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TODAY’S LAW ENFORcEMENT story

Judge bars Trump from keeping FBI HQ in DC

What happened
A federal judge in Maryland yesterday blocked President Donald Trump’s plan to keep the FBI headquartered in Washington, D.C., saying the decision illegally discarded the General Services Administration’s congressionally approved 2023 decision to build a new complex in Maryland. The administration said last year that the FBI would move from its longtime headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover Building (pictured above) to the Ronald Reagan Building a few blocks away, the previous home of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Who said what
Congress, “through a pair of laws,” required the GSA to pick a site for the FBI headquarters “from among three suburban ⁠locations outside of Washington,” Reuters said. The Biden administration picked Greenbelt, Maryland, ending “almost 15 years” of debate on where to base the law enforcement agency. Maryland sued after Trump tried to reverse course, and U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang agreed, barring the administration from moving the FBI to the Reagan Building or diverting about $1 billion in funding approved for the Greenbelt campus.

What next?
Chuang’s ruling “is almost certainly not the end of the lengthy dispute,” The New York Times said. “In the meantime, the FBI continues to operate from its old headquarters, an aging colossus veiled in netting to keep concrete from falling on passers-by.”

TODAY’S SUPREME COURT Story

Court denies Trump bid to claw back $5M from Carroll

What happened
The Supreme Court yesterday rejected President Donald Trump’s second request to throw out a jury’s $5 million civil judgment that he assaulted and defamed writer E. Jean Carroll (pictured above). Trump paid Carroll the $5 million plus interest last month, “a few days after the court initially turned away” his appeal, The New York Times said. The court yesterday “formally declined” his “long-shot request to the justices that they reconsider.” There was no stated reasoning and no noted dissents.

Who said what
Trump’s legal team said in a statement that the American people “demand an immediate end to all of the witch hunts, including the Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll hoaxes.” Trump, they added, “will keep winning against liberal lawfare.” Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan said after yesterday’s ruling, “the jury’s unanimous verdict that Donald Trump sexually assaulted and then defamed E. Jean Carroll is now final and cannot be challenged in any court.”

What next?
Trump’s appeal of a separate $83 million judgment for Carroll is “pending at the Supreme Court,” said CNN. The “justices are on summer recess,” the Times said, and “not expected to consider whether to take up that case until late September at the earliest.”

It’s not all bad

Nigerian conservationist Rachel Ikemeh is making great gains in her race to save the Niger Delta red colobus monkey. She launched the South-West/Niger Delta Forest Project in 2012 to protect the monkeys, whose wild populations were nearly decimated. Ikemeh began working with the local Apoi community to boost conservation efforts and protect the red colobus. Today they protect 2,500 acres of forest, she told CNN, and there are four “thriving” groups of monkeys repopulating the area.

Under the radar

Archaeologists reveal ‘lost’ Amazon civilization

Archaeologists have uncovered hundreds of vast earthworks in the Amazon rainforest that they say are evidence of a “lost civilization” that flourished nearly 2,000 years ago, said New Scientist. Researchers believe the geometrically patterned structures, known as geoglyphs, were built by an advanced precolonial society, known as the Aquiry, between 600 B.C. and A.D. 850, without metal tools or animals.

The earthworks are almost impossible to detect under the dense tree canopy of the deep rainforest, but the archaeologists, employing cutting-edge airborne laser scanning technology, found hundreds. They combined the light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data with previous findings to estimate that there might be up to 30,000 structures across the Aquiry territory. The results “strongly suggest” that, at its peak, the civilization may have numbered 1.25 million to 3 million people, the researchers said in a study published in Nature.

University of Helsinki archaeo-anthropologist Martti Parssinen, who theorized that the earthworks had been built by a complex pre-Columbian civilization, “officially introduced the name Aquiry” in 2021, said LiveScience, after the Indigenous name for the Acre River.

While Romans were “laying roads and building temples,” the Aquiry were “carving vast circles, squares and monumental enclosures” on the other side of the world, said The Times of London. They cleared forests for the huge earthworks and extensive roads “without destroying the Amazon,” living in “harmony in that way with the forest,” said Parssinen. “They made clearings but not too big to change the ecological systems. Despite their huge numbers, they never converted the rainforest into savannah.”

On this day

August 18, 1920

Tennessee became the pivotal 36th state to approve the 19th Amendment, ratifying it and guaranteeing women the right to vote. The amendment was added to the Constitution the following month. The 19th Amendment’s passage followed decades of efforts from the women’s suffrage movement and secured a landmark victory for women’s freedoms.

TODAY’S newspaperS

‘Quagmire’

“U.S. and Iran blow through deadline,” The Minnesota Star Tribune says on Tuesday’s front page. “Thwarted Trump threatens Oman as truce expires,” The New York Times says. “War has Trump in a quagmire,” The Washington Post says. “Pro-Iran alliance bloodied but also not broken,” says the Los Angeles Times. “Iran threatens to go on offensive in Strait of Hormuz,” says The Sacramento Bee. “Lawmaker contradicts DHS on ICE death, says intended target was victim’s roommate,” The Boston Globe says. “Haitians’ loss of job status hits employers in Florida,” says The Wall Street Journal. “Immigration cases sped through court,” as “critics say rushed ‘mega’ hearings slash due process,” says USA Today.

► See the newspaper front pages

Tall tale

Stretching AI boundaries

An AI bot tasked with getting Australian AI executive Andrew Bird into a full Pilates class discovered it could hack the system and canceled another person’s booking. The bot wasn’t trying to be “malicious,” Bird wrote in a since-deleted blog post. “It was helpful.” When the bot wasn’t able to reverse its line-cutting hack, Bird requested it send a cybersecurity report to the gym. This wasn’t a “serious cyberattack,” the BBC said, but it illustrates the “unintended consequences” of outsourcing jobs to “sophisticated AI bots.”

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