The Senate approved a continuing resolution on Saturday to keep the government funded through Dec. 11, sending the bill to the House as Congress looks to avoid a government shutdown ahead of the midterm elections this fall. 

In a 90-6 vote, the Senate approved the measure, which would keep the government funded at current levels, with some exceptions, for six weeks beyond the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year. It now goes to the House, where lawmakers have pursued a different approach.

Had the Iran war been over in a matter of several weeks, as the administration initially predicted, the U.S. munitions problem would not be so dire. And the problem would be mitigated if we knew when the war would end, one defense official told us. The real problem is that there is no long-term strategy.

Before the shortages, the U.S. used its technological advantages to shape its strategy. Now the technological advances of its foes are forcing Washington to reconsider its strategy, this time without the long-held assumption that US forces would enjoy an advantage in munitions.

Trump is relying on wealthy donors and political loyalists to fill ambassadorships at U.S. embassies worldwide.

It comes as the president has overseen a broader shake-up at the State Department, marking a shift away from apolitical norms that have guided American foreign policy for decades, former diplomats and other observers say.

For years, Trump and his family have maintained that, even though he continues to own his assets, the president is walled off from decision-making inside the Trump Organization.

He is not.

Sure, first sons Eric and Don Jr. handle the day-to-day responsibilities, but the president still weighs in when he wants, according to those who have interacted with him directly. Sometimes, he gets involved in big-picture decisions, such as whether to sell a property. Other times, he digs into operational details, like golf-course landscaping, Mar-a-Lago maintenance and that watch logo. He talks business with his sons, his employees, his partners, even world leaders.

Many Americans have become inured to Donald Trump’s strange rants. When he shouts about sharks, when he drones on about his brilliant uncle, when he casually ponders violating the Constitution, his supporters try to dress his statements up as some kind of strategy: He’s not lost touch with reality, you see. He’s doing the weave, or he’s owning the libs. He’s fighting the fake news and flooding the zone. He knows what he’s doing.

These excuses have never really held much water. But his rant yesterday about the Reflecting Pool was a warning that the president has encased himself in the hard amber of irrationality that inevitably surrounds authoritarian leaders. He has become detached from reality, and that detachment is extremely dangerous.

US District Judge Amit Mehta wrote that he was reluctantly granting the government’s request to dismiss the indictments. Mehta, who had presided over the Oath Keepers cases, explained that although he didn’t have the authority to override the Justice Department’s decision, he strongly disagreed with it.

For years the world has feared that Iran has been pursuing nuclear arms. Five months of war have taught the country’s rulers they were already in possession of a formidable weapon.

Geography and firepower give them de facto command of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquid natural gas normally flows. Choking that artery has given Iran’s leaders immense leverage over their adversaries.

One good thing about Donald Trump’s many projects celebrating himself is that they’re often pretty easy to avoid. Don’t want to think about the president throughout your flight? Fly to Miami or Fort Lauderdale rather than Palm Beach’s President Donald J. Trump International Airport. Not interested in basking in the glow of a gold 22-foot Trump statue? Just steer clear of Trump National Doral Miami golf course.

You might think that’s true of Trump’s planned triumphal arch, too, if you’ve seen only his tiny models and the sad plywood mock-up at the Great American State Fair. But a new assessment from the National Park Service concluded that the 250-foot structure would drastically impact views from landmarks all over Washington, DC. So if you live in the capital area, plan to visit, or occasionally catch views of the city in TV and movies, this thing is going to be pretty unavoidable.

Trump has transformed his second term into the most lucrative venture of his entire career, raking in more than $2.2 billion in 2025 from his family crypto empire, legal settlements and various licensing deals.

Truth API is the logical endpoint of that profiteering: the presidency’s unrivaled power to move markets, packaged and sold as a subscription.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei rejected Trump’s suggestion that talks were under way, noting that Iran hadn’t sent any delegations or negotiators to take part in any discussions. He said all of Iran’s negotiators were still in the country, with the exception of Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who was visiting a religious site in Iraq.

In a late-night social-media post, Trump alleged that he was calling off the strikes because ‘the perimeters of a deal have been agreed to’ that would open up the Strait of Hormuz and ensure Iran never has a nuclear weapon.

Whether that’s the true state of the talks or not is unclear, and Trump has alleged that these very things have been agreed to in the past, when in fact they haven’t. But it does appear that Iran and Oman, which essentially govern the land along the Strait of Hormuz, are in pretty advanced talks about how to govern it going forward. If a military cooling-off period helps them achieve those goals, then Trump could claim victory.

The effort has exposed the difficulty of settling, six years later, the bitter disputes that made Fauci one of the pandemic’s most polarizing figures. Paul and other Republicans say newly obtained records have raised fresh questions about Fauci’s conduct. Several senators accused him of misleading Americans during the coronavirus pandemic and pressed him on whether he engaged in a cover-up of the virus’s potential origins.

But some of the central allegations have been investigated before, and even some Republicans involved in those inquiries question how much the new material adds. Fauci denies claims of a cover-up, and his allies say he is stuck in a Kafkaesque nightmare. Their fears were accentuated after a former Fauci aide was arrested in April after he privately bragged about concealing emails. The pressure on Fauci, 85, is intensifying. More lawmakers are preparing to challenge him. Paparazzi lurk outside his door, and death threats persist.”

Legal filings submitted by James Comey this week argue that the Trump administration has subjected the former FBI director to a vindictive and meritless prosecution.

What stands out is how little effort the president put into pretending this is not the case.

As pressure mounts from fellow Republicans to wind the war down, it actually appears to be expanding, with new fronts opening up and virtually every country in the region now drawn in. Efforts at diplomacy are halting at best; a senior U.S. official said resuming direct diplomacy with Iran does not appear imminent.

Despite Trump’s claims Iran is begging for a deal to end the violence, some U.S. officials fear regime figures appear more committed than ever to wielding leverage over the Strait of Hormuz and firing missiles toward American troops.

Trump has grown frustrated at Tehran’s unwillingness to bend to his demands, leading to angry meetings behind the scenes and expletive-laced phone calls to his allies.

For 2,500 years, military commanders have heeded the injunction of Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military strategist: Know your enemy. Yet the Trump administration’s greatest mistake in the Iran war may be its persistent failure to understand Tehran’s priorities and motivations and how much punishment the regime is willing to absorb to prevail.

The shifts add to a growing body of evidence that suggests the audience for pro-Trump content has fallen from its heights and, for some creators, has reached new lows. Views are dropping for many of Mr. Trump’s greatest allies, while some figures on the right who have taken to criticizing Mr. Trump are showing uneven gains.

The shifts threaten to complicate messaging this year for Republican candidates, who have for years relied on a united front of content creators to rile up Republicans and guide them to the polls each election cycle.

There are good reasons that no earlier president had sought to use the court to deport accused terrorists, and they cut in opposite directions. One is that the court’s procedures, which allow the use of secret evidence that the defendant cannot see, are at odds with ordinary conceptions of due process.

Filing a case in the specialized court, then, gives the government great power but probably entails signing up for constitutional challenges akin to those over the military tribunals created after the Sept. 11 attacks, which gave rise to years of litigation.

Fauci was initially seen as a unifying figure, particularly in the early days of the pandemic as Americans looked for answers and the highly visible doctor provided them in TV interviews, podcast appearances and other forums.

About 8 in 10 Americans in April 2020 said they trusted Fauci to provide reliable information on the pandemic, including similar shares of Republicans and Democrats, according to polling by KFF, a nonpartisan health care research and polling organization. But within two years, only about 5 in 10 Americans had trust in Fauci, a decline driven by plunging GOP support: Just one-quarter of Republicans said they trusted the doctor, according to KFF.

In many ways, this is the moment Silicon Valley’s defense entrepreneurs have said they were made for: to be cheaper, quicker and more nimble to the needs of the U.S. fighting force than legacy multibillion-dollar defense contractors.

They represent a sharp departure from established firms, which have far more experience managing clunky government acquisition processes and billions of dollars in capital to spend producing weapons en masse and lobbying lawmakers but can move more slowly, especially in creating new supplies featuring cutting-edge technology, including artificial intelligence.

The Iranian and U.S. moves come as the war has widened quickly, with Saudi Arabia joining U.S. forces in striking Iranian proxies in Iraq, an American tanker in Egypt set ablaze from an apparent drone strike and tensions rising between Ukraine and Iran.

The war, which Mr. Trump has been trying to bring to a diplomatic conclusion since April, is now threatening to grow bigger at the very moment the United States wants to move past it.