Morning Report

TODAY’S WHITE HOUSE story

Judge halts Trump’s White House ballroom

What happened
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon yesterday ordered President Donald Trump to stop construction on his massive White House ballroom “unless and until Congress blesses this project.” The U.S. president “is the steward of the White House,” wrote Leon, a George W. Bush appointee. “He is not, however, the owner!”

Who said what
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, which sued Trump in December, is likely to succeed in its challenge because “no statute comes close to giving the president the authority he claims” to radically transform the White House, Leon said. Trump demolished the East Wing in October to build the ballroom.

Leon’s decision, “punctuated by 19 exclamation points,” is the “first meaningful setback to the president’s increasingly audacious efforts to redesign the White House and Washington,” The New York Times said. The $400 million, 89,000-square-foot ballroom is a “passion project” for Trump, Politico said. He “fumed at the ruling,” The Associated Press said, calling Leon “totally wrong” about the need for congressional approval.

What next?
Leon paused his decision for 14 days so the White House could appeal, but warned that “any above-ground construction” in that period “is at risk of being taken down depending on the outcome of this case.”

TODAY’S SPACE Story

NASA set to launch Artemis II lunar mission

What happened
NASA this morning appears on track to launch its Artemis II mission this evening, sending four astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972’s Apollo 17. There’s “an 80% chance of favorable weather conditions,” NASA said yesterday, and no apparent problems with the SLS rocket and Orion capsule set to take astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen (pictured above) around the moon and back.

Who said what
A “successful mission” would be a “crucial step” for NASA as it “seeks to return to the moon’s surface” and “validate technology” needed to travel “even further,” The Washington Post says. The “dwindling survivors of NASA’s greatest generation” are “thrilled that NASA is finally going back,” The Associated Press said. And the “power brokers in Washington” insist it’s a “vital national imperative” to beat China to the moon, The New York Times said. But “people on the street” tell pollsters they want NASA to “monitor” Earth-bound asteroids and “key parts of the Earth’s climate system,” while sending humans back to the moon ranks only above sending them to Mars.

What next?
“If all goes as planned,” AP said, the 10-day mission will take the four astronauts farther from Earth than anyone has ever gone, followed by a “six-hour flyby” of “never-before-seen regions of the lunar far side.”

It’s not all bad

Widespread use of new diagnostic tests could help end tuberculosis, according to the World Health Organization. Tongue swabs and nucleic acid amplification tests that swiftly check for the infection could be used in homes, clinics and ambulances. By offering “fast, accurate diagnosis closer to people,” these “transformative” tools could save lives and curb transmission, said WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Under the radar

The ongoing race to cure baldness

Male-pattern hair loss affects 80% of men at some point in their lifetime, while female-pattern hair loss affects half of all women over the age of 70. But “until recently, we knew remarkably little about how to slow, halt and reverse its seemingly inevitable onset,” said BBC Science Focus.

For all the recent messaging about “body positivity,” the search for a balding “fix” has become “increasingly desperate and financially lucrative,” said Esquire. The hair-loss industry is well on track to be worth $12 billion by 2030.

An “early front-runner” in the anti-baldness race is hair cloning, said Howarth. Also known as hair multiplication, it’s a form of “hair banking.” Before baldness hits, healthy hair follicles are extracted from your scalp and cryogenically frozen. Once hair-thinning begins, these follicles are taken to a lab, and the skin cells around them are isolated and multiplied.

In Japan, researchers are successfully growing hair follicles from scratch in a lab. But the “big one” is a drug called PP405, developed by U.S. pharmaceutical company Pelage, said New York Magazine. “We were blown away,” Qing Yu Christina Weng, Pelage’s chief medical officer, told the magazine. After four weeks of applying the drug as a topical gel, not only was the treatment group “growing new hair where there wasn’t any before,” but it wasn’t “peach fuzz or baby hair.” It was “proper, thick, terminal hair.”

If the drug lives up to the initial hype, its potential is obvious. “After decades of snake oil and broken promises,” it feels as though the “end of baldness” is within sight, said New York. Call it the “faint stubble of hope.”

On this day

April 1, 2001

The Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. More than 20,000 same-sex couples have wed in the Netherlands since the law took effect. As of this year, 38 countries have followed the Dutch example and legalized same-sex marriage, the most recent being Thailand in 2025.

TODAY’S newspaperS

‘Trump soft-pedals hard facts’

“Trump says U.S. quitting war in 3 weeks,” the Los Angeles Times says on Wednesday’s front page. “Trump facing hard decisions as war rages,” The New York Times says. “Trump soft-pedals hard facts of war,” The Boston Globe says. “UAE pushes to open Strait with force,” The Wall Street Journal says. “Gas hits $4: A ‘headache’ for drivers — and Trump,” The Minnesota Star Tribune says. “Gulf drilling shielded from federal protections” and “could impact ecosystems,” the Austin American-Statesman says. “Penn ordered to name people in Jewish groups,” The Philadelphia Inquirer says. “Data reveals depth of deportations,” and most “had no criminal records, despite White House claims,” says the Chicago Tribune.

► See the newspaper front pages

Tall tale

Vegan roadkill

A truck spilled 40,000 pounds of tofu on a highway in Jerome, Missouri — and because of an insurance holdup, it was left in the “heat and cold for three weeks just stewing,” Doolittle Rural Fire Protection District Chief Brandon Williams told The New York Times. The accident occurred on March 1, but cleanup didn’t begin until last week. The smell was “like a dead animal but worse,” Williams said, and it would hit passing drivers “like a brick wall.”

Morning Report was written and edited by Nadia Croes, Catherine Garcia, Scott Hocker, Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, Justin Klawans, Rafi Schwartz, Peter Weber and Kari Wilkin, with illustrations by Stephen Kelly and Julia Wytrazek.