Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson used a public appearance this week to take her own court to task, warning that the Supreme Court's growing reliance on its emergency docket — the so-called "shadow docket" — risks undermining the institution's credibility.

Jackson called the practice "problematic" and urged her colleagues toward more restraint, according to The Washington Post. The New York Times reported she went further in a speech, describing the trend as "potentially corrosive" — pointed language for a sitting justice to use about her own court's procedures, delivered just hours after she had fielded the Trump administration's latest emergency application.

The emergency docket allows the Court to issue rulings, often unsigned and without full briefing or oral argument, on requests for immediate relief — a mechanism that has seen dramatically increased use as the Trump administration has repeatedly sought fast-track intervention on policy disputes making their way through lower courts. Critics across the ideological spectrum have argued the practice lets the Court make consequential decisions with minimal transparency about its reasoning.

Jackson's comments do not describe a specific pending case by name in available reporting, and neither the Post nor the Times account details what remedy, if any, she proposed beyond urging "more restraint." It is also not clear from these reports whether other justices have publicly responded.

Still, a sitting justice publicly criticizing her own court's internal practices is unusual, and it lands amid mounting scrutiny — from lawmakers and legal scholars alike — of how much power the emergency docket has quietly accumulated. Whether her colleagues take the criticism to heart is, for now, an open question.

Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.

— Compiled from reporting by The Washington Post and The New York Times.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill called on Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell to resign Thursday, after an internal investigation concluded he had violated the state's ethics and harassment policies.

Sherrill did not mince words. Caldwell's "ethical lapses persisted despite multiple warnings and trainings," she said, according to NBC News — language that suggests this was not a single lapse in judgment but a pattern the governor's office tried, and failed, to correct quietly before going public.

The governor's office has not released the full investigative report, and it remains unclear what specific conduct triggered the finding or whether Caldwell intends to comply with the request. NBC New York's Ida Siegal reported that the call for resignation followed the completion of the ethics probe, but details on the underlying complaint, who filed it, and when the investigation began were not disclosed in available reporting.

Caldwell, who holds a largely ceremonial post but sits a heartbeat from the governorship, has not yet issued a public response as of this writing. New Jersey's lieutenant governor cannot simply be removed by the governor alone; resignation would need to be voluntary, and any refusal could set up a prolonged standoff over who holds the second-highest office in Trenton.

The episode lands as New Jersey Democrats navigate a general election calendar and scrutiny of how state officials handle workplace conduct complaints. Sherrill's public break with her own lieutenant governor is a notable rupture within the state's executive branch, and one voters will be watching closely for what comes next.

What exactly the ethics report found, and why it took "multiple warnings" before this went public, are questions this desk will keep pressing.

— Compiled from reporting by NBC News and NBC New York.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

With the midterms just under six weeks away, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina put the Republican Party's position in blunt terms: a "fight for our lives" to hold the Senate, according to CBS News. As chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Scott laid out the strategy his party is banking on to survive what he and others acknowledge is a difficult environment.

The warning lands alongside a quieter but telling signal from the party's donor class. Timothy Mellon, one of the GOP's biggest financial backers in 2024, has so far withheld his midterm donations to Republican senators, according to The New York Times. Mellon's reported grievance: frustration that a key Trump priority failed to pass. A single major donor stepping back doesn't sink a party's finances on its own, but it does say something about intraparty patience wearing thin.

Meanwhile in Alaska, Democrats see an opening. Mary Peltola is hoping to flip a Republican-held Senate seat, but her campaign has been rocked by internal turmoil — former aides describe angry outbursts and slurs inside a congressional office and campaign operation marked by chaos, the Times reports.

Taken together, the three threads point to a midterm map still very much in motion: Republicans nervous about holding what they have, a major donor sitting on his wallet, and a Democratic pickup opportunity complicated by its own internal mess. Neither party has this cycle locked down, and the people closest to the money and the campaigns are the ones saying so.

Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.

— Compiled from reporting by CBS News and The New York Times.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

A federal judge moved before dawn Thursday to undo what three news organizations called an unconstitutional purge of the White House press corps.

The judge granted CNN, Politico and MS NOW a temporary restraining order, ordering the White House to immediately restore the outlets' hard-pass credentials. In her ruling, the judge said President Trump's directive barring the three organizations last week was "most likely unconstitutional," according to reporting from NBC News and CBS News.

The order reverses, for now, a ban that had shut out three newsrooms from the briefing room and the grounds where presidents have answered reporters' questions for generations. CBS News legal contributor Jessica Levinson had noted before the ruling that the ban was already facing a First Amendment lawsuit, with the outlets arguing the administration cannot pick and choose which journalists cover the presidency based on its own satisfaction with their coverage.

The White House had not detailed, in public terms cited in the coverage reviewed here, a legal justification for the exclusion beyond the president's own directive. The ruling is temporary — a restraining order, not a final judgment — meaning the underlying First Amendment lawsuit will continue.

What's clear already: a court has told the executive branch, in writing, that shutting reporters out of the building because you don't like their coverage runs into constitutional trouble fast. What's not yet clear is whether the administration will appeal, comply quietly, or test the line again in some narrower form. That fight isn't over. It's just moved to the next hearing.

Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.

— Compiled from reporting by NBC News, ABC News, and CBS News.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

The Austin Police Department has released bodycam footage from the scene of a shooting in which a DoorDash driver was hit by an ICE officer's gunfire — video that exists only because a nearby Austin police officer, not the shooter, happened to be wearing a camera.

The ICE officer who fired was not wearing the body camera assigned to them, the department said, leaving the only recorded account of the encounter to come from local police who arrived on or near the scene. The driver was hospitalized for care related to paralysis and has since been returned to immigration detention.

The release comes amid a separate, and by ICE's own account mistaken, incident in Illinois in which agents targeted and injured a U.S. citizen. Together the two cases have sharpened questions about oversight of federal immigration enforcement operations that increasingly intersect with everyday encounters — a delivery run, a traffic stop — far from any courthouse or border crossing.

[The specific circumstances that led the ICE officer to fire, and whether use-of-force policy was followed, are not detailed in available reporting and should be confirmed before further characterization.]

Austin police have not said whether their release of the video reflects a broader policy on transparency when federal agents are involved in local shootings, or whether it was a one-time disclosure tied to public pressure over the case. ICE has not issued a public accounting of why its officer lacked the assigned camera.

Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.

— Compiled from reporting by NBC News and CBS News.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

For the third time, Missouri's congressional map is back before the U.S. Supreme Court, and the clock is running toward next year's midterms.

A federal appeals court has sided with Republicans seeking to use district boundaries redrawn last year — lines critics say were engineered to hand the GOP an added seat in the state's congressional delegation. The ruling clears the way, for now, for the newly drawn map to stand, but opponents are asking the Supreme Court to intervene before it takes effect in an election cycle.

This is not a new fight. Missouri's map has already bounced to the high court twice before over the same basic dispute: whether the redrawn boundaries unlawfully dilute the voting power of certain communities or simply reflect the state legislature's prerogative to draw its own lines. Each trip to the justices has left the underlying question — who gets to draw the map, and by what limits — unresolved.

What's different this time is the calendar. With midterm primaries approaching, any further delay in a final ruling raises the odds that Missouri could hold 2026 elections under a map that is still, legally speaking, in dispute. Redistricting fights in other states have shown how a late-arriving court order can force last-minute changes to filing deadlines and ballot printing.

The Supreme Court has not said when, or whether, it will take up the case for full review. Until it does, the redrawn lines - and the partisan advantage they were built to deliver - stand.

Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.

— Compiled from reporting by The New York Times and ABC News.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

CNN, MS NOW and Politico filed suit Monday against President Trump over his decision to revoke their access to White House events, calling the ban a "blatant violation" of the First Amendment, according to CBS News. The president has said he barred the three outlets because he objected to their coverage of his administration.

The fallout has reshaped how the White House is covered day to day. Major broadcast networks in the White House press pool responded by refusing to cover the president's public events altogether while the ban is litigated, a boycott The New York Times' chief White House correspondent Peter Baker described as unprecedented. CBS News reported Monday that there was no network television coverage of the president's meeting with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani at Gracie Mansion, nor of his preparations for Tuesday's address to the United Nations General Assembly.

The dispute marks a sharp break from decades of practice in which the press pool — rotating print, radio and television journalists — covered the president's movements regardless of which outlets he favored. The three suing organizations argue the administration cannot selectively exclude outlets based on the content of their coverage without running afoul of press-freedom protections; the White House has not, per available reporting, offered a detailed legal defense of the ban.

How the courts resolve the suit — and how long networks sustain their boycott — will shape the terms of White House access for whoever holds the office next. For now, a sitting president is getting less unscripted airtime than at almost any point in the modern television era, by his own administration's design.

Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.

— Compiled from reporting by CBS News, NBC News and The New York Times.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and wounded a 28-year-old delivery driver inside his own car in Austin, Texas, in an encounter caught partly on video that has since circulated widely.

The man, identified by his attorney as Venezuelan, is now in federal custody. His lawyer told CBS News the bullet remains lodged near his spine. NBC News reported new video shows what its correspondent Ryan Chandler described as the "chaotic moments" surrounding the shooting, though the network's account does not establish what precipitated the officer's decision to fire.

Neither ICE nor Austin police has offered a detailed public account, based on available reporting, of the sequence of events leading up to the shooting. That gap matters: a man was shot while working a delivery job, and the public record so far consists of a lawyer's account of his injuries and video described but not fully narrated by network correspondents.

The incident lands amid a summer and fall of intensified immigration enforcement activity nationwide, and it is likely to draw scrutiny from civil liberties advocates and immigration attorneys watching how ICE conducts encounters with civilians who are not the direct targets of enforcement action. This paper could not independently confirm additional details of the officer's identity or the internal review status of the shooting as of publication.

[Editor's note: The specific circumstances that led the officer to fire have not been established in available reporting and should not be inferred.]

Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.

— Compiled from reporting by NBC News and CBS News.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

A grand jury in Mississippi has declined to bring criminal charges in the death of Nolan Wells, the 18-year-old whose body was found days after he traveled by boat to Horn Island with friends over the Fourth of July weekend.

The local district attorney told reporters the panel reviewed the evidence available to it and found it insufficient to support a criminal case. The district attorney also characterized the finding as a rejection of months of online speculation that race played a role in Wells's death — speculation that spread widely on social media long before any official findings were released.

Wells's case drew national attention over the summer, and NBC News, CBS News and ABC News each confirmed the grand jury's decision this week. None of the available reporting details the specific evidence the panel weighed, and the precise circumstances of how Wells died remain unclear in the public record.

The grand jury's decision closes the door on criminal prosecution. It does not, on its own, answer the questions that drove so much public attention to a Mississippi island most Americans had never heard of before this summer.

[Editor's note: The evidence reviewed by the grand jury and the exact circumstances of Wells's death have not been detailed in available source reporting and should not be assumed or embellished.]

Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.

— Compiled from reporting by NBC News, CBS News and ABC News.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

Monae Johnson runs elections in South Dakota. She is also a Republican. And according to the New York Times, she is now backing the Democrat running to succeed her rather than the conservative candidate carrying her own party's banner.

The Times reports Johnson is the latest Republican incumbent to speak out against conservative candidates as President Trump's standing erodes ahead of the midterm elections. The specific grievances driving her break — policy disagreements, character concerns, something else — were not detailed in available reporting, and this paper has not independently confirmed them. What is documented is the endorsement itself: a sitting Republican secretary of state choosing the opposing party's nominee for her own former post.

Such defections are rare enough to make news on their own. They matter more in the aggregate. A secretary of state's job is unglamorous but load-bearing — certifying results, setting rules for ballot access, fielding the disputes that follow close races. When the person who has run that office breaks publicly with her own party's nominee, it is a signal aimed less at any single voter than at her fellow Republicans watching from the sidelines.

Whether Johnson's endorsement moves votes in South Dakota is unknowable this far out. What it confirms is a pattern reporters have been tracking all year: pockets of Republican officials, closest to the machinery of government, declining to fall in line as the party's midterm map grows more difficult. Further reporting on Johnson's specific reasons, and the race itself, is warranted before more can be said.

— Compiled from reporting by The New York Times.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

President Trump wants a new military branch for artificial intelligence. He does not, by his own words, think artificial intelligence is much of a threat.

Speaking this week, the president proposed what he called an "AI Force," explicitly modeled on the Space Force he created in his first term, and said he would appoint an AI czar to oversee it, according to ABC News. In the same breath, Trump continued to describe fears about AI's pace and potential for harm as a "hoax," a term he has also applied to climate science and other subjects experts treat as settled or serious.

The contradiction is the story. Creating a military branch to handle artificial intelligence is, on its face, an acknowledgment that the technology carries risks significant enough to warrant a dedicated armed-forces command — the same logic that built Space Force around orbital threats. Yet the president has offered no rules, regulations, or oversight framework to go with the new bureaucracy, and he continues to publicly reject the premise that AI's rapid development poses dangers worth restraining, the New York Times reported.

What exactly an "AI Force" would do, who would lead it, and what authority it would carry remain undefined. No legislation has been introduced. No budget has been proposed. For now it is a name floated in a speech, not a plan.

That matters because the substantive debate in Washington and in AI research circles is not about whether to stand up a new military logo — it is about guardrails: testing requirements, transparency rules, liability standards. None of that featured in the president's remarks. A force without rules is a flag without a country.

Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.

— Compiled from reporting by ABC News and The New York Times.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

The U.S. military struck another boat in the Caribbean Sea it says was smuggling drugs, killing four people aboard, the Pentagon confirmed Saturday.

The strike is not an isolated action. It is the latest entry in a campaign that has now killed at least 231 people in 69 strikes across Latin American waters since the Trump administration began targeting what officials call "narcoterrorists" roughly a year ago, according to CBS News.

What the public has not been given, in this case or in the strikes before it, is much in the way of verification. The Pentagon has offered a body count and a label — drug-smuggling boat — but not names, nationalities, evidence presented to a court, or an accounting of who, if anyone, was found unarmed or innocent. Sixty-nine strikes is a lot of boats to have sunk without a single public trial.

That is the trouble with a war fought by press release. The administration has framed these as counter-narcotics operations, but they carry the hallmarks of a shadow military campaign: extrajudicial killings, conducted at sea, far from cameras and courts, justified after the fact rather than authorized before it. Congress has not declared war on cartels. No public legal memo has been released explaining the authority under which the military can kill suspected smugglers on sight rather than interdict and prosecute them, the traditional coast guard approach.

At 231 dead and counting, the scale alone demands scrutiny this newspaper has not seen applied. Who reviews these strikes? What evidence justifies each one? The administration has not said, and reporters have not yet forced an answer.

Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.

— Compiled from reporting by ABC News and CBS News.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

Major Jason Watson, an Air Force officer, could face court-martial after protesting against President Trump — a case that may become a rare test of how much a uniformed service member is allowed to say in public against the commander in chief.

Watson has said he spoke out to defend the Constitution, framing his protest as an act of fidelity to the oath he took rather than defiance of the chain of command. The military draws sharp, long-standing lines around political speech by active-duty personnel, and violations can carry real career and legal consequences, including court-martial.

The specifics of the charges, and what exactly Watson said or did, have not been fully detailed in available reporting. That gap matters: military justice cases turn on precise conduct — what regulation was allegedly broken, and how — not on the general sympathy of the underlying cause.

What is clear is the stakes. Cases testing the boundary between a service member's constitutional rights and the military's need for political neutrality in the ranks are uncommon, and they tend to produce rulings that outlast the news cycle that produced them.

This is an early story, with limited detail confirmed. We'll follow it as charges, if any, are formally filed and made public.

— Compiled from reporting by The New York Times.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

A federal appeals court on Friday shut down a Department of Homeland Security policy that let officials deport immigrants to third countries with little warning and less recourse.

The ruling, from a unanimous three-judge panel, strikes down the fast-track approach and requires that detainees get what the court called "a meaningful opportunity to contest" being sent to a country where they have no connection at all — not the country they fled, not a country they've ever set foot in.

That distinction matters. Deportation to a home country, however fraught, at least follows a familiar legal script. Deportation to a third country — arranged through diplomatic deals the deportee never sees — has been harder to challenge in real time, which is precisely what advocates argued made the policy unlawful.

The decision does not end third-country removals outright. It restores a process: notice, and a chance to object, before the plane leaves the ground.

The White House has not signaled whether it will appeal further. Given the administration's aggressive posture on immigration enforcement this year, a request for Supreme Court review would not be a surprise.

For now, the ruling is a check — not a knockout — on an administration that has tested the outer edges of executive authority over deportation for months. The footnotes on this one are worth reading: the panel's opinion turns on due process, not sympathy, and that's the ground on which future fights over this policy will be fought.

— Compiled from reporting by ABC News and CBS News.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

It has been federal law for well over a century: armed federal officers do not station themselves at polling places on Election Day. That statute exists for a plain reason — a badge and a sidearm near a ballot box chills the vote, and a democracy that has to think twice about that isn't much of one.

According to NPR, a new lawsuit — first reported by the network — argues that the Trump administration's repeated suggestions that federal officers could be present at polling sites amount to a form of illegal voter intimidation, even before a single agent shows up. The suit is reportedly one of several now working through the courts on the same question, though NPR's available reporting does not specify which court is hearing this particular case, who the named plaintiffs are, or when a ruling might come.

That's a meaningful gap, and it's worth naming rather than papering over: this is a story still developing, built on a legal theory — that statements alone can constitute intimidation — that a judge has not yet ruled on. What is established, per the reporting, is the underlying statute barring armed federal officers at polls, and the administration's public comments that plaintiffs say violate it.

Midterm season sharpens the stakes. If the courts side with the plaintiffs, expect explicit injunctions barring federal law enforcement from polling places well before voters head to the booth. If the administration prevails, or if the suits stall, the question of who guards democracy's most basic act — and from whom — stays unsettled heading into next year's elections.

Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.

— Compiled from reporting by NPR.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

The paperwork on a fighter jet sale rarely makes headlines. This one should. According to reporting by The New York Times, the Trump administration is proceeding with a sale of F-35 stealth jets to Saudi Arabia even as U.S. intelligence agencies have warned, in internal reports, that the deal carries a real risk: that China could acquire or steal American warplane technology once the jets are on Saudi soil.

The F-35 is the most advanced fighter in the U.S. arsenal, and Washington has historically guarded its export closely — Israel remains the only Middle Eastern country currently flying it. Saudi Arabia's deepening commercial and diplomatic ties to Beijing, including in telecommunications and infrastructure, are reportedly at the center of the intelligence community's unease, though the Times reporting does not detail the specific mechanisms officials fear, whether espionage, technology-sharing arrangements, or physical access to the aircraft.

The administration's rationale for pressing ahead has not been laid out in the available reporting. That silence matters. A president is entitled to override intelligence assessments — that is his constitutional prerogative — but the public is entitled to know why, especially when the asset in question is the most sensitive military technology the United States sells to anyone.

Congress has a notification role in major foreign arms sales and the power to object, though such objections rarely succeed once a deal is underway. Whether lawmakers intend to use that leverage here is, as of this writing, unclear.

We don't yet know the full contours of the deal — price, quantity, delivery timeline — nor the administration's answer to its own analysts. Those are the numbers and the reasoning worth demanding before the first jet leaves the tarmac.

— Compiled from reporting by The New York Times.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

The jet came down in a residential stretch of Grand Traverse County, Michigan, and for a few hours the story could have gone very differently. It didn't. The pilot ejected safely and was taken to a hospital for evaluation, according to the Texas Military Department, which owns the aircraft. No injuries were reported among residents on the ground.

The F-16, flown by the Texas Air National Guard, triggered evacuations in the surrounding area as emergency crews secured the crash site — standard procedure given the risk of unspent fuel and, in military aircraft, potential ordnance. NBC News and ABC News both confirmed the evacuation order and the pilot's safe ejection; CBS News included the crash in its Wednesday evening broadcast roundup.

What isn't yet public is why the jet went down. The Texas Military Department has not released a cause, and reporting so far has focused on the immediate aftermath rather than mechanical or pilot-error findings. That investigation, typically run by the Air Force, takes weeks or months to complete and is worth watching for when it lands.

It's a reminder of a fact easy to forget in a country accustomed to routine military flights over its own soil: fighter jets on training or transit missions fly over homes, schools and highways every day, and when something goes wrong, it goes wrong at speed, in populated places. This time, distance and a working ejection seat did the work that luck usually gets credit for. The people of Grand Traverse County were fortunate. The Air Force owes them, and the country, a straight answer on why.

— Compiled from reporting by NBC News, ABC News and CBS News.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

President Trump campaigned in North Carolina for Michael Whatley, the former Republican National Committee chairman now running for Senate, using the stop to hammer Democrats on crime, according to NBC News. Whatley faces former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper in a race both parties regard as pivotal to which party holds the Senate majority.

The visit was not without friction. CBS News chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes spoke with Whatley ahead of the president's appearance about pushback he's gotten locally — a North Carolina farmer's criticism of tariffs and gas costs, grievances that cut against the campaign's preferred message and point to a rougher patch of ground for Republicans in farm country than the crime-focused stump speech might suggest.

The race sits alongside several other contests both parties are watching closely this cycle. CBS News' director of elections and surveys, Anthony Salvanto, has flagged the broader map of congressional races where control of Congress is up for grabs. Separately, former Vice President Kamala Harris is set to campaign in Michigan with Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, a reminder that both parties are deploying their biggest names to close contests this fall.

Cooper has not yet been reported responding to Trump's specific crime remarks in the sourcing available here; this paper will note his reply when it comes. What's certain is that North Carolina, again, is a proving ground — for a message, and for a Senate majority neither party can afford to lose.

Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.

— Compiled from reporting by NBC News and CBS News.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

The Federal Reserve raised interest rates Wednesday, its first such move in three years, citing concern that inflation is running too high. CBS News' Kelly O'Grady reported the decision came the same week diesel fuel prices hit a record high for an eighth straight day, a sign the price pressures worked into this decision are not abstract for anyone paying at the pump.

The rate hike carries a political subplot. President Trump, who has pushed for lower rates in the past, said Wednesday he told Fed Chair Kevin Warsh — whom Trump appointed — to "do what you want" ahead of the decision, according to The Washington Post. Trump added he wants Warsh to be independent, then, in the same breath reported by NBC News, predicted Warsh likely won't follow his direction regardless.

It is a notable posture from a president who has not always shied from pressuring the Fed publicly. Whether Trump's stated hands-off approach holds as rates and prices continue to move will be worth watching. For now, the Fed's message was blunt: inflation is too high, and it acted accordingly. Diesel prices, unaffected by monetary policy on any given week, tell their own story about what's driving up costs at the register and the pump alike.

This paper has not independently verified the diesel price figures beyond CBS News' reporting and will follow up on the underlying data.

Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.

— Compiled from reporting by NBC News, The Washington Post and CBS News.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."

The House passed a Russia sanctions bill late Wednesday, sending to President Trump's desk legislation Sen. Lindsey Graham has championed for years. The bill now awaits the president's signature or veto.

[Editor's note: An earlier version of this story referred to Graham as deceased. That claim could not be confirmed against an obituary, official Senate or family statement, or wire report, and has been removed.]

Details on the measure's specific provisions — what sanctions it imposes, on whom, and under what triggers — were not laid out in the reporting available to this desk. CBS News congressional reporter Taurean Small covered the vote's passage, but this paper has not yet reviewed the underlying bill text and is not in a position to characterize its scope or reach. That reporting will follow once the text is in hand.

What is clear from the available reporting: the House vote is a legislative win for Graham, a South Carolina Republican who has spent years pushing Congress toward tougher measures on Moscow, including through the ongoing war in Ukraine. That a GOP-controlled House sent it to a Republican president's desk says something about where the center of gravity sits on Russia policy within the party, even as other Republicans have grown louder in their skepticism of American involvement in foreign conflicts.

Whether Trump signs it will be its own story. The president has at times bristled at congressional attempts to constrain his hand on foreign policy, and Russia sanctions have been a recurring flashpoint between the White House and Capitol Hill across multiple administrations. This paper will follow the bill to the president's desk and report what he does with it.

Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.

— Compiled from reporting by CBS News.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."