lawsuits alleging its talc products caused ovarian cancer. The agreement requires 95% of remaining claimants to participate and is intended to end more than a decade of litigation.
Congo’s Ebola outbreak reaches 3,200 confirmed cases and 1,405 deaths
ECDCThere is no useful “normal annual” Ebola figure because cases occur in discrete outbreaks. In roughly ten weeks, this outbreak has nearly matched the 3,481 cases recorded during Congo’s entire 2018–20 epidemic; AP reports that it reached 1,000 deaths almost three times faster than the 2014–16 West Africa epidemic. The outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo strain, for which no approved strain-specific vaccine or treatment exists.
Not news news5 stories
Districts receiving more federal money collected less local revenue and reopened faster, without increasing per-pupil spending or test scores.
Update
Paper co-author Philip Hoxie supplied useful scale in an explanatory thread: the event-study chart shows the local-revenue gap widening to roughly $500 per pupil by 2022. He also stressed an important limit on the result: the estimate applies to a relatively small, affluent slice of districts near the funding cutoff, with almost no Southern districts in the sample.
Update 2
Education-policy researcher Vladimir Kogan pointed to the tension with other studies that found positive achievement effects from pandemic aid. His proposed reconciliation is external validity: districts clustered around this particular 5% threshold may be unusual, so the paper’s local estimate need not describe the full universe of school districts.
More than 300,000 hectares have burned across the two countries, with major fires in Gironde, Ávila and Castellón.
Related reading
Read more about: Wisconsin tornado cuts power to more than 30,000
A confirmed tornado severely damaged homes and businesses around Appleton and Menasha in Winnebago County and knocked out power to more than 30,000 customers. No deaths or injuries had been reported Monday evening.
The 2016–17 memoir recordings—not Biden’s later interview with special counsel Robert Hur—became evidence in Hur’s classified-documents investigation.
Context
These are not the recordings of Biden’s 2023 interview with Hur. They were made in 2016 and 2017 for Promise Me, Dad, then obtained during Hur’s investigation. Biden fought their release on privacy grounds and dropped the case after a divided federal appeals court ruled that the public interest outweighed the remaining privacy intrusion. A Biden spokesperson called the release political retribution.
A new estimate across 69 economies finds the largest spillovers from nondefense research, especially in non-OECD countries.
What that means
The authors’ back-of-the-envelope calculation says global returns to U.S. public nondefense R&D are about twice the domestic returns—so the United States captures roughly half of the total productivity benefit. They point to open scientific knowledge, trade in capital goods and technological leapfrogging as likely channels. This is a working paper, not a peer-reviewed result, and the 50–50 split is an estimate built on the paper’s causal model rather than a direct accounting of gains.
Trump’s comments3
What Trump said today, from policy conditions to off-the-cuff remarks.
Trump brushes aside Netanyahu’s F-35 objection
Trump rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s objection to selling F-35 fighter jets to Turkey: “Nobody tells me what we should be selling.” A sale is not final. Turkey was removed from the F-35 program after buying Russia’s S-400 air-defense system, and the report says the State Department recently told Congress that Turkey still has not met the requirements to rejoin.
Trump repeats disputed Michigan award claim
Trump again claimed he received a Michigan “Man of the Year” award, this time placing it 25 years ago and saying the press later verified the story. CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale says no such award existed: Trump had previously placed it in the 2010s, and a Michigan Republican group later created a different “Man of the Decade” award for him in 2023.
Update
The paper trail cuts against Trump’s new claim that the press eventually vindicated him. Media reporter Justin Baragona documented that when Trump cited a 2023 Oakland Press article as proof of a 2013 award, the newspaper corrected the article and said a local Republican official had supplied a false statement about that earlier honor.
Trump blames Biden for affordability and calls Iran talks “friendly”
At a Michigan speech, Trump blamed Biden for affordability problems and said negotiations to end the Iran war were continuing in a “friendly” fashion. The conflict has driven fuel and energy prices higher.