What happened
President Donald Trump yesterday pushed out the remaining three members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, firing the two Democratic commissioners while allowing the Republican member to resign. The fourth member, a Republican, quit in April to join the Heritage Foundation. 

Who said what
The EAC, an independent agency created in 2002, is a “crucial guardrail for ensuring election security across the country,” The New York Times said. Trump’s ouster of its leadership is “an apparent move to assert control over voting ahead of the midterms,” Politico said, and “election officials across the country expressed various degrees of confusion and alarm.” Trump issued executive orders last year to require proof of citizenship on the EAC-maintained national voter registration form and to “block the EAC from distributing funds to states that did not adjust voter forms to have a citizenship check,” but were both “blocked in court.”

What next?
The Supreme Court last month gave Trump “precedence” to “remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring ​every legal vote is counted,” a White House official said yesterday. Without at least three Senate-confirmed “bipartisan replacements,” NYU’s Brennan Center of Justice said, the EAC “cannot lawfully make any decisions that affect how Americans vote.” 

What happened
The Bayeux Tapestry, a wool-on-linen depiction of the Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066, arrived in London this morning after a secret journey from France. It’s the first time the Medieval artwork has returned to Britain since its creation nearly 1,000 years ago. The high-security, “dead of night” delivery at the British Museum was “like a heist movie in reverse,” The Associated Press said.

Who said what
The Bayeux Tapestry is an “epic depiction of the end of Anglo-Saxon England” after the defeat of King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings, the BBC said. It was the last successful conquest of England and it “changed everything, reshaping the country entirely.” When French President Emmanuel Macron “offered us the tapestry, I think he understood that it would have far more impact in the U.K.,” Peter Ricketts, the retired British diplomat who helped secure the loan, told the AP. Everybody in Britain “knows 1066.”

The 230-foot tapestry’s 58 scenes brim with “vivid and sometimes gory detail,” the AP said, including “mutilated bodies and the unlucky Harold, felled by an arrow through his eye.” A record 100,000 tickets were sold for the exhibition on its first day of sales. 

What next?
Before going on public display in September, the AP said, the tapestry “will spend several days acclimatizing before it is carefully unpacked and unfolded for an exhibition that the museum expects to be one of the most popular in its history.”

Women receive $4,800 a year less than men in Social Security benefits on average, according to AARP. The disparity is largely because women “still tend to earn less,” said CNBC. Women also make up 61% of caregivers and are “more likely to take time out of the workforce” to shoulder those responsibilities. Both of these factors “tend to leave women with less retirement savings.”

Data from FinanceBuzz suggests an even larger gap. Women make up about 55% of all Social Security recipients, but according to the personal finance website, they “receive an average of $1,760 per month in Social Security — 19.9% less than the $2,198 men receive — a gap of $5,254 per year.” 

While the pay gap has been narrowing in recent years, the “median earnings for American women working full-time are only 83% of those of their male counterparts,” and the financial consequences may be “felt long after women have retired from the workforce,” said FinanceBuzz. The result is a “retirement income system that faithfully mirrors the inequalities of working life.”

The ongoing disparity also means that Social Security cuts, slated to hit in 2032, would “deeply impact women,” said USA Today. Elderly women are already more likely to live in poverty than men. Between 2023 and 2024, the national poverty rate “significantly increased from 15.0% to 16.2% for older women while remaining unchanged for older men,” according to a National Women’s Law Center report. And these rates would be “far higher without Social Security.”