Wednesday, September ninth. Tonight: two courts hand Missouri two different congressional maps with ballots about to lock, missiles hit Saudi oil, and American fifteen-year-olds post their first real reading decline in a quarter century.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Tuesday, September eighth denied Missouri Republicans' emergency bid to revive a new congressional map, in one sentence with no reasoning. That left the state Supreme Court's order to run the 2022 map, which splits the delegation six to two Republican. Hours later, U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark ordered the opposite: a temporary restraining order requiring the state to use the new map, H B One, and its seven to one lines, on November third.

Clark's order landed seven minutes before Missouri's ballot-change cutoff and runs fourteen days. Officials must finalize ballots by September nineteenth. Trump called the state ruling horrible and unconstitutional; CBS News called the outcome a federal election administration disaster. Our editors read the two orders as answering different questions, not as one court defying the other. Voters get the last word: Proposition A is on the same November ballot.

Dozens of missiles and drones hit four Saudi cities Tuesday, wounding seventy-three, Fox News reported. Strikes on Jazan, Najran, Abha and Khamis Mushait briefly halted work at Aramco sites, including the Jazan refinery, which handles about four hundred thousand barrels of crude a day. Brent crude climbed toward ninety-nine dollars a barrel. The Saudi-led coalition blamed Houthi forces; no group had claimed the attack as of Tuesday.

In New Hampshire, Chris Pappas led Karishma Manzur sixty-two to thirty-six percent with about a fifth counted, and Trump-endorsed John Sununu led Scott Brown seventy to twenty-five with about a sixth in. Neither race had been called at those counts. The winners run for the seat Jeanne Shaheen is leaving. Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte cleared her primary and faces Democrat Cinde Warmington in a race Cook rates lean Republican.

New York's mayor, Zohran Mamdani, posted a hundred seventy thousand pages of post-September eleventh air quality records and said the city lied about safe air. The release settles a lawsuit by 9/11 Health Watch and draws partly on sixty-eight boxes found in a city office last year. An October 2001 memo shows officials bracing for mass toxic-exposure claims.

Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch will retire by year's end after thirty-eight years there, eleven days after an Interior Department letter threatened the institution's federal funding over what it called ideological activism. Bunch, its first Black leader, says the timing was personal, not political.

Russia resumed strikes on Kyiv after the truce, killing seven, and Trump and Putin then spoke for an hour. By the Kremlin's account, unconfirmed by any U.S. readout, Putin said Russia has no aggressive intentions toward Europe. The Witkoff and Kushner shuttle in Moscow and Kyiv set no date and no terms for a next round.

Trump ordered the General Services Administration and the trade representative to strip Canadian goods from federal buying schedules worth more than fifty billion dollars a year, until Canada grants what he called full and fair reciprocity; Canada's retaliatory tariffs began the same day. Separately, the administration asked the Supreme Court to let states check voter rolls against its expanded SAVE database, now carrying Social Security records, after two courts blocked it.

The State Department has held a sixteen-year-old green card holder and his parents since April, about five months, over his grandmother's role in the 1979 Tehran embassy seizure. Maryam Tahmasebi, her husband Eissa Seyed Hashemi and their son are California permanent residents with no criminal record. The charge is a 1990 clause letting the Secretary of State declare a noncitizen deportable for serious adverse foreign policy consequences.

The family offered to pay their own way to Türkiye. The government refused and countered with a removal order plus continued detention. A federal judge has temporarily barred removal while habeas petitions proceed; no merits ruling has come, and court filings allege no act, statement or belief by any of the three.

The FBI, the National Security Agency and CISA accused six Chinese AI companies — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z dot A I — of copying American models since 2024, likely with Chinese government awareness. The method is distillation: querying a finished rival model repeatedly and training on its answers. The advisory carries no sanction, no export rule and no prosecution referral, and its recommended steps are aimed at American firms.

American fifteen-year-olds scored four hundred ninety in reading on the 2025 PISA test, fourteen points below 2022 and the first real break in twenty-five years of flat results. Twenty-six percent now fall below the OECD's functional literacy floor, up seven points since 2015. Math and science barely moved. The U.S. ranking rose to thirteenth because other countries fell faster. The OECD flagged the American sample for incomplete school response, so bias cannot be ruled out.