What happened
A federal judge last night blocked the White House from starting construction on President Donald Trump’s 250-foot triumphal arch outside Arlington National Cemetery, less than an hour after a Trump-packed review board gave the project final approval. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan imposed a 14-day restraining order while she considers consolidated legal challenges from Vietnam veterans, an architectural historian, Virginia and the District of Columbia. The administration had planned to break ground shortly after getting the green light from the National Capital Planning Commission, which came in a 8-4 vote after 8-plus hours of overwhelmingly anti-arch testimony.

Who said what
Chutkan said the plaintiffs were “likely” to prove the arch requires congressional approval the administration hasn’t sought, and Virginia and D.C. would bear “certain” harm and “significant unrecoverable costs.” Her ruling “temporarily stalled progress on one of the president’s favorite projects, which Democrats have threatened to kill” in the next Congress, The New York Times said. 

“Our most revered presidents earned their place of honor,” Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) said at yesterday’s commission hearing. “They didn’t try to bestow it on themselves with gaudy tributes.”

What next?
When Congress flips to Democratic control in January, Trump’s efforts to remake D.C. are “sure to face far more roadblocks,” The Associated Press said, including spending freezes, stringent oversight and House-backed lawsuits.

What happened
Paraguayan President Santiago Peña yesterday submitted his resignation following the collapse of a major digital bank with ties to him and his government. But lawmakers refused Peña’s offer, and the House instead voted unanimously to impeach him. Several Ueno Bank executives were arrested yesterday, and Attorney General Emiliano Rolón Fernández announced three criminal investigations, some involving allegations about Peña and other government officials. Central bank president Carlos Carvallo, a former Ueno executive appointed by Peña, resigned earlier this week. 

Who said what
After Peña’s 2023 election, Ueno grew rapidly from an obscure financial firm to a bank serving 60% of Paraguay’s adults and administering about $850 million in public funds. Peña owned a stake in Ueno’s parent company until last year. After regulators found that the bank had “nowhere near” the legally required “level of capital to sustain its losses,” the central bank seized it on Tuesday, The Washington Post said. The collapse triggered a “political crisis and street protests” as Paraguayans rushed to access frozen accounts and pension payments.

What next?
Peña said on social media he would exercise his “right to self-defense” in Senate impeachment proceedings today. Opposition senators are demanding he be “removed from office,” The Associated Press said, “arguing that allowing him to resign would preserve his eligibility to become a senator for life,” shielding him from potential prosecution. 

Earth has had five major ice ages in its geographic history — and we should be experiencing another one right now, according to Columbia University scientists. But global carbon emissions appear to have stopped the Earth’s glaciation, and researchers are unsure if it will ever return.

About 2,000 years ago, the Barnes Ice Cap, covering part of Canada’s Baffin Island, began growing. This marked the beginning of an ice age — which generally lasts millions of years — but in the 1960s, the expansion started reversing course, according to a study published in the journal Science. “Everything was normal, the next glaciation was about to happen,” study author Nicolás Young said in a news release. “And yet it stopped.”

The ice cap’s retreat coincided with rising summer temperatures driven by human-caused climate change. Reconstructing the history of the Barnes Ice Cap, researchers found that the Earth’s climate had “warmed enough” that the glacier “lost more ice in the summer than it added in winter,” Columbia said in the release. The ice cap’s edges have “retreated an average of 4 meters [13 feet] per year since the 1980s,” which “coincides with a period of rapidly increasing carbon emissions” that’s causing “ice to go into retreat worldwide,” said Wired.

Avoiding an ice age may seem like a good development, but it’s also a disruption. These findings are a “powerful example of how we have jolted the system,” said Young. Climate models suggest the Barnes Ice Cap will likely be gone entirely in the future. And when it is, “what has been an extremely natural and predictable phenomenon is now gone.”