North Korea Stole 76% of All Crypto Hack Value Worldwide in 2026 Using Just Two Attacks
North Korean state-linked hackers accounted for a staggering 76% of all cryptocurrency stolen worldwide through the first four months of 2026, according to blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs, with two attacks alone netting the regime a combined $577 million even as international sanctions continue to formally cut it off from the global financial system. The two operations, carried out weeks apart in April, showcased increasingly sophisticated tactics that blockchain security researchers say represent a marked evolution from North Korea’s earlier, cruder hacking playbook. In the first attack, on April 1, hackers targeted Drift Protocol, a decentralized finance platform built on the Solana blockchain, stealing $285 million through a scheme that unfolded over months. The attackers spent weeks on social engineering — building trust with people who held authorization credentials — before spending roughly three weeks staging the theft directly on the blockchain itself. They ultimately exploited a feature of Solana’s transaction system known as a “durable nonce” to get the platform’s security council signers to pre-authorize transactions without fully realizing what they were approving, then executed 31 separate withdrawals in a rapid-fire window of approximately 12 minutes once the theft began in earnest. A separate North Korean group struck again just over two weeks later, on April 18, this time targeting KelpDAO through a cross-chain bridge built on the LayerZero protocol. That attack netted $292 million by compromising the remote procedure call nodes that platforms use to communicate with the blockchain, exploiting what researchers described as a single-verifier design flaw that allowed the attackers to push through fraudulent transactions without the additional layers of verification more robust systems require. In the aftermath, the Arbitrum Security Council managed to freeze roughly $75 million of the stolen funds before the hackers could move them further, but the bulk of the money was successfully laundered through THORChain, a decentralized cross-chain exchange that has become a favored laundering route for stolen crypto precisely because it allows funds to be swapped between different blockchains with minimal friction and limited centralized oversight. Combined, the two attacks totaled $577 million and, despite representing just 3% of the total number of crypto-theft incidents tracked globally in 2026, accounted for the overwhelming majority of the dollar value stolen across the entire industry during that period — a reflection of how selectively and effectively North Korean hacking units have come to target the largest, most lucrative platforms rather than pursuing high-volume, low-value theft. The scale of the haul lines up with a broader pattern researchers have documented in North Korea’s cyber operations over the past several years, in which state-linked hacking groups — most prominently the Lazarus Group, a unit widely believed to operate under North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau intelligence agency — have increasingly targeted decentralized finance platforms, crypto exchanges and blockchain bridges as a primary funding mechanism for the isolated regime. Separate reporting from Bloomberg has put North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s cumulative windfall from crypto theft and related illicit financial activity at roughly $22 billion, a sum that analysts say has become an increasingly important funding stream for a government that remains subject to some of the most extensive international sanctions of any country in the world, largely over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. The persistence and scale of the thefts have raised uncomfortable questions for the broader cryptocurrency industry about whether current security practices at even well-established platforms are adequate against a persistent, well-resourced state actor. Unlike criminal hacking groups motivated purely by short-term profit, North Korea’s units operate with the backing, patience and operational security resources of a nation-state, allowing them to invest months in reconnaissance and social engineering before executing a theft — an asymmetry that has repeatedly proven difficult for even sophisticated crypto platforms to defend against, since it targets human trust and institutional processes as much as it does purely technical vulnerabilities in code. U.S. and allied officials have long argued that North Korea’s crypto theft operations directly subsidize its weapons programs, helping the regime work around the formal international financial sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council and individual countries including the United States. That argument has taken on renewed urgency as North Korea has continued to expand its ballistic missile testing and, according to U.S. intelligence assessments, deepen military cooperation with Russia amid the ongoing war in Ukraine — cooperation that has reportedly included North Korean troops deployed to support Russian forces in exchange for military technology transfers, adding another dimension to concerns that sanctions-evading revenue streams like crypto theft are helping fund activity with consequences well beyond North Korea’s own borders. Industry groups and blockchain security firms have called for stronger cross-platform information sharing and more robust verification standards for the kinds of bridge and cross-chain infrastructure that both the Drift Protocol and KelpDAO attacks exploited, arguing that the current fragmented approach to security across thousands of independent DeFi platforms leaves systemic vulnerabilities that a sufficiently patient and well-funded attacker — state-sponsored or otherwise — will continue to find and exploit. Whether the industry moves quickly enough to close those gaps before North Korea’s hacking units identify the next one remains, based on the pattern of the past several years, very much an open question. U.S. Treasury officials have continued to add sanctions designations against individuals and front companies linked to North Korean cyber operations throughout the year, part of a broader effort to disrupt the laundering networks that convert stolen crypto into usable funds for the regime. But enforcement officials and blockchain analysts alike acknowledge that sanctions targeting individual wallets or front companies have had limited success in actually stopping the underlying theft, since decentralized platforms like THORChain are specifically designed to resist the kind of centralized control that would let a government freeze or block transactions the way it can with a traditional bank. Some lawmakers in Washington have pushed for legislation that would impose stricter know-your-customer requirements on cross-chain bridges and DeFi protocols, arguing that the industry’s continued resistance to centralized…
House Passes Stopgap Funding Bill, Averting Shutdown Before Midterm Elections
The House of Representatives passed a short-term government funding bill Tuesday by a lopsided 370-48 vote, sending the measure to President Trump’s desk and averting a government shutdown just weeks before voters head to the polls in the November midterms. The stopgap measure, known as a continuing resolution, keeps federal agencies funded generally at current spending levels through December 11, buying Congress additional time to negotiate full-year appropriations bills without the immediate pressure of an October 1 funding cliff. The Senate had already approved the measure by an overwhelming margin before it reached the House floor, and with Trump’s signature considered a formality, the bill is expected to become law well before the current funding deadline expires. The lopsided vote margin reflects a rare moment of bipartisan alignment on a piece of must-pass legislation, particularly notable given how badly the last two funding fights went. Lawmakers in both parties have been eager to avoid a repeat of 2025’s shutdown chaos, when the federal government endured a 43-day lapse in funding followed by a separate, even longer 76-day shutdown limited to the Department of Homeland Security — the longest shutdown of any single federal department in U.S. history. With midterm elections just two months away, neither party wanted to be blamed for a third disruptive funding lapse in as many years, a dynamic that appears to have driven Tuesday’s smooth passage far more than any newfound spirit of bipartisan cooperation on the underlying spending questions that remain unresolved. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole framed the bill as straightforward good governance, telling reporters it provides “certainty that the government will remain open, certainty that our service members will be paid.” House Speaker Mike Johnson struck a similar tone, crediting Republicans for delivering the result and saying the House GOP is “continuing to do the grown-up thing, get the job done” — remarks aimed as much at midterm voters weighing which party can be trusted to keep basic government functions running as at colleagues on the floor. Democrats offered a more qualified endorsement. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, pointed to a provision delaying a proposed rule that would have given Trump-appointed officials new authority to halt federal grants for programs they deem misaligned with the administration’s policy agenda, calling the delay “an important first step.” But DeLauro made clear Democrats see the underlying policy fight as far from settled, warning that “whether a community receives disaster relief should not depend on who they voted for in the last election” — a pointed reference to Democratic concerns that the administration could eventually use grant-approval authority to reward friendly states and jurisdictions while punishing others. The bill includes at least one other notable policy provision beyond the topline spending extension: language preventing the Department of Homeland Security from transferring funds internally to boost Border Patrol’s budget beyond what Congress has already appropriated, a restriction that reflects ongoing congressional efforts to maintain oversight over how immigration enforcement dollars are actually spent even as the administration has pushed to expand enforcement operations through other channels, including the National Guard deployments and ICE surges already underway in several major cities. The relatively narrow scope of the bill — a straightforward extension of current funding levels rather than a comprehensive rewrite of federal spending priorities — reflects a deliberate strategy by leadership in both chambers to keep the legislation simple enough to avoid the kind of ideological riders that have sunk previous funding bills. Appropriators on both sides have signaled they intend to use the roughly three-month runway before the December 11 deadline to try to negotiate full-year spending bills covering the various federal agencies individually, rather than relying on another continuing resolution when the current one expires. Whether that effort succeeds is an open question; previous attempts at regular-order appropriations have repeatedly broken down over disputes on individual agency budgets, immigration enforcement funding, and policy riders attached by both parties, which is part of why the government has now operated under a series of short-term patches for much of the past several years rather than the full-year budgets that were once the norm. The bill’s passage removes one significant source of uncertainty from the political landscape heading into the fall campaign season, allowing both parties to turn their full attention to the redistricting fights, the state of the economy, and other issues expected to dominate midterm messaging without the added complication of a government shutdown playing out in the final stretch before Election Day. Still, the December 11 deadline means the underlying funding fight has only been postponed, not resolved, and lawmakers on both sides say they expect a more contentious round of negotiations once Congress returns from the elections to face a lame-duck session that will need to produce either full-year spending bills or yet another short-term extension before the holidays. For federal workers and contractors who lived through last year’s back-to-back shutdowns, Tuesday’s vote offers at least a few months of certainty. Whether that certainty extends much beyond December remains very much in the hands of a Congress that has struggled repeatedly in recent years to complete its most basic constitutional task of funding the government it oversees. The timing of the new deadline is itself politically significant. By pushing the next funding cliff to December 11, congressional leaders in both parties effectively guaranteed that the fight over full-year spending bills will unfold in a lame-duck session immediately following the midterms, when the incentives facing individual lawmakers shift considerably. Members who lost reelection bids in November will have less political exposure to worry about when casting votes on politically difficult spending bills, while members who won will be looking ahead to a new two-year term rather than an immediate election. Congressional aides in both parties have said privately that lame-duck sessions, for all their reputation as chaotic and rushed, have historically proven more capable of producing genuine compromise on appropriations than sessions held in the shadow of an looming…
SNAP Turns 62 With Enrollment Down 11% Nationally as New Work Requirements Take Hold
The federal food stamp program marks 62 years since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Food Stamp Act into law on August 31, 1964 — an anniversary landing this year amid the steepest enrollment decline in the program’s modern history, as expanded work requirements and eligibility restrictions passed last year work their way through the system. More than 4 million people lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits between July 2025 and April 2026, according to federal data, with nationwide participation falling from roughly 42 million to 37 million recipients — an 11% decline in less than a year. More recent estimates put the total number of people who have lost benefits since the changes began at over 5 million, with enrollment continuing to decline in every state, according to Lauren Bauer, an economist at the Brookings Institution who tracks the program. The changes stem from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the sweeping tax and spending package Congress passed in July 2025. The law significantly expanded SNAP’s work requirements, mandating that more adults prove they are working or volunteering at least 80 hours a month to keep receiving benefits. Groups newly subject to those requirements include veterans, homeless individuals, young adults aging out of the foster care system, parents with children between 14 and 17, and adults between the ages of 55 and 64 — populations that had previously been exempted from SNAP’s work-requirement rules in whole or in part. The law also eliminated federal food aid eligibility entirely for certain categories of noncitizens, including refugees, asylum seekers, and victims of domestic abuse or human trafficking who had previously qualified for assistance regardless of immigration status. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the expanded work requirements alone will reduce SNAP participation by an average of 2.4 million people per month over the 2025-2034 period, a scale of reduction that budget analysts describe as one of the largest deliberate contractions of the program’s reach since its modern form took shape in the 1970s. Children have not been spared: at least 1 million children lost benefits across the 19 states surveyed in one recent analysis, even though most of the new work requirements are aimed at adult recipients rather than families with young children directly. The impact has landed unevenly across the country. Arizona has seen the steepest decline of any state, with enrollment falling to roughly half of the previous year’s level — a drop of more than 400,000 participants. Louisiana, Florida and Oklahoma have also recorded significant enrollment drops as the new eligibility rules and paperwork requirements take hold, according to state-level data reviewed by researchers tracking the rollout. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has offered a different read on the numbers, attributing the enrollment decline primarily to “a better economy” and arguing that many people leaving the rolls were “taking the program that shouldn’t have been” receiving benefits in the first place — framing the drop as evidence the new work requirements are successfully targeting the program toward those who genuinely need it. Policy analysts studying the data have pushed back on that explanation, noting that unemployment has remained essentially flat over the same period while food prices have continued to rise, a combination they argue points toward the policy changes themselves, rather than a strengthening labor market, as the primary driver of the decline. Beyond the immediate eligibility changes, the law sets up a more structural shift in how SNAP is funded starting in 2027, when states will be required to help cover the program’s costs for the first time in the program’s history. SNAP has historically been funded almost entirely by the federal government, with states responsible mainly for administrative costs rather than the benefits themselves. Tim Shaw, a policy expert at the Aspen Institute, said the new state cost-sharing requirement creates a serious long-term risk for the program’s reach, since most states are legally required to balance their budgets every year and have far less fiscal flexibility than the federal government to absorb a new, potentially large and unpredictable expense. “More than 60 years of food assistance could soon come to an end” in some states, Shaw warned, raising the possibility that a handful of states could eventually scale back their participation in the program altogether once the funding burden shifts. Some states have also begun restricting which specific food items SNAP recipients are permitted to purchase with their benefits, a separate trend that predates the 2025 law but has gained momentum alongside the broader push to tighten the program’s rules. Supporters of those restrictions argue they encourage healthier purchasing patterns among recipients; critics counter that they add administrative complexity for retailers and stigmatize recipients without meaningfully improving nutrition outcomes. Elaine Waxman of the Urban Institute pointed to what she described as one of SNAP’s core historical strengths now under strain: its universality. Before the recent changes, she noted, the program’s defining feature was that “it was available everywhere,” providing a consistent nutritional safety net regardless of which state a family happened to live in. With enrollment now falling unevenly by state and a state-funding requirement looming in 2027, that consistency is increasingly in question, with anti-hunger advocates warning that the practical experience of the program could soon vary dramatically depending on a family’s zip code in a way it has not for most of the program’s 62-year history. Food banks and local charitable networks in several of the hardest-hit states say they have already seen a noticeable uptick in demand as SNAP recipients lose eligibility, though most describe their capacity as strained rather than broken so far. Anti-hunger organizations argue that private charity was never designed to absorb the scale of need that a federal entitlement program covering tens of millions of people is built to address, and they warn that a further wave of state-level funding shortfalls in 2027 could push local food assistance networks well past their sustainable limits. Supporters of the new work requirements counter that a modest transition period of strained…
Supreme Court Lets Trump’s Mail-Voting Order Partially Take Effect, Injecting Uncertainty Into Midterms
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority handed the Trump administration a preliminary win Monday, pausing a lower-court ruling that had blocked key parts of President Trump’s executive order overhauling mail-in voting rules across two dozen states — even as a separate nationwide injunction keeps the order’s central mechanism frozen for now. Trump signed the executive order in March, directing the Department of Homeland Security to compile citizenship verification lists and requiring the U.S. Postal Service to obtain lists of eligible mail voters from state election officials. Under the order, USPS would deliver mail ballots only to voters confirmed on those lists, and election officials would be required to place specific verification barcodes on ballot return envelopes. The White House has defended the order as a necessary safeguard against noncitizen voting, though research on the subject has consistently found that noncitizen voting in U.S. elections is, in the words of election researchers, “infinitesimally rare.” U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani had blocked the order’s key provisions in June for 23 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, ruling that Trump “overstepped a president’s authority” under a Constitution that assigns election rule-setting power to state legislatures and Congress, not the executive branch. Talwani also found that the Postal Service, as an independent federal agency, has no legal authority to condition mail-ballot delivery on the kind of voter-list verification scheme the order envisions. The Supreme Court’s unsigned order Monday paused Talwani’s injunction specifically as it applied to those 23 states and D.C., allowing the administration to move forward with certain aspects of implementation there while the underlying legal fight continues. But the justices left a separate, broader nationwide injunction in place, meaning USPS still cannot actually begin restricting mail-ballot delivery based on the disputed voter lists anywhere in the country while the administration’s appeals proceed. The court was notably cautious in its own language, writing that its decision “does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell” — a signal that the justices were resolving only a narrow procedural question about which injunction applies where, not endorsing the order’s ultimate legality. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the ruling, warning that the decision “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections” at a moment when state election officials are already deep into planning for November. New York’s attorney general, whose office has been among those challenging the order, called the ruling a “painful setback” while vowing to continue pursuing the underlying legal challenge through the appeals process. The practical stakes of the ruling are tied tightly to the calendar. Administration officials have acknowledged that full implementation of the order would need to begin “as soon as early to mid-August” to be operationally ready before the midterm elections in November — a deadline that has now effectively passed, meaning that even with Monday’s favorable ruling, the legal and logistical hurdles remaining make it increasingly unlikely the order will be fully in effect in time to reshape how mail ballots are processed in this year’s midterms. That timing crunch has left election administrators in the affected states in an awkward holding pattern, uncertain whether to prepare systems for a new verification regime that may or may not be operational before ballots go out. Republican-led states that intervened in the case have appealed the broader injunction, arguing that Talwani’s nationwide order improperly extended relief to states that were never party to the original lawsuit and that federal courts should not be able to block a presidential directive on a nationwide basis based on a challenge brought by a subset of states. Democratic attorneys general and voting rights groups, meanwhile, argue that the administration’s own timeline concessions undercut its claim of urgency, suggesting the order’s real purpose was less about closing a negligible security gap and more about making mail voting logistically harder in states that rely on it most heavily. The dispute now heads back to the lower courts for further proceedings on the merits, with the Supreme Court’s Monday order settling only which injunction controls in the interim rather than resolving the constitutional questions at the heart of the case. Legal analysts following the litigation say a final resolution — whether from the appeals court or eventually from the Supreme Court itself on the full merits — is unlikely before the 2026 midterms are decided, meaning the order’s ultimate fate will most likely be determined only after this election cycle has already played out under whatever patchwork of rules happens to be in effect this fall. For voters in the 23 states and D.C. covered by Monday’s ruling, the immediate practical impact remains limited given the separate nationwide injunction still blocking USPS implementation, but election officials in those states say they are watching the appeals process closely, given how quickly the legal landscape has shifted over the past several months. The ruling arrives against a backdrop of intensifying legal and political fights over election procedure in the run-up to November, following on the heels of the redistricting battles reshaping House maps in more than half a dozen states. Voting rights groups have argued that the mail-voting order, the redistricting fights, and a series of other state-level changes to voter ID and registration rules amount to a coordinated effort to tilt the midterm playing field in ways that will be difficult for courts to fully sort out before votes are cast. Administration officials reject that characterization, framing each initiative as a separate, good-faith effort to address a specific and distinct integrity or fairness concern, whether in how districts are drawn or how ballots are verified. Election law scholars note that the fractured nature of Monday’s ruling — one injunction lifted, another left standing — is itself a reflection of how unusual this case is procedurally, since it involves overlapping lawsuits filed in different jurisdictions raising similar claims against the same federal policy. That fragmentation means the order’s legal status could…
Is Now the Right Time to Go Back to School? Find Out in 2 Minutes
Now Is the Perfect Time to Go Back to School Question 1 of 7 14% 1 / 7 What’s mainly holding you back from going back to school? Cost → Not enough time → Not sure where to start → 2 / 7 What’s your current education level? High school diploma / GED → Some college, no degree → Associate’s degree or higher → 3 / 7 How soon would you want to start? As soon as possible → Within the next 3-6 months → Just exploring for now → 4 / 7 What class format works best for you? Fully online → Evenings / hybrid → On campus → 5 / 7 What’s motivating you most right now? A higher salary → A career change → A personal goal → 6 / 7 Have you looked into grants or financial aid before? Yes, but wasn’t sure what I qualified for → No, never looked into it → Not sure → 7 / 7 Are you ready to see what you might qualify for? Yes, show me now → I have about 2 minutes → Let’s see my matches → You’re a good candidate to explore your options Based on your answers, grant and aid programs may be able to help cover a meaningful part of your tuition. Get matched with schools that fit your goals — it only takes a couple of minutes. Get Matched With Schools → *Grant funding availability and amounts vary by program and eligibility. Not a guarantee of aid. Grant Programs Provide Up to $7,395 to Those Who Qualify For millions of working adults, the biggest barrier to finishing a degree isn’t ambition — it’s the assumption that school is out of financial reach. That assumption is often wrong. Grant funding, need-based aid, and employer programs exist specifically to help adult and returning students cover tuition, and many qualified people never apply simply because they never checked. $90,000 vs. $50,000 On an annual basis, median earnings for bachelor’s degree holders are about $90,000 — roughly 81% higher than the $50,000 median earnings of workers whose highest education is a high school diploma. (Based on national data, not school-specific figures; conditions in your area may vary.) Why So Many Adults Are Going Back Now Online and hybrid programs have made it far easier to fit coursework around a job, a commute, or a family schedule. Evening classes, accelerated tracks, and fully remote degrees mean “going back to school” no longer has to mean putting a career or a household on pause. At the same time, more employers are prioritizing degree-holders for promotions and higher pay bands, which has pushed many adults to finally close the gap. Here’s what tends to make the difference for people who follow through: They find out what they actually qualify for. Grant and aid eligibility varies widely by program, income, and enrollment status — the only way to know is to ask. They compare more than one program. Cost, format, and timeline can differ significantly between schools, even for the same degree. They talk to a real person. A quick conversation with a program representative can clarify aid options and answer questions a webpage can’t. See What Programs You May Qualify For → How It Works Getting matched with schools takes about two minutes. Answer a few questions about your goals and schedule, and you’ll be connected with featured programs and representatives who can walk you through what financial aid — including grants — you may qualify for. There’s no cost or obligation to look. If you’ve been putting off finishing a degree because you weren’t sure what it would cost, this is the fastest way to find out. Get Matched With Schools →
France’s Political Season Reopens With No Majority, No Budget, and a 2027 Race Already Underway
France’s political class returned from summer recess this week facing a familiar and worsening problem: a National Assembly with no working majority, a 2027 budget that must somehow pass anyway, and a presidential race that, with less than eight months to go before voters head to the polls, is already reshaping how every major party approaches the fall legislative session. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, who has spent months trying to hold together a government that lacks a stable parliamentary coalition, has made passing a 2027 budget his central priority for the fall, but he is doing so under a self-imposed constraint designed to keep his own political future out of the equation. “I am not a candidate in the presidential election,” Lecornu said, an explicit attempt to signal that his budget proposals are being shaped by fiscal necessity rather than positioning for 2027 — a distinction he hopes will make it easier to find votes from lawmakers who might otherwise view any prime ministerial initiative through the lens of the coming presidential contest. Lecornu’s team has described the budget measures under consideration as deliberately “reversible,” a hedge intended to make the package more palatable to a fractured Assembly where no single bloc controls anything close to a majority. The budget fight is unfolding against a backdrop of sharpening ideological battle lines. Olivier Faure, first secretary of the Socialist Party, has staked out a position built around what he calls “ecological socialism,” combining traditional left-wing tax and spending priorities with climate policy, while explicitly ruling out any accommodation with the far right. Faure has warned that his party will not support any Lecornu-backed measure that draws backing from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, declaring flatly that “if…the far right supports it, we will vote to censure it” — a warning that any bill perceived as dependent on far-right votes will trigger a no-confidence motion from the Socialists, regardless of the bill’s substance. That dynamic hands outsized leverage to Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, who has used the summer to prepare the party’s platform for the 2027 campaign rather than negotiate over the current government’s budget. Bardella said his party has “worked hard this summer on a programme to get the country back on its feet,” language aimed squarely at voters rather than at his colleagues in the Assembly, and reflecting the extent to which the National Rally now positions itself as a government-in-waiting rather than a conventional opposition party working the current legislative session for incremental wins. On the center-right and center, Édouard Philippe of the Horizons party has tried to carve out space as a unifying figure capable of pulling together right-of-center and centrist voters wary of both the National Rally and the hard-left France Unbowed. Philippe has paired that pitch with a call for fiscal restraint, positioning himself as the candidate of budgetary seriousness against both a far right he views as fiscally reckless in its own way and a resurgent left pushing for higher taxes and spending. Adding another layer to the field, former Socialist President François Hollande has signaled his own 2027 ambitions are gaining momentum, calling for tax increases to address France’s economic strains — a notable break from the fiscal caution favored by Philippe and much of the governing center, and a sign that Hollande, who left office deeply unpopular in 2017, sees an opening to reposition himself for a political comeback. The immediate legislative agenda facing Lecornu’s government extends well beyond the budget itself. Lawmakers are also expected to take up an agricultural “rescue plan” aimed at addressing financial strain among French farmers, along with a reform of the country’s sick leave policy — both politically sensitive measures in their own right that will require the same kind of fragile, ad hoc coalition-building the government has relied on for every major initiative since the last National Assembly elections left no party or bloc with a majority. The stakes of the budget fight are difficult to overstate in a political system still adjusting to a period of chronic parliamentary fragmentation. France has cycled through multiple prime ministers in rapid succession in recent years as successive governments failed to build durable coalitions, and a failure to pass a budget this fall would raise fresh questions about the viability of governing at all under the current Assembly’s composition — potentially reviving talk of new legislative elections or a fresh government reshuffle less than a year before voters choose a new president. Moderate figures across the political spectrum have used the start of the new session to warn against the further radicalization of French politics, cautioning that both a resurgent far right and an emboldened far left threaten the kind of pragmatic, compromise-based governance that a divided Assembly requires to function at all. Whether those warnings translate into actual cooperation on the budget, or whether the approaching presidential election simply accelerates the trend toward legislative gridlock as every major figure positions for 2027 rather than for the next fiscal year, is likely to become clear well before voters cast their first ballots. For now, Lecornu’s government remains dependent on a shifting, issue-by-issue patchwork of support from lawmakers who, in nearly every case, have far more to gain politically from distancing themselves from the current government than from helping it succeed — a structural problem that no amount of “reversible” budget language is likely to fully solve. The instability has broader implications beyond France’s own borders. As one of the European Union’s two largest economies alongside Germany, France’s ability to pass a credible budget carries weight for European bond markets and for the bloc’s broader fiscal credibility at a moment when several member states are already navigating their own debt and spending pressures. European officials have watched the past several years of French governmental turnover with concern, worried that prolonged instability in Paris could complicate joint EU initiatives that require French buy-in, from defense spending coordination to the bloc’s collective response to Russia’s war in Ukraine,…
Federal Judge Rejects Maxwell’s Bid to Keep Sealed Epstein-Case Documents Secret
A federal judge in New York has rejected Ghislaine Maxwell’s constitutional challenge to a law forcing the release of long-sealed documents from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, clearing the way for another batch of previously secret materials from Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 civil lawsuit against Maxwell to become public. U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ruled August 12 that the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law in 2025, overrides the decade-old protective order that had kept the documents under seal. Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year federal sentence after her 2021 conviction for sex trafficking, had argued the law was unconstitutional on three separate grounds, all of which Preska rejected in her opinion. Maxwell’s attorneys first argued the law violated separation-of-powers principles by improperly reopening a final judgment and directing courts how to rule in a specific case — in effect, they argued, Congress was doing a judge’s job by legislating a particular outcome in ongoing litigation rather than setting general policy. Preska disagreed, finding that Congress has clear authority to modify the rules governing grand jury secrecy through legislation, and that the original protective order sealing the documents was never meant to be permanent in the first place. The order, she noted, was explicitly modifiable “by the Court at any time for good cause shown” — meaning the parties involved never had an ironclad guarantee that the records would stay sealed forever. Maxwell’s second argument leaned on Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e), which generally bars disclosure of materials gathered through grand jury subpoenas. Some of the documents at issue were produced by Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, the law firm that represented Giuffre, after the firm complied with a grand jury subpoena as part of the broader Epstein investigation; those materials were originally placed under seal by a March 2016 protective order. Preska found that Congress retains the authority to override grand jury secrecy protections through validly enacted legislation, undercutting Maxwell’s claim that the records were categorically off-limits regardless of what a later statute said. Maxwell’s third and final argument was that unsealing the documents now would violate her due process rights by stripping away a vested legal right to permanent secrecy that she claimed to have earned when the original protective order was issued. Preska rejected that framing outright, ruling that Maxwell never had “a vested right to total and perpetual secrecy” in the first place — a protective order, by its nature, protects information only for as long as a court determines that protection remains warranted, not as an unconditional promise that can never be revisited. The Epstein Files Transparency Act itself requires the Department of Justice to “make publicly available … all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” tied to a list of specified subjects, including Epstein and Maxwell by name. The law was the product of sustained pressure from lawmakers in both parties, along with victims’ advocates, who argued that years of piecemeal, heavily redacted document releases had failed to give the public a full accounting of who knew what about Epstein’s abuse of underage girls and when they knew it. Since the law’s passage, courts and the Justice Department have released multiple rounds of material, including a batch of roughly 3 million documents and photos made public by the DOJ in January, though critics on the House Oversight Committee have repeatedly accused the department of slow-walking the fullest disclosures and continuing to withhold material that lawmakers say should be released under the statute. Preska’s ruling did not set a specific date for when the newly cleared documents will actually become public. Records released under the Transparency Act typically go through a redaction process first, intended to protect the identities of Epstein’s victims and other private individuals named in the files who are not themselves subjects of the underlying allegations — a process that has, in past rounds of disclosure, taken anywhere from several weeks to a few months after a judge clears materials for release. It remains unclear from the ruling itself whether Maxwell’s legal team plans to appeal Preska’s decision to the Second Circuit, though her attorneys have signaled in past filings that they intend to keep contesting individual releases of sealed material as they come up, even as the broader legal fight over the Transparency Act’s constitutionality has now been resolved, at least at the district court level, in the government’s favor. Giuffre, who died by suicide in April 2025, sued both Maxwell and Prince Andrew in the years before her death, alleging she had been trafficked as a teenager. Maxwell settled Giuffre’s suit against her in 2017; Prince Andrew reached his own settlement with Giuffre in 2022. Epstein died in federal custody in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, a death that was officially ruled a suicide but that has continued to fuel public skepticism and conspiracy theories, adding to the political pressure that eventually produced the Transparency Act. Lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee, which has spent much of the past year pressing the Justice Department for fuller compliance with the law, have said they view the ruling as a significant step toward the kind of complete public accounting they have been demanding since the statute’s passage, even as they continue to argue that millions of additional pages remain improperly withheld. Whether this latest release meaningfully advances that broader effort, or simply becomes the next flashpoint in an ongoing legal and political fight over how much of the Epstein investigation’s paper trail the public is ultimately entitled to see, is likely to become clearer only once the newly cleared documents are actually made public in the weeks ahead. Preska’s decision is notable partly because it is not the first time a federal judge has sided with disclosure advocates over Maxwell’s objections this year. Her ruling followed similar findings from other judges handling related sealed materials from the broader Epstein docket, part of a pattern that has emerged since the Transparency Act’s passage: courts asked to weigh decades-old secrecy orders…
National Guard’s DC Deployment Extended Through 2029 at Projected $1.4 Billion Cost
The federal deployment of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C. has been extended through January 2029, stretching what began as a short-term crime crackdown into a multi-year presence projected to cost taxpayers roughly $1.4 billion, according to Defense Department estimates. President Trump originally ordered the deployment on August 11, 2025, framing it as a federal law enforcement surge aimed at bringing down violent crime in the nation’s capital. More than a year later, the mission has grown rather than wound down: as of August 4, more than 4,600 military personnel drawn from the D.C. Guard and units from 24 states and territories remain stationed in the city, working alongside federal law enforcement officers on patrols and other public safety functions. The administration points to concrete numbers to justify the extension. Officials credit the surge with more than 13,000 arrests since it began, and city crime statistics show an overall 20% drop in crime through August 7 compared with the same period in 2025, including a 32% decline in homicides, from 97 down to 66. Supporters of the deployment argue those numbers speak for themselves and reflect a level of coordinated federal-local enforcement that the city could not achieve on its own. Critics, including independent crime analysts, note a more complicated picture: violent crime in Washington had already been on a downward trend before the National Guard surge began in 2025, part of a broader decline in major-city crime rates seen across much of the country. That has fueled a debate over how much of the recent improvement can be credited specifically to the military deployment versus a continuation of trends already underway. The extension has deepened long-simmering tension between the Trump administration and D.C.’s local government over who controls law enforcement and public safety policy in the district. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has walked a careful line between cooperating with federal authorities and defending the city’s limited home-rule autonomy, acknowledged the district’s constrained position bluntly: “We don’t have voting representation in Congress. We don’t control the D.C. National Guard.” Unlike governors in the 50 states, D.C.’s mayor does not have direct authority over the district’s Guard units, which answer instead to the president — a quirk of the district’s unique legal status that has become newly consequential now that the deployment is expected to stretch across multiple years and, potentially, into a different presidential administration. Some members of the D.C. Council have been more openly critical. Council member Brianne Nadeau said the extended presence has taken a toll on residents’ sense of normalcy in their own city. “The fact that we still have the National Guard walking our streets a year later with no end in sight is really demoralizing,” she said, capturing a sentiment shared by other local officials who argue that a temporary emergency measure has effectively become a permanent fixture of daily life in the capital without the kind of public debate that would normally accompany a policy of that scale and duration. A lawsuit challenging the legal basis for the deployment remains pending in federal court, though legal observers have expressed skepticism about its odds of success, citing the district’s unusual legal status and the broad authority presidents have historically exercised over its Guard units. Unlike a Guard deployment to a state, which generally requires the governor’s consent, the president’s authority over the D.C. National Guard is considerably more direct, giving the White House wide latitude to extend the mission with comparatively little legal friction. The $1.4 billion price tag has also drawn scrutiny on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers from both parties have raised questions about the deployment’s long-term cost-effectiveness compared with alternative approaches, such as funding additional D.C. Metropolitan Police officers directly or investing in community-based violence-intervention programs. Defenders of the current approach counter that the National Guard’s visible presence provides a deterrent effect that a strictly local police response cannot replicate, particularly in high-traffic tourist and government areas of the city that carry outsized symbolic and security importance. The deployment has also become a flashpoint in the broader national debate over the use of military and quasi-military forces for domestic law enforcement, a debate that has grown louder as the administration has weighed similar deployments in other major cities experiencing crime spikes or high-profile public safety incidents. Administration officials have pointed to Washington as a proof-of-concept for the approach, arguing that the visible reduction in violent crime validates extending similar deployments elsewhere. Opponents warn that normalizing a years-long military presence in American cities, even one focused on ostensibly civilian law enforcement tasks, sets a precedent that could prove difficult to unwind regardless of which party controls the White House in the years ahead. For now, the roughly 4,600 troops remain a fixture of daily life in the nation’s capital, stationed at Metro stations, tourist landmarks and neighborhood patrol routes that, before 2025, would have been the sole responsibility of D.C.’s own police force. With the deployment now locked in through the start of 2029, the debate over its costs, benefits and legal footing is likely to remain a recurring feature of D.C. politics for years to come, well beyond whatever crime statistics ultimately emerge from any single year of the surge. The multi-state composition of the deployment has added another layer of political complexity. Guard units from 24 states and territories have rotated through the mission alongside D.C.’s own Guard, meaning governors in a range of red and blue states have had to decide whether to keep contributing troops to a mission that has become a symbol of the broader fight over federal versus local control of policing. Several Republican governors have framed their states’ continued participation as supporting law and order in the capital, while governors in a handful of Democratic-led states have faced pressure to withdraw their contingents, arguing the mission has drifted well beyond its stated purpose as a short-term emergency response. The financial structure of the deployment has also drawn attention from budget analysts. The projected $1.4 billion cost…
Kremlin Declares Ukraine Peace Talks in ‘Deep Pause’ as Putin Orders New Wave of Strikes
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced Friday that negotiations to end the war in Ukraine are effectively frozen, telling reporters that “as for peace talks, that topic is currently on a deep pause” — a blunt acknowledgment that months of on-and-off diplomacy have failed to produce a breakthrough, even as Russian forces intensify their military campaign. The announcement caps a difficult week for the peace process. Bloomberg reported Wednesday that President Vladimir Putin has moved to escalate the war rather than wind it down, with Russia’s Defense Ministry describing a “massive strike” launched overnight from land, air and naval platforms that hit Kyiv’s city center along with five other Ukrainian cities and the port cities of Odesa, Chornomorsk and Reni. Russia’s military has signaled it intends to keep up conventional ballistic missile attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure in the weeks ahead. Peskov tied the pause in talks directly to the battlefield, telling reporters, “We’re pressing forward with the special military operation and our troops are making gains on the frontlines.” He said Russian forces were “intentionally destroying the Kyiv regime’s military and military-adjacent infrastructure,” and Russia’s General Staff chief claimed troops were advancing on Slovyansk, a heavily fortified city in the Donetsk region that has long been viewed as a key defensive anchor for Ukrainian forces in the east. At the core of the impasse is a demand Kyiv has repeatedly rejected: Putin is insisting Ukraine cede full control of the Donetsk region as a precondition for any ceasefire. “The Ukrainian side knows our demands full well,” Peskov said. “They just don’t want to discuss them peacefully.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government has consistently ruled out formally surrendering territory as part of a settlement, arguing that doing so would reward Russian aggression and invite further attacks down the road. The diplomatic track that once looked promising has largely stalled. Negotiating frameworks that had been under discussion for months have effectively collapsed, with both sides reverting to their original opening positions, according to Bloomberg’s reporting. U.S. mediation efforts under President Trump, which had driven earlier momentum toward a deal, have lost steam in recent weeks as the administration’s attention has shifted heavily toward its economic and military standoff with Iran. A planned visit to Moscow by U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner has no confirmed date, and officials briefed on the effort say expectations for a breakthrough are low. That doesn’t mean diplomatic efforts have stopped entirely. CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow earlier this week in what officials described as an attempt to nudge the Kremlin back toward negotiations, and a Vatican envoy separately met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to press the case for peace. Neither effort appears to have moved the needle in any visible way. Putin has also raised the specter of a broader economic confrontation. In comments this week, he accused Ukraine of having “opened this Pandora’s box” through its own strikes on Russian territory and warned of a “heavy response” targeting economic infrastructure — a signal that Russia may expand its targeting beyond the energy and military sites it has focused on for much of the war. Peskov echoed the warning, telling reporters “this will be a heavy response” regarding future strikes on economic infrastructure. Ukraine, for its part, has continued its own campaign against Russian oil refineries and logistics networks deep inside Russian territory, part of a tit-for-tat escalation that has increasingly targeted both countries’ energy sectors and, in Russia’s case, commercial shipping in the Black Sea. The war, now in its fifth year, has ground on despite periodic diplomatic openings, and this week’s developments underscore how far apart the two sides remain. Some analysts tracking the Kremlin’s internal debates say hardliners in Moscow have floated the idea of Russia eventually turning to tactical nuclear weapons as a last resort if the conventional war stalls further, though there are no visible signs of preparation for such a step, and most Western officials view it as a low-probability scenario meant partly to pressure Kyiv and its backers psychologically. For ordinary Ukrainians, the practical consequence of the stalled talks is another season of missile and drone attacks on cities far from the front lines, with power and water infrastructure likely to remain prime targets as autumn approaches — a repeat of tactics Russia has used in each of the war’s previous winters. Ukrainian officials say they are bracing for exactly that scenario and have spent recent months hardening air defenses and reinforcing the electrical grid. The Trump administration has staked significant political capital on brokering an end to the war, and the collapse of momentum comes at an awkward moment for the White House, which is simultaneously managing an economic and military confrontation with Iran and a trade dispute with Canada. Officials close to the process say Trump remains personally interested in restarting talks but has not set a firm timeline, and that the administration is watching to see whether Russia’s latest push produces gains significant enough to change Moscow’s calculus — or whether mounting Russian losses eventually push Putin back to the table on different terms. For now, both sides appear to be betting that continued fighting will improve their negotiating position rather than undermine it, a dynamic that has repeatedly derailed previous rounds of talks over the past year. Unless that calculation changes on one side or the other, officials and analysts following the conflict say a genuine resumption of negotiations is unlikely before the fall, if not later. The stalemate also carries consequences beyond Ukraine’s borders. European governments, which have spent years ramping up defense spending in anticipation of a prolonged conflict, have watched the collapse of talks with a mix of resignation and quiet relief that Washington has not pressured Kyiv into an unfavorable settlement simply to claim a diplomatic win. Several NATO members have said they will continue military aid to Ukraine regardless of the state of U.S.-brokered talks, though funding fatigue has become a more visible undercurrent in…
Republicans Hold Roughly 8-Seat Redistricting Edge Heading Into 2026 Midterms
A wave of mid-decade congressional map redraws has left Republicans with a net advantage of roughly eight U.S. House seats heading into the November midterms, the product of an aggressive redistricting push in GOP-controlled states that a Supreme Court ruling this spring helped clear the way for. Texas kicked off the fight last August when Governor Greg Abbott signed a new congressional map creating five additional Republican-leaning districts. Democratic-controlled California countered in November, when voters approved a new map projected to net Democrats five seats of their own. Since then, the redistricting arms race has spread well beyond those two states: Ohio’s bipartisan redistricting commission approved a map last October worth two more seats for Republicans, Florida’s governor signed a map in early May netting the GOP an estimated four seats, and Missouri’s legislature — over Democratic objections — redrew Kansas City-area Representative Emanuel Cleaver’s district to add a Republican-leaning seat, a move the state Supreme Court upheld in May. Louisiana was forced into its own redraw after the U.S. Supreme Court’s late-April ruling in Texas’s case, a decision that is expected to net Republicans an additional seat there as well. Not every state redraw favored the GOP: a Virginia court struck down a Democratic-backed constitutional amendment that would have let the legislature redraw that state’s map, keeping Virginia’s current lines in place. Added together, Republicans have picked up an estimated 13 seats across Texas, Florida, Ohio, Missouri and Louisiana, while Democrats have gained roughly five through California’s counter-map — a net swing of about eight seats toward the GOP, enough to meaningfully shift the math in a chamber where 218 seats decide control. The redistricting fights were reshaped by the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which narrowed the Voting Rights Act’s protections for minority-opportunity districts. The court held that maps drawn specifically to maximize the electoral chances of non-white candidates can themselves run afoul of the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantee, a decision legal analysts say gave state legislatures far more room to redraw lines for straightforward partisan advantage without running into the VRA constraints that had shaped redistricting for decades. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin has criticized the wave of GOP-led redraws, saying of Missouri’s effort specifically that Governor Mike Kehoe “undermined the voice of Missouri voters” and sought to “dilute their power altogether.” Republican officials have defended the new maps as legitimate exercises of state legislative authority, noting that Democratic-controlled California pursued the same strategy once voters there approved it. More maps could still be litigated before November. Courts have traditionally been reluctant to order new congressional lines close to an election, but this year’s Supreme Court ruling has led some legal observers to say that “traditional expectations may not apply in 2026,” leaving open the possibility of further changes in the months ahead. Even with the current GOP edge, strategists in both parties caution that redistricting alone won’t decide House control — Republicans continue to face separate headwinds heading into the midterms, including historical trends that typically favor the party out of the White House in off-year elections.