When “marine snow” made of dead plankton’s shells, fish poop, dust particles, and other debris descends to the ocean floor, it carries atmospheric carbon the plankton used to make their calcite shells. It’s one of the ways the ocean stores carbon, helping to keep greenhouse gases from turning the planet into an oversize toaster oven. Yet scientists realized that something has been dissolving those calcite shells and releasing carbon dioxide, reducing the ocean’s carbon-trapping capacity. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA identified the culprit: dense microbe “cities” living inside the marine snow.
The individual cities are microscopic, but collectively they have powerful effects on Earth’s climate because the ocean is home to an inconceivable number of microbes. A shot glass full of seawater can contain millions of bacterial cells. “If you were to take every bacterial cell in the ocean and string them end to end like a chain of pearls, it would stretch 50 times around the Milky Way,” says study co-author Andrew Babbin, an oceanographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
To study the microbial cities, “we brought the ocean into the laboratory,” says Benedict Borer, lead study author and a biogeochemist at Rutgers University. The scientists introduced microbes to a microfluidic chip designed to mimic marine-snow particles and added fluorescent molecules whose glow changed with oxygen levels and acidity. (The system was so sensitive that at first, people breathing in the lab were affecting measurements.)
The researchers found that the cities’ chemical microenvironments increase calcite dissolution. Many oxygen-breathing microbes feed on carbon, then release carbon dioxide, which turns into carbonic acid in seawater. The sheer number of microbes breathing in such tight quarters creates concentrated pockets of carbonic acid in and around the marine-snow particles, which dissolve the snow’s calcite.
As marine-snow particles dissolve and get lighter, they also sink more slowly, the researchers say, giving carbon extra time to escape before it can reach long-term storage in the deep ocean and potentially increasing its release back into the environment. More research is needed to calculate microbial cities’ full influence on ocean acidity because dissolved calcite can counteract the carbonic acid to an extent.
“Large-scale biogeochemical processes often depend on very small-scale interactions,” says Hongjie Wang, an oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, who was not involved in the study. Babbin agrees: “Ultimately everything that’s happening at these microscales—that’s really what’s terraforming our planet.”
Once the last stars have walked the red (or green) carpet, the livestream has ended, and most of the cameras have stopped snapping at the Met Gala 2026, the real fun begins. This year, guests explored the museum’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries, where the spring exhibition, “Costume Art,” was held; sat for a garden-inspired dinner at the Temple of Dendur; and took in musical performances by Sabrina Carpenter and Stevie Knicks.
And aside from the rare, forbidden bathroom selfie, photos from inside the event are hard to come by. Luckily, Vogue had photographer Francesc Planes on the scene, capturing all the candid moments you won’t see anywhere else. The Paris-based photographer, who has shot many a fashion week and whose work spans documentary and fashion photography, turned his lens toward attendees as they enjoyed the evening.
Below, see Planes’s point of view on the night through film photos.
Photographed by Francesc Planes 1/28
Beyoncé
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Click the link below the following photo for the complete collection of Planes Photos
In 1950, Robert Doisneau photographed a kiss you’ve surely seen. The man and woman seem to have been stopped by ardor amid the midday rush, in front of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris. Though staged, it became, nearly immediately, one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.
Surely unknown to Mr. Doisneau, nine years earlier, there was another kiss captured on film in Paris that was much more spontaneous, just as passionate — far more desperate — between two Jews about to be separated by Vichy police. This kiss, found on a contact sheet of Nazi propaganda images in a Reims flea market six years ago, is now at the heart of a new exhibition of 98 Nazi propaganda photos at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, curated by Lior Lalieu and me. This kiss, perhaps destined to become just as iconic, reveals a very different midcentury Parisian moment.
The photos provide a detailed visual account — almost minute by minute — of the very first, and little-known, roundup of Jews in France on May 14, 1941. That day, some 3,700 foreign-born Jews obeyed a summons by Paris police with a notice, printed on light green paper (it became known as the “green ticket roundup”), for what they believed would merely be a check of their immigration and identity papers. The operation was organized by a man named Theodor Dannecker, the envoy of Adolf Eichmann in Paris. A photographer with the Nazi propaganda unit in the city was on hand to observe.
What gives these newly discovered photographs their singular power is not only what they show but the fact that they survived at all. They remind us that the past is never entirely buried, and that images can unexpectedly return to challenge the void of memory and representation. They function today not as propaganda, the purpose for which they were originally produced, but as fragments of truth — painful, incomplete, and indispensable — that allow us to better understand the way the roundup was organized and conducted and also to get a glimpse of the victims’ shock, fear, and pain.
There are only a few hundred photographs of roundups or murders of Jews from the 1930s and 1940s, a disparity of mass proportion considering the extent of the genocide. Some were taken by victims as acts of resistance, some by bystanders, and others, like this collection, were by an authorized photographer for the Nazi propaganda machine. From time to time, grandchildren of Nazi perpetrators find these images in attics and boxes when the older generation passes away.
This particular group of photographs was meant to document a Nazi success story. They begin with the trap: Jewish men and their spouses were summoned to over 60 locations in Paris: police offices, various administrations, and a sports facility in the 11th Arrondissement. Women, we know from eyewitness testimony, were asked to return home to gather items; a list was provided. When they returned, as the images we now have on hand show, they were barred from reuniting with their male relatives. The doors were closed and guarded by French policemen. We can see the women’s pain, their bewilderment, many with bundles in their arms. We see couples as they part from each other.
Credit…via Mémorial de la Shoah.
Other photos document the departure of guarded buses, commandeered from the Paris bus company, filled with the captured men. We see the arrival of the internees at Paris’s Austerlitz train station. The same photographer captures the imprisonment of these Jews a few days later at the French internment camps, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Some 700 of those Jewish men were later liberated, or escaped, after the green ticket roundup. About 3,000 of those taken that day were later deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau; of that group, just a scant few returned.
Taken months before the decision to annihilate the Jews of Europe was made, these 98 photos do not show extermination camps, gas chambers, shootings, or even starvation. What they do show is the careful, methodical beginnings of racially motivated separation that later enabled the mass murder. The noted historian Raul Hilberg called this phase of the Nazi genocide “concentration.” There is no sign of outright violence; indeed, the despair of the ensnared Jews and their bewildered spouses is shown with a strange sensitivity by the German photographer.
At first, the photos were kept on file by the German Propaganda Unit in Paris. After the war, six of the 98 photos were found in the archives of the N.I.O.D. Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, an indication that they were shared among the various propaganda units across Western Europe. A few others circulated among archives. But the vast majority were languishing, unseen, on contact sheets, until 2020, when two amateur collectors came upon them at a flea market. They brought the sheets to Ms. Lalieu, the director of photo collections at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, who analyzed the images in an effort to identify as many people as possible. Ms. Lalieu also identified the photographer as Harry Croner, a man from Berlin, who had gone on to have a stellar career in postwar West Berlin, as a famous cinema and opera photographer. ((Half Jewish himself, he spent the end of the war in a labor camp.)
A start-up’s plan to run drug experiments and even develop pharmaceuticals in orbit is taking shape. If it works, it could mark a step toward developing new medicines and, ultimately, a burgeoning space-based manufacturing industry.
The start-up in question is Varda Space Industries. This week, Varda announced a partnership with United Therapeutics, a biotech company that is known for its treatments targeting rare respiratory diseases and for organ transplants.
For the past few years, the Los Angeles County–based Varda has been sending capsules into space to develop its technology for performing automated experiments that it says can only be done in microgravity. These include the manipulation of certain kinds of small molecules—the backbone of many different types of medicines, from antibiotics to corticosteroids. “Surprisingly, it’s very economical for things like small molecules, where you’re able to create novel crystal seeds in space, and then bring them back down to Earth,” says Michael Reilly, Varda’s chief strategy officer.
United Therapeutics will primarily test its small molecule drugs with Varda’s in-orbit technologies, Reilly says. But he believes that applications will expand beyond United Therapeutics’ drugs to a range of biotechnologies, such as monoclonal antibodies, which, he believes, could eventually transform from primarily intravenously administered treatments to subcutaneous shots.
Varda’s goal is to provide an in-orbit environment to develop crystals for drugs under conditions that can never be achieved on Earth. “In space, you can get bigger crystals, more perfect crystals, and they can be more uniform,” says Anne Wilson, a Butler University chemist, who has designed experiments for the International Space Station (ISS) and collaborated with Redwire Space, a space infrastructure company. Crystals with unique physical structures can also be spawned in orbit, she says. Because of such advantages, one could fashion crystals with particularly valuable properties—for example, to make a drug become more soluble and require fewer doses, thereby reducing costs, Wilson says.
The potential is there, but it is currently a risky business, says Gerard Capellades, a chemical engineer at Rowan University, who has also worked with Redwire. For one, there’s the challenge of scale, he says: researchers will have to try to use the crystals grown in space as seeds that they can multiply on the ground or will need to focus on growing single, high-value crystals for applications outside the pharmaceutical sector. It’s also exceedingly difficult to control the experimental environment in such a way that guarantees the precise crystal structure needed in a timely and cost-efficient manner. Capellades describes the approach as a game of chance: “For the same environment, sometimes it can take minutes to form a crystal, and sometimes it can take weeks or longer,” he says. But he thinks that costs will eventually drop and that it’s worth pursuing.
Varda’s orbital lab, nicknamed “Winnebago,” consists of a 300-kilogram (about 660-pound) satellite bus. After being deposited in orbit by a launch vehicle, Winnebago uses its own propulsion to maneuver into the right attitude. The satellite houses the capsule in which the experiments are done. Once the work is complete, the capsule reenters the atmosphere at some 18,000 miles per hour, parachuting down with a bump in the Australian outback. (An early prototype’s return to Earth, with planned landing zone in a desert in Utah, was delayed in 2024 because the company was initially denied a reentry license by the Federal Aviation Administration.)
In addition to drug experiments, Varda also brings various defense experiment payloads on its spaceflights for the Pentagon to help defray the cost, Reilly says. While launch costs per pound of cargo have dropped over the past decade, thanks especially to SpaceX’s reusable rockets, they’re still not cheap. So Varda and other space companies keep looking for new customers.
Still, the drug industry may be one of the most enthusiastic about making the space economy work for it. “First, it’s a giant market,” says Matthew Weinzierl, a Harvard Business School researcher, who studies the private space sector. “It’s also because the mass of some of the key ingredients in pharmaceuticals is relatively small.” For years, academic and commercial researchers have sent experiments to both the ISS and China’s space station, Tiangong. But according to Reilly, Varda and SpaceX are currently the only companies capable of launching experiments into orbit that don’t need to be operated by astronauts.
New opportunities could also emerge in the coming commercial space station era, planned for the 2030s, when new orbital outposts launch to replace the aging ISS. For example, the companies Space Tango and Voyager Technologies (formerly Nanoracks) have already begun providing plug-and-play research support services in space, and Voyager Technologies is working on a commercial station concept, called Starlab. That proposal and others have the pharma industry at their center, Weinzierl says. Meanwhile, Varda is planning for more partnerships and a faster launch cadence, eventually moving from a launch per quarter to every other month.
Weinzierl hopes that Varda’s partnership with United Therapeutics turns into a successful proof of concept that could then be replicated. Short of that result, it could set off a domino effect, he argues, with more pharma space company alliances on the horizon. “It would be fantastic if this partnership yielded a couple or even one blockbuster product or drug that really started opening up profitable business models for pharma in space at scale,” he says.
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One of Varda’s capsules. John Krauss, Varda Space Industries
Hmmmm … A billion Dollars could feed billions of starving children!
Click the link below the picture
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A GOP bill seeking $1 billion for the Secret Service to help finance President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom is in jeopardy as it faces pushback from a top Senate official.
The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, said Saturday that the budget bill, which aims to fund ICE and Border Patrol alongside $1 billion to help fund the ballroom, needs to be rewritten to account for jurisdictional issues.
“A project as complex and large in scale as Trump’s proposed ballroom necessarily involves the coordination of many government agencies which span the jurisdiction of many Senate committees,” MacDonough told Senate offices Saturday. “As drafted, the provision inappropriately funds activities outside the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee.”
The parliamentarian wrote that the bill would be subject to a 60-vote threshold to pass, meaning it can’t move forward with a simple majority, unlike similar bills advanced using budget reconciliation.
Budget reconciliation is a parliamentary tool used to get around the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold, but it comes with restrictions on what provisions can be included.
The development is a blow to the Republican bill, but it is not the end of efforts to include ballroom funding. Senate Republicans had already been redrafting the provision’s language before Saturday’s ruling based on feedback from Senate officials, a GOP leadership aide told NBC News.
A spokesperson for Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans also told NBC News that “conversations and revisions are continuing, as they have been for days.”
It’s not clear if Republicans can rewrite the provision in a way that would fully resolve the parliamentarian’s issues. The budget resolution detailing what can be included in the bill only allows language to originate from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
If Senate officials again find the ballroom project falls under the jurisdiction of a committee other than those two, Republicans may be forced to leave that funding out of the bill, as they likley won’t find the 60 votes needed to overrule the parliamentarian.
Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said in a statement Saturday that “the American people shouldn’t spend a single dime on Trump’s gold-plated ballroom boondoggle.”
“While we expect Republicans to change this bill to appease Trump, Democrats are prepared to challenge any change to this bill,” Merkley said. “We cannot let Republicans waste our national treasure on a mission of chaos and corruption while turning a blind eye to the needs of the American people.”
Ryan Wrasse, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, downplayed the setback for the GOP bill Saturday.
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The parliamentarian wrote that the bill would be subject to a 60-vote threshold to pass, meaning it can’t move forward with a simple majority as similar bills advanced using budget reconciliation. Alex Brandon / AP
The lack of concrete agreements with Beijing shows the risks of President Trump’s personality-driven foreign policy, which rests on the belief that he can defend U.S. interests through charm and force of will.
There was a vague agreement that China would purchase Boeing jets and more American soybeans. There was discussion about Iran and opening the Strait of Hormuz, and a nod to other issues, like cracking down on chemicals used to make fentanyl.
But President Trump departed Beijing on Friday with almost nothing concrete to show for his two-day summit with President Xi Jinping of China. After months of buildup and a delay necessitated by Mr. Trump’s difficulty in extricating the United States from the war with Iran, the summit ended with no major public progress on the Middle East, trade, Taiwan, nuclear proliferation, artificial intelligence or any of the other myriad issues that are sources of friction between the world’s two superpowers.
Instead, Mr. Trump seemed intent on a different kind of diplomacy, forging a personal bond with a Chinese leader who appeared far more focused on advancing his own nation’s strategic agenda.
Mr. Trump toasted Mr. Xi as “my friend” at their banquet in Beijing on Thursday and said he had “become really a friend” when they sat down before the cameras on Friday.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, asked at a briefing during the summit whether Mr. Xi considered Mr. Trump a friend, responded with boilerplate: “the two sides exchanged views on major issues.”
Mr. Trump has hailed the summit in Beijing as a major success, highlighting the personal bond he says he has built with China’s longtime leader. But the feeling is not necessarily mutual, as evidenced by Mr. Xi’s more measured tone and the lack of clarity about any major agreements.
Orville Schell, vice president of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York, called the summit “quite insubstantial and aspirational.”
“We have Trump dreaming out loud,” he said.
The mismatch shows the risks in Mr. Trump’s personality-driven foreign policy, his bet that he can solve the world’s problems and defend American interests by his charm and force of will. In Mr. Xi, the U.S. president faced a counterpart this week well versed in Mr. Trump’s desire for praise and pomp, and with an apparent strategy for how to exploit it.
The result, analysts said, was a summit that illustrated the growing confidence of China on the world stage alongside a strategically muddled U.S. foreign policy under Mr. Trump.
The summit might yet come to be seen as the start of a shift toward a more stable relationship between the United States and China. But few of even the limited accomplishments that Mr. Trump spoke about were confirmed by China, while Mr. Xi set the tone with an assertive posture over Taiwan.
Experts say there is no question that personal chemistry between leaders is crucial, especially when authoritarian, centralized countries like China are involved.
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President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, at the state banquet in Beijing on Thursday. Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Since the first cases of hantavirus on the MV Hondius cruise ship were reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) on May 2, misinformation has rapidly flooded the Internet.
Much of it is familiar, echoing the conspiracies of the COVID pandemic, such as false claims about the drug ivermectin being known to effectively treat the infection and vaccines causing the outbreak. Hantavirus-related misinformation is “operating not like isolated rumors but more like a standing online ecosystem,” says Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago. This kind of thinking is “ready to plug and play and rapidly attach itself to any kind of emerging health threat within hours,” she says.
But not all faulty information online is being spread in bad faith. Though public health officials have said the hantavirus outbreak poses a low risk to the public, fear is its own kind of contagion. “We’re still recovering from the collective trauma of going through COVID-19. People are still carrying that residual fear, exhaustion, and distrust,” says Monica Wang, a public health researcher at Boston University, who specializes in health misinformation.
In an environment where misinformation and fear are amplified by social media algorithms, it is hard to know what to listen to and what to tune out. The key strategy for staying informed is to focus on what we know and not fill in uncertainties with worst-case scenarios. The goal is “not to dismiss concern but to calibrate concern appropriately based on evidence,” Wang says.
Recalibrating Risk
The Andes type of hantavirus at the center of this outbreak isn’t new to scientists, but outbreaks like this one are scarce. The novelty of a rare disease outbreak can result in disproportionate media attention, Wang says. And understandably, “people are responding to this uncertainty and this unfamiliarity with the familiarity of what happens when we do have a pandemic,” she says.
Many of the lessons we learned from the COVID pandemic can, perhaps surprisingly, lead us astray if we try to apply them to the current hantavirus outbreak. The two situations are very different. First, this strain of hantavirus has been previously studied by epidemiologists; SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, was entirely new to science. Second, Andes hantavirus is harder to spread from person to person and usually requires close contact to do so, although airborne spread can’t be ruled out. Third, the hantavirus outbreak is considered contained, unlike the early spread of COVID; the people most at risk of hantavirus are quarantining and being monitored. Fourth, epidemiologists suspect that hantavirus is most contagious when an infected person is showing symptoms, whereas SARS-CoV-2 can readily be transmitted by seemingly healthy people.
“It’s very hard [for people] to grasp the science of a new disease,” Wallace says. This helps to explain why COVID-era conspiracies and distrust in medical authorities have made a forceful comeback despite the differences between SARS-CoV-2 and hantavirus. When something about the current outbreak doesn’t seem to make sense, it’s easy to fall back on preexisting narratives to explain the discrepancy, such as the belief that authorities are withholding key information or that ivermectin is a cure-all. (There is no evidence that ivermectin, an antiparasitic medication, can treat hantavirus.) These false theories become especially powerful when they are amplified by people with large platforms, such as former congressional representative of Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and popular health influencers.
Threat Bias
The trauma of COVID can also highjack our reasoning by priming us to pay special attention to unfamiliar viral outbreaks and treat them as potentially devastating threats. “Humans aren’t wired for happiness. They’re wired for survival,” Wang says. If there is a potential threat in our environment, we will try to find out as much information as we can. “We pay attention when something triggers fear, surprise, or disgust,” she says, “because we’re constantly seeking [to know] ‘Is my physical safety, or my social or emotional safety, under threat?’”
Psychologists call this phenomenon negativity bias or, more specifically, threat bias. And it means that social media posts that stoke fear and uncertainty about a virus will almost always receive more attention than those that are more measured or even reassuring. Although most social media apps try to remove particularly harmful misinformation, algorithms use attention to determine what content to spread. “These social media platforms, they reward engagement, not facts,” Wallace says: if you’re seeing a video on your feed, it is likely because it is engaging, not necessarily because it’s accurate.
Red Flags
According to a Pew Research Center survey released last week, 40 percent of adults in the U.S. get health and wellness information from social media and podcasts. Some of this is inevitable: if you spend time on algorithmic social media feeds, posts about health will eventually find you. That’s especially true now that the hantavirus outbreak is dominating the news cycle.
So how can you tell who to listen to? Wallace advises being suspicious of posts that project absolute certainty or confidence. “People who speak in certainties” likely won’t be trustworthy sources, she says; responsible doctors and scientists will be clear about what we don’t know.
“People that spread misinformation can do it for many different reasons,” Wallace says. Sometimes they do so because they stand to make money by selling a product via a link in their profile’s bio or by monetizing your attention; other times, they’re just seeking clout. Right now, she advises being suspicious of people telling you to panic.
Wallace is particularly troubled by how quickly hantavirus was incorporated into the COVID-era health conspiracies and the distrust in public health authorities that still thrive in certain online ecosystems. For this disease outbreak and for future ones, “because of the way social media works,” she says, “[misinformation will] spread faster than the actual evidence-based information can reach people.”
“I worry that this represents sort of a pattern of conspiratorial framing that people are now just applying to whatever health threat comes up,” Wallace says.
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The first passengers from the MV Hondius depart for Tenerife Airport on May 10, 2026. Anadolu/Getty Images
Keeping your vision in good shape is just as important as taking care of your body. There are many things you can do to protect your eyes as you age that don’t require too much effort, but can make a big difference. For example, you can wear sunglasses when you step outside to keep your eyes safe from UV rays. Making these small changes can prevent certain eye conditions that often accompany aging. Below are some of the habits you can add to your daily routine to keep your eyes healthy.
1. Wear sunglasses outside
Exposing your eyes to ultraviolet rays may cause damage over time. According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, wearing sunglasses can block harmful UV light, lowering your risk of eye diseases like cataracts, sunburn, eye cancer, and growths around the eye. Polarized glasses with smoke or gray lenses may offer the best protection against the sun’s rays and reduce glare.
2. Use the 20-20-20 screen break rule
Prolonged screen time can cause dry eyes, pain in the neck and shoulders, blurred vision, headaches and digital eye strain, or computer vision syndrome. The American Optometric Association recommends using the 20-20-20 rule to prevent computer vision syndrome. Every 20 minutes, look at something at least 20 feet away for 20 seconds.
3. Take a break from books, too
Screen time isn’t the only way to strain your eyes. You probably hold a book up close for long periods when you read it. Both activities can lead to nearsightedness, or myopia, which means faraway objects are blurry, while up-close objects are clear. Just like you should use the 20-20-20 rule to take screen breaks, you should also use this rule for book breaks. If you find yourself engrossed in what you’re reading or doing on the computer, set an alarm so you don’t miss your breaks.
4. Get your body moving with regular exercise
Regular exercise can provide eye health benefits, such as promoting healthy blood vessels and lowering your risk of developing glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy, the American Academy of Ophthalmology reports. The CDC recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity every week, plus two days of strength training for your muscles. You can also practice eye exercises to reduce tension and eye strain while sitting at your desk.
5. Enjoy the outdoors
Children and adults need to get outside often, even if they get their recommended exercise indoors. Research shows that children who spend time outdoors have a lower risk of developing nearsightedness in adolescence and as adults. Playing with your kids at the local playground, walking through the woods, or even playing in the backyard can help the whole family stay healthy and active. Be sure to use your sunglasses.
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Boosting your eye health involves more than simply protecting them from the sun. Anastassiya Bezhekeneva/Getty Images
The Supreme Court on Friday rejected an emergency request by Democratic officials in Virginia to use a newly approved congressional district map in the midterms that would give their party an edge.
Instead, the justices declined to overturn a recent decision by the Virginia Supreme Court striking down the map, a ruling that dealt a major blow to Democrats in the nationwide redistricting fight.
The one-sentence emergency order by the justices did not give a vote count or provide reasoning for the decision, which is typical in such rulings. No dissents were noted.
The Supreme Court’s ruling blocking the map wipes out four newly drawn Democratic-leaning House districts in Virginia, and was the latest in a string of election-related decisions that the justices have weighed in on in recent months.
The Supreme Court does not ordinarily review rulings by state supreme courts interpreting state constitutions.
The fight over the Virginia map stems from a redistricting push that began last summer when President Trump pressured Republican-led states to redraw their district maps ahead of the midterms in hopes of maintaining the party’s razor-thin majority in the House.
First, Texas officials redrew their lines to give Republicans an advantage. Then, California responded by crafting a new map to help Democrats. Similar efforts have followed in other states throughout the country.
In the fall, Virginia lawmakers voted to amend their state constitution to clear the way for Democrats to redraw the map, a process that required two votes of the state’s General Assembly, with an election in between.
The timing of that fall vote is crucial for understanding what followed. Lawmakers authorized the amendment just days before the fall’s legislative election, while early voting was already underway. More than a million voters had already cast their ballots.
After another vote of the assembly, Virginians approved the map in a statewide referendum in April. The move was widely seen as a victory for the party that put it on equal footing with Republican redistricting efforts nationwide, or even might give Democrats a narrow advantage.
But Republicans swiftly challenged the new map, arguing that Democrats had violated the procedural guidelines required to pass the redistricting amendment by beginning the process once an election was underway.
Democrats countered that they had voted in time, since they acted before Election Day. They also argued that the state Supreme Court should not undercut the will of the voters who took part in the spring referendum.
On May 8, the Virginia Supreme Court sided with the Republicans, deciding 4 to 3 that the Democratic lawmakers had violated the state’s constitution by taking up the matter after early voting was underway.
Three days later, Jay Jones, Virginia’s Democratic attorney general, filed an emergency petition asking the Supreme Court to temporarily block the Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling and clear the way for the new map to be used in the midterm elections.
Democratic leaders cited two arguments for why the justices should intervene.
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The Supreme Court’s ruling blocking the map wipes out four newly drawn Democratic-leaning House districts in Virginia. Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
A. R. Bernard: one of many
Thomas Fuchs
Photographed by Francesc Planes
via Mémorial de la Shoah
The parliamentarian wrote that the bill would be subject to a 60-vote threshold to pass, meaning it can’t move forward with a simple majority as similar bills advanced using budget reconciliation. Alex Brandon / AP
President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, at the state banquet in Beijing on Thursday. Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times
The Supreme Court’s ruling blocking the map wipes out four newly drawn Democratic-leaning House districts in Virginia. Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times
James' World 2 