Good morning.
Texas can use a redrawn congressional map that adds as many as five Republican-friendly congressional districts, the supreme court ruled yesterday, handing Donald Trump a major win in his push to boost Republican seats ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
In an unsigned order, the 6-3 conservative-majority court granted a request by Texas to lift a lower court’s ruling that struck down the state’s new map in November. The supreme court’s three liberal justices dissented.
“The district court improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections,” the supreme court said in an order explaining its decision.
What did the lower court rule? The lower district court previously found that Texas had likely sorted voters based on their race – an unlawful practice called racial gerrymandering – when it adopted the new maps, and ordered the state to use the maps it had adopted after the 2020 census for next year’s election.
Pentagon announces it has killed four men in another boat strike in Pacific
The Pentagon announced yesterday that the US military had conducted another deadly strike on a boat suspected of carrying illegal narcotics, killing four men in the eastern Pacific, as questions mount over the legality of the attacks.
The US southern command, based in Florida, posted video of the new strike on social media with a statement saying that at the direction of Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, “Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization”.
The footage showed a large explosion suddenly overtaking a small boat as it moved through the water, followed by an image of a vessel in flames and dark smoke streaming overhead.
Why was the boat targeted? “Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed,” the statement said.
EU leaders race to save Ukraine funding deal as Kyiv’s cash runs low
Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, will meet the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and Belgium’s prime minister, Bart De Wever, for emergency talks today as the EU tries to save its sorely needed financing plan for Ukraine.
With Russia’s attacks intensifying, Washington pushing for a peace deal that favours Moscow, Kyiv fast running out of money and Europe struggling for influence at US-led talks, the bloc must find a solution or suffer a major blow to its credibility.
What else is happening? Vladimir Putin is visiting Delhi for a summit with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. It comes as Washington seeks to increase pressure on India to cut back trade with Russia. It is the first time Putin has visited India since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and marks another step for him on the international stage since starting a war that has turned Russia into a global pariah.
In other news …
The Sudanese city of El Fasher resembles a massive crime scene with large piles of bodies heaped throughout its streets as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) work to destroy evidence of the scale of their massacre.
A grand jury declined to indict Letitia James yesterday, according to a source familiar with the decision, less than two weeks after a judge ruled that a similar mortgage fraud case brought by federal prosecutors against the New York attorney general was unlawful.
Donald Trump has replaced the architect originally selected to oversee his $300m planned gilded ballroom. The president and James McCrery II disagreed over expanding ballroom’s size but the change was ultimately prompted by the firm’s limited staff.
Stat of the day: Three-year-old chess prodigy becomes youngest player to earn official rating
India’s Sarwagya Singh Kushwaha has become the youngest player in chess history to earn an official Fide rating, at the age of three years, seven months and 20 days. Kushwaha defeated three rated players in events across his state and other parts of the country to secure his record-breaking status.
Culture pick: Cover-Up review – atrocity exposer Seymour Hersh, journalism legend, gets a moment in the spotlight
The renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was never played in a film like the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were. But as this documentary portrait argues, he’s probably more important than either. Hersh’s record of uncovering the big stories, from My Lai to Abu Ghraib, speaks for itself. This documentary, which has a limited US theatrical release this month and will also be available to stream on Netflix, watches him at work: dogged, nonconformist and combative.
Don’t miss this: ‘It was about degrading someone completely’ – the story of Mr DeepFakes, the world’s most notorious AI porn site
The story of Mr DeepFakes, the world’s largest and most infamous non-consensual deepfake porn site, is essentially the story of AI porn itself. Its pages, viewed more than 2bn times, hosted extreme, graphic deepfakes of countless famous women. Yet that was only the shop window: the real engine room was its forum, where people could commission deepfakes of women they knew – a girlfriend, sister, classmate or colleague – for a price.
Climate check: 60,000 African penguins starve to death after sardine numbers collapse – study
More than 60,000 penguins in colonies off the coast of South Africa have starved to death as a result of disappearing sardines, a paper has found. The penguins probably starved to death during the moulting period, according to the paper, which said the climate crisis and overfishing were driving declines.
Last Thing: Spotify’s listening age feature stirs delight and dismay
It has given some in middle age dubious hope that they have their finger on the cultural pulse. Meanwhile, some younger users have been told their listening habits suggest they are well into retirement. Spotify has confected a wave of intrigue over what our musical preferences suggest about our vintage, with its “your listening age” feature causing delight and consternation.
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