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Nepal and China have paused rescue efforts for survivors of the devastating flash flood that hit the border region two days ago as a “barrier lake” formed during the disaster began to overflow.

Chinese rescue teams and vehicles were forced to pull back to safe ground, state broadcaster CCTV reported, as the risk of the lake bursting rose. Nepalese authorities also paused search operations for 90 minutes, an army officer confirmed.

The “barrier lake”, formed as Wednesday’s flash flood carried huge volumes of mud and debris down a steep valley, is threatening to unleash another huge and destructive wave.

In Nepal’s Rasuwa district, on the border with Tibet, residents were seen scrambling up hillsides to escape potential surges in the river level, according to the Reuters news agency.

The disaster unfolded as a glacier collapsed and sent a huge torrent of ice, water, rock, and mud down Himalayan river valleys, burying entire villages and destroying roads, bridges, and hydropower plants.

In its wake, leftover debris trapped water to form a barrier lake, a natural dam created when landslides block a river.

With water continuing to pour into the lake, the threat to downstream communities of another wave of flooding is rising.

China has deployed an engineering team to conduct aerial surveys and 3D modelling of the site. By Friday, the lake’s volume had swelled to more than 2.5 million cubic metres, up from the estimated 1.5 to 2 million cubic metres recorded just a day earlier.

Downstream in Nepal, officials received warnings that the lake had begun breaking its bank, according to Narendra Pariyar, the top administrator in the hard-hit Rasuwa district.

“We can see that the level of water in the river is rising,” he said, adding that the exact height of the surge remains unclear.

Relief supplies blocked

The death toll from the disaster has surpassed 470. On Friday, the Nepalese prime minister’s office reported 469 confirmed deaths, with 977 people still missing. About 1,550 people have been rescued.

Chinese authorities reported on Friday that the death toll in Tibet has now risen to at least five, with 558 missing.

Bishal Nath Upreti, president of the Nepal Centre for Disaster Management, told Al Jazeera that conditions are “extremely difficult” for those trapped in the disaster zone, as destroyed roads have left them completely cut off.

So far, about 800 people have been rescued by helicopter and 700 by land, with airlifts delivering vital aid to survivors.

Al Jazeera’s Katrina Yu, reporting from Beijing, said the number of missing is expected to rise. China has deployed about 500 military and paramilitary personnel and sent Premier Li Qiang to supervise operations on the ground, while Nepal has deployed 30,000 security personnel to search remote, cut-off valleys, she said.

More ⁠than ⁠90,000 people are estimated to have been affected ⁠by disaster, the ⁠Red Cross said on Friday, adding that the delivery of relief supplies has been blocked by the overflowing lake.

“We’re of course very concerned about the secondary flood,” said David Fisher, head of delegation ⁠for the International Federation ⁠of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in ⁠Nepal.

SEOUL, Aug. 21 (UPI) — South Korea’s presidential Blue House on Friday called on North Korea to halt its “derogatory remarks” toward Seoul, one day after Kim Yo Jong mocked the South over the scaling back of joint U.S.-South Korea military drills.

“Derogatory remarks toward our government and president do not help in building mutual trust,” the Blue House said in remarks reported by Yonhap News Agency.

“We call on the North to halt unnecessary criticism and march together toward peaceful coexistence on the Korean Peninsula,” it added.

The remarks came in response to a commentary by Kim, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, in which she derided Seoul as a “puppet” of the United States and accused President Lee Jae Myung of making “double-dealing remarks.”

This week’s decision to cut short the Ulchi Freedom Shield joint military exercise has “placed Seoul in a poor plight of discontinuing the ‘war game’ it liked very much,” Kim said in the commentary carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency late Thursday.

She said Lee “uttered shameful words” in a social media post in which he expressed respect for U.S. President Donald Trump’s order to scale back the exercise while also pledging that South Korea would continue to build up a self-sufficient military capacity.

“Such double-dealing behavior vividly proves uneasiness and impatience of the ROK,” Kim said, using the official acronym for South Korea.

“The world witnesses that the U.S. security aids are no longer free of charge,” she added. “Seoul should be aware of the unavoidable fate of the ‘puppet.'”

The exchange comes after Trump called for the allies’ joint military drills to be “substantially reduced” in a Truth Social post Sunday, saying they are expensive and “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff on Wednesday announced that the two sides would cut short the ongoing exercise by almost a week. The command-post portion of the exercise was set to conclude Friday, although a pared-down set of field training drills will continue through next week as originally scheduled.

The directive has been widely seen as an effort by Trump to restart diplomacy with the North, and on Wednesday he told reporters that he expected to meet Kim Jong Un this year.

In an earlier KCNA commentary, however, Kim Yo Jong downplayed the significance of the exercise reduction, calling it “unworthy of comment.”

“If the U.S. calculates that it can propagate its recent measure as the one of so-called good faith, they will not get desired answer,” she said.

On Thursday, Pyongyang fired multiple short-range ballistic missiles toward the East Sea, Seoul’s military said, marking the North’s third missile launch in less than two weeks.

The Blue House on Friday reiterated its commitment to pursuing peaceful coexistence between the two Koreas.

“As a party directly involved in building peace on the Korean Peninsula, the government will continue its close cooperation with the U.S. while making proactive efforts to help resume North Korea-U.S. dialogue as a ‘pacemaker,'” the presidential office said, according to Yonhap.

Gen. Michael Guetlein, the top U.S. military officer in charge of the Golden Dome missile defense shield, says he is confident that the initiative will be able to deliver the desired capabilities within its current stated budget of $185 billion. Operational elements of the huge new architecture are currently scheduled to start coming online in mid-2028. This is despite independent estimates that the required ‘system of systems’ could cost exponentially more to develop, field, and maintain. At the same time, Guetlein has now warned that work on Golden Dome could abruptly end, at least for a time, regardless of its total price tag, if a huge budgetary hurdle is not overcome.

Guetlein, whose current title is Director of Golden Dome and is presently assigned to the U.S. Space Force, shared new details about the initiative during a talk today at the annual Space & Missile Defense (SMD) Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, at which TWZ is in attendance.

“What is the bill to the nation? How much national treasure are we asking the American public to commit to the defense of the homeland?” Guetlein said in his introductory remarks. “I’m on record, and I’m still up here saying the exact same number: $185 billion. We started at 175 billion dollars, and we added 10 more billion [dollars] worth of accelerating space capabilities that we thought the nation needed, that were not part of our original architecture.”

“That is a lot of money. It’s one of the biggest systems that we’ve ever put together as a nation. We [have] got to keep it affordable,” Guetlein continued. “There’s two other cost estimates out there that are exceptionally larger, but I’m going to tell you those cost estimates are not estimating what we are building.”

The general did not specify what cost estimates he was referring to, but the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has put out two top-level figures since the initiative was first unveiled in 2025. CBO’s first estimate in May 2025 said the complete architecture could cost up to $542 billion to develop, deploy, and then operate over a period spanning two decades. The office put out a second estimate in May of this year that said the full price tag might actually be nearly $1.2 trillion over the same 20-year timespan. At that time, CBO also explicitly said its analysis had been hampered by a lack of publicly available information about exactly what the so-called “objective architecture” for Golden Dome actually entails.

There are other independent estimates of Golden Dome’s full cost that are even higher than CBO’s May 2026 projection.

“We’re building something completely differently, and that architecture is coming together, and is being proven every single day,” Guetlein stressed today. “We have radars on contract. We have launchers on contract. We have space-based interceptors on contract. Hypersonic ballistic tracking system on contract. Space data network is on contract. Our construction contracts have been let [sic], and we are moving out with haste to get after what the President [Donald Trump] asked us to do in the summer of 2028.”

Space-based interceptors are notably vital to the Golden Dome plan as it has been described publicly to date. They are also central to CBO’s $1.2 trillion cost estimate, which projected that it would be necessary to have 7,800 of them in orbit at any one time for the architecture to work as intended.

The Northrop Grumman video below includes a computer-generated clip depicting a space-based interceptor engaging a target outside the Earth’s atmosphere, starting at 0:13 in the runtime.

Northrop Grumman Third Quarter 2025 Highlights

“We have our first operational site. We are digging dirt around the homeland, getting ready for the capabilities that the President asked us to deliver in the summer of 2028,” Guetlein also said, but did not elaborate on where that work was being done or its exact purpose.

“We’ve had two tests. We can’t talk about those tests, but those tests were phenomenally successful, and they demonstrated that the capabilities that we are putting together, both command and control, our sensor network, and our effectors, are going to be effective against the threats as they are currently designed,” the Golden Dome director added.

“We had committed to the President last year that we would do a major test every single year. So in January this year, I gave a challenge to the Missile Defense Agency of what test I needed to happen in the summer of 2026, and we executed that test,” Guetlein did note later on in the talk. “It was the most complex test with the most threats in the air in the history of WSMR [the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico]. MDA pulled that off and executed that test in six months, and met every single test objective that I gave them.”

“So the MDA team, plus the WSMR team, plus SMDC [the U.S. Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command], plus PAE Fires [the Army’s Portfolio Acquisition Executive for Fires], plus Fort Bliss [in Texas], plus a whole host of other agencies, all came together in less than six months, starting from scratch, and delivered what I will argue is the most complex integrated missile defense test that we have pulled off as a nation,” he continued. “But that test is a fraction of what we got to do to deliver what they’ve asked us to do in [20]28. So the test in [20]27 will be even more complex.”

Despite all of this apparent progress and significant authority to keep pushing ahead, Guetlein warned today that Golden Dome is facing a potentially insurmountable budget impasse. This has to do with how the initiative has been paid for so far, with core funding coming from outside normal defense spending streams via a process called reconciliation.

“When the President submitted his President’s Budget over to the Hill for FY27 [Fiscal Year 2027], I was not in the top line. I’m in what they call mandatory funding, which is another reconciliation-type funding bill,” Guetlein explained. So, yes, we have a CR [continuing resolution], and we’re not going to shut down the federal government, but a CR doesn’t help me under Golden Dome because I don’t have a top line to fall back to to get that percentage of the continuing resolution.”

Continuing resolutions are short-term spending bills Congress passes to keep the government running in the absence of the approval of a full annual budget.

The defense budget for the 2027 Fiscal Year that the Trump administration submitted earlier this year was already historically large, in part because of expected reconciliation funding. The $1.5 trillion “topline” was broken down into a base budget of $1.1 trillion and then “$350 billion in additional mandatory resources through reconciliation.”

“So we’ve got to figure out, as a nation, a different way of funding Golden Dome, at least for [20]27. Right now, that’s under reconciliation,” Guetlein added. “I will tell you that if they don’t figure it out, there is no Golden Dome because there is no funding.”

Guetlein said today that $22.5 billion has been appropriated for Golden Dome so far, and that 95 percent of that money is already committed to specific work.

“I do believe, as a nation, we’re going to figure this out just because the sense of urgency is so great, but it is a challenging budget environment,” he continued.

As an aside, the Senate, which is currently controlled by President Trump’s Republican Party, just passed its version of the new continuing resolution last week. It notably omitted certain defense spending provisions the White House had sought, including $1 billion for work on the Trump class battleship program, another top priority for the administration. That bill still needs to be reconciled with a separate temporary spending bill making its way through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives before it can be sent to President Trump’s desk to be signed into law (or vetoed).

On top of all this, there has been some bipartisan pushback to further use of the reconciliation process and related mechanisms to boost defense spending outside of the U.S. military’s base budget.

“I think it’s safe to conclude there will not be another reconciliation bill,” Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, a Republican, said during a hearing on the U.S. Air Force’s proposed 2027 Fiscal Year budget back in June.

It is also worth noting here that a significant delay in additional funding could have a cascading impact on Golden Dome and its aggressive schedule. The Pentagon could also seek to redirect funds from other parts of its budget, but this could then have similar effects on other efforts. Guetlein did tell reporters after his talk at the SMD Symposium that the Pentagon is looking at contingency options to keep Golden Dome running in the absence of direct funding, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine.

“Several of the space capabilities that we are investing in are also being invested in by the Space Force,” he said, per Air & Space Forces Magazine‘s report. “So, if Golden Dome is not able to continue to invest in those type of capabilities, then the Space Force could decide at that time to continue the investments.”

“Because we have diversified execution of a lot of these capabilities, and a lot of these capabilities are already requested by combatant commands, there are some alternatives that we can pursue. We have not made any decisions on any pathway,” he also noted.

Still, this all comes a the U.S. military is currently in the midst of a host of other major modernization programs, many of which are also deemed critical to national security. This is especially true of costly and expansive programs now underway to update all three legs of America’s nuclear deterrent triad, as well as the command and control architectures that underpin them.

Based on Guetlein’s comments today, Golden Dome now looks to be approaching its first major watershed moment, with this budgetary dilemma set to have significant impacts on how the initiative continues to progress.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

There’s still no vaccine for the Bundibugyo strain of the virus as the country struggles for control in infected areas.

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has killed more than 1,500 people, as the spread of the virus continues to outpace response efforts, new statistics have revealed.

DRC has now recorded 3,442 cases of the virus and 1,521 deaths, a government update said on Thursday. The data marks a 50 percent increase in the death toll over the past week, with authorities continuing to struggle to rein in the outbreak in the east of the country, where decades of conflict with rebel groups have left government control and infrastructure lax or absent.

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said that the sharp rise since last week partly reflects a backlog of cases and deaths that had not yet been confirmed or recorded.

The lack of a proven vaccine for Bundibugyo, which is the rarest of the four variants of Ebola known to affect humans, and the fact the epidemic is unfolding in an area of active hostilities between armed groups, producing a shortage of public health resources, has helped to allow the virus to spread “like wildfire”, a public health consultant who helped establish Africa CDC told Al Jazeera earlier this month.

Africa CDC added that delays in contact tracing, difficulties accessing affected areas, and mistrust from communities have hindered an effective response.

The outbreak is mostly concentrated in eastern Congo’s remote Ituri province, which accounts for nearly 90 percent of cases, but five other provinces have confirmed cases, including one of the country’s largest cities, Kisangani.

Neighbouring Uganda declared itself free of Ebola on Tuesday following the discharge of the country’s last patient in mid-June.

Africa CDC Director-General Dr Jean Kaseya said 63 percent of confirmed deaths in the last two weeks occurred outside treatment centres.

This is largely due to the “unsafe handling of infected bodies” by residents, including touching the remains of the deceased, whose bodies remain highly infectious.

Earlier this month, some healthcare workers in Ituri went on strike over unpaid wages and unsafe working conditions, which has also impeded efforts to hold back the disease’s rapid spread.

In Ituri’s Nyakunde health zone, international partners supporting the Ebola response had to temporarily relocate after a July 15 attack on a hospital and a treatment centre, prompted by a patient’s death. Officials said this disrupted surveillance, contact tracing and supplies.

Despite the accelerated death toll in DRC, the World Health Organization has said the risk of a global spread remains low because Ebola does not travel through the air, making it much harder to spread than respiratory viruses.

Cases detected outside the DRC have so far been quickly identified and contained without leading to sustained transmission, the agency said.

Pressure is growing on the EU to sanction Israel for its expansion of illegal settlements and violence against Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank.

The European Union has renewed its call on Israel to halt the expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank, warning that continued construction and other unilateral measures threaten the viability of a future Palestinian state.

An EU spokesperson on Friday urged Israel to stop the legalisation of settlement outposts, land appropriation, demolitions, forced evictions of Palestinians, and other actions that “undermine the viability of the two-state solution”.

The statement came days after Israel’s security cabinet approved the allocation of 1.3 billion shekels ($427.8m) to establish 34 new settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The funding package marks one of Israel’s largest recent investments in settlement expansion and has drawn criticism from Palestinian officials and international partners.

The United Nations, the International Court of Justice and most countries consider Israeli settlements in territory occupied by Israel since 1967 to be illegal under international law. Israel rejects that interpretation.

The EU has long maintained that it does not recognise Israel’s sovereignty over the territories it occupied in 1967. However, the 27-member bloc remains divided over whether to take stronger measures against Israel’s settlement policy.

EU foreign ministers this week failed to reach a consensus on proposals that could restrict trade with settlements in the occupied West Bank, despite growing calls from several member states for tougher action.

The renewed diplomatic pressure comes amid continuing violence in the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians, including children, have been injured in separate incidents involving Israeli settlers and Israeli forces.

On Friday, two Palestinian children were taken to hospital after suffering head and facial injuries when Israeli settlers allegedly hurled stones at their family’s vehicle in the Wadi al-Sha’er area, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa.

In another incident, a 16-year-old Palestinian boy was shot by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank. He remains in hospital.

“Everybody agrees that the situation in the West Bank is really intolerable,” the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said ahead of talks among EU foreign ministers in Brussels on Monday.

“What is happening in the West Bank is actually making it more and more impossible that the two-state solution ever can come into effect,” she added.

Russian President Vladimir Putin says Ukraine has proposed a mutual halt to long-range strikes and a meeting with Kyiv’s leadership. But, though he says he is considering the proposal, he believes the deal would benefit Ukraine more than Russia.

June 24 (UPI) — Senate lawmakers have approved a war powers resolution directing President Donald Trump to halt U.S. hostilities with Iran or seek congressional authorization.

The Senate voted 50-48 on Tuesday, with four Republicans — Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky — joining their Democratic colleagues in passing H.Con.Res. 86. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., was the only Democrat to vote against the measure.

The measure’s legal force was disputed. Though concurrent resolutions are non-binding, Democrats argue H.Con.Res. 86 is binding because it was adopted under the War Powers Resolution.

Either way, the measure shows the deepening fissure in support among Trump’s Republican Party for the war his administration unilaterally launched in late February.

Democrats have been forcing repeated war powers resolution votes for months, most of which have been stonewalled by Republicans. But GOP support for the war has waned as it has dragged on, culminating Tuesday when the Senate approved the measure that the House narrowly passed 215-208 earlier this month.

“Both chambers have now made clear that the president cannot continue this war of choice and must cease all hostilities against Iran,” Rep. Gregory Meeks, the resolution’s sponsor and ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Tuesday after the vote.

“Regardless of what President Trump says, this measure is binding under the War Powers Resolution, and I will explore all legal avenues to ensure the Executive complies with the will of Congress.”

Democrats argue that the U.S. war with Iran — as well as other military actions taken by Trump, including attacks on suspected drug-trafficking boats in international waters — is illegal as Congress has not authorized war, a power the Constitution gives to Congress.

Trump has responded that he does not need authorization, and any war powers resolution is moot due to the fragile U.S.-Iran cease-fire that went into effect in early April.

Amid the cease-fire, Trump has been seeking an agreement to end the war, and his administration was actively negotiating terms with Iran when the vote was held Tuesday.

In a social media statement, Trump lambasted Congress over the vote, saying it was informing Iran that the United States does not support him while hee has “Iran on the ‘ropes,’ ready to go down for the fall.”

“Four Republican Losers voted with the Dumocrats,” he said, while calling the measure “poorly timed and meaningless.”

“These Senators have just made my job more difficult, but I will get it done, one way or the other, because I always get it done.”

June 17 (UPI) — Officials at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport announced Tuesday that the airport is scheduled to be closed for much of July 4 amid a predicted record-breaking week of travel for the holiday.

There are no scheduled flights to or from the airport after noon on July 4, the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority announced in a release. The day before will also have no flights for several hours in the early afternoon.

The MWAA said the schedule disruption is to accommodate Independence Day celebrations coinciding with the country’s 250th birthday.

“Many events will include downtown flyovers or other aerial displays such as fireworks or parachute jumps, which will affect flights periodically at Reagan National,” the agency said.

Airport officials expected flight operations to return to normal July 5.

AAA projected Tuesday that a record-breaking 72.2 million Americans will travel at least 50 miles away from home to mark Independence Day between June 27 and July 5. That’s up from 71.8 million in 2025.

Stacey Barber, vice president of AAA Travel, said traveling for the July 4th holiday “is tradition.”

“The 9-day travel forecast includes travelers who are vacationing all week and people just getting away for the long holiday weekend,” Barber said. “While the overall number of Independence Day travelers appears to be plateauing, we’re still expecting record volumes this year.”

Among those traveling for the holiday, AAA projected the vast majority — 61.4 million — will do so by car, 5.85 million by air and 4.93 million by other modes of transportation such as bus, train or cruise.

The Top 10 domestic destinations for the holiday week are Seattle; Orlando, Fla.; Anchorage, Alaska; Miami; New York City; Chicago; Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Fairbanks, Alaska; Denver; and Boston. The Top 10 international destinations are Vancouver, Canada; Rome; Dublin; Paris; London; Calgary, Canada; Reykjavik, Iceland; Amsterdam; Athens; and Barcelona, Spain.

US Department of Justice claims NAACP lawsuit threatens ‘national, economic, and energy security’.

The United States government has intervened on the side of Elon Musk’s xAI in a legal dispute over a $20bn data centre, claiming that efforts to block a related power project threaten national security.

In a court motion filed this week, the Department of Justice requested the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing xAI of illegally operating dozens of natural gas turbines erected to power the Colossus 2 data center in Memphis, Tennessee.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the largest civil rights group for African Americans, filed the lawsuit in April under the 1963 Clean Air Act, which allows citizens to seek injunctions and civil penalties against alleged polluters.

The NAACP alleges that xAI built the turbines, located in nearby Southaven, Mississippi, without obtaining the necessary permits, exposing hundreds of thousands of residents to harmful pollutants linked to “increases in asthma, respiratory diseases, heart problems, and certain cancers”.

The lawsuit notes that a “much larger share” of residents are Black compared with the US general population.

In its motion, filed in a US District Court on Monday, the Justice Department accused the NAACP of threatening “national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations”.

The motion also claims that the US Constitution vests the power to seek civil penalties “conclusively and preclusively” in the executive branch, including the “discretion to decide when such an enforcement action is unwarranted or inconsistent with federal enforcement priorities”.

Adam Gustafson, the top prosecutor at the Justice Department’s environment and natural resources division, said in a statement that the government would “not sit idly by while private organisations use environmental laws to undermine our national security”.

xAI, which is a subsidiary of Musk’s SpaceX, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earthjustice, an advocacy group representing the NAACP in the lawsuit, condemned the intervention as a “massive power grab” by President Donald Trump’s administration.

“Trump’s Justice Department wants to shield Elon Musk’s data center company, xAI, from being held accountable for its illegal pollution – and it’s attempting to grab power from impacted communities, the courts, and Congress to do so,” Laura Thoms, director of enforcement for Earthjustice, said in a statement.

“There is no moral or legal precedent for this.”

Ann Carlson, a professor of environmental law at  UCLA School of Law, described the Trump administration’s argument as a “brazen attempt” to limit enforcement of the Clean Air Act.

“It’s based on a radical notion that the executive branch can dismiss lawsuits brought by citizen groups that Congress has authorised based on no rationale at all,” Carlson told Al Jazeera, adding that the Justice Department’s position would let “polluters off the hook even for blatant violations of the law.”

“This motion is also just one of many ways in which the administration is undermining efforts to protect air quality,” Carlson said.

The Trump administration has cultivated close ties with Musk, the world’s richest man, tapping the tech titan as a temporary cost-cutting tsar and using xAI’s flagship model Grok in the Pentagon’s drive to become an “AI-enabled fighting force”.

In testimony in support of Monday’s motion, Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s top official for AI, said that Grok had been used to launch more than 2,000 munitions at 2,000 targets within the first 96 hours of the US-Israel war on Iran.

If Grok cannot be deployed and upgraded due to “limitations in energy supply or limited reserve compute capability”, numerous tools used by the Pentagon would be “severely impacted”, Stanley said in a declaration made under oath.

WASHINGTON — The House approved a war powers resolution Wednesday that would halt the U.S. military action against Iran, defying President Trump as a handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to end the three-month-long war that has reordered politics at home and abroad.

House Speaker Mike Johnson had tried to prevent an outcome that would show the mounting opposition to the war, abruptly shutting down floor action two weeks ago when the war powers resolution was on the verge of approval. But displeasure has only grown as the conflict drags on and as Trump struggles to negotiate a quick resolution.

The roll call Wednesday was 215-208, and cheers erupted in the House chamber.

“This reckless and costly war of choice needs to end today,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said earlier in the week.

“All we need are a handful of Republicans to join us and we can end this reckless and costly war of choice — a war that has cost the American taxpayer over $100 billion — that’s extraordinary — and left our country in a weaker position relative to Iran.”

Opposition to war grows

It’s the fourth time the House has tried to curb the U.S. war against Iran, and the first time the House was able to pass the measure. The Senate advanced its own war powers resolution last month when a handful of GOP senators broke ranks with the Republican president in a rare show of political pushback from his party.

Each time Democrats have pushed forward the war powers resolution, the vote tallies have inched higher as political unease with the U.S. war swells. Trump had campaigned for the White House on a promise to end U.S. entanglements abroad and focus more on domestic issues, but the war has shifted attention back to the Middle East.

Johnson insisted Trump is “laser focused” on the domestic front, particularly ahead of the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.

The speaker said he spent three hours at the White House with the president this week as Trump is calling on allies to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz for commerce, especially the flow of oil.

Since the U.S. joined Israel in launching the Feb. 28 strikes on Iran, Americans have seen gas prices spike at the pumps, adding to inflationary pressure on consumer spending.

Iran has been able to interrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital channel for a large segment of the world’s oil, natural gas and related products such as fertilizer.

“We’re working on that final piece,” said Johnson, R-La. “The entire world has an interest in the Strait of Hormuz being reopen for commerce. That what he’s working on.”

While a ceasefire in the conflict was declared in April, it remains uneasy and uncertain. Talks for a more durable end to the fighting have dragged, increasingly complicated by Israel’s broadening war with Iran-backed Hezbollah militants in Lebanon. Meanwhile, military strikes between the U.S and Iran continue to flare.

Congress exerts its war powers authority

The war powers resolution from the House would not immediately stop the war, but it would provide a symbolic if not legal step against further military action.

If approved, it would then go to the Senate, where four Republican senators last month joined Democrats in advancing a similar measure to curtail the U.S. campaign against Iran. The Senate has yet to take a final vote to approve or reject its own war powers resolution.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned Wednesday testifying at a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing that the Iranians would think that the administration’s “hands are going to be tied” if Congress approved a war powers resolution. He said they would think ”we won’t be able to do anything to them, so why make a deal?”

It’s not the only action Congress is taking in the national security arena as Democrats, in the minority, work to peel off Republican support for measures beyond the war against Iran.

The House is also voting Wednesday on another Democratic-led effort that would authorize U.S. support for Ukraine’s military operations as it battles Russia and to help reconstruct the war-torn country. The House this week is also expected to consider a war powers resolution to block U.S. action in Lebanon.

While Congress has the authority under the Constitution to declare war, the president also has power as the commander in chief to engage in military action, creating a legal dispute over which branch of government has ultimate say in matters of war and peace.

Under the war powers act, the White House has a 60-day window to seek approval from Congress for military action. The administration, however, has indicated that because a ceasefire has been declared in the current conflict in Iran, the hostilities have ceased.

Mascaro writes for the Associated Press.

BOSTON — A federal judge on Tuesday heard from voting rights groups and a coalition of two dozen states that want the courts to halt President Trump’s executive order seeking to create a federal voter list and limit who can receive a mail ballot.

The plaintiffs argued in two lawsuits that Trump’s order should be found unconstitutional because the states and Congress, not the president, have the power to set election rules. They also told the court that the move imposes a costly burden on state election officials to comply and would spread fear about the possibility of prosecution.

“This is going to be a sea change in the way that some states administer their ballots,” said Michael Cohen, who was part of a team representing California, adding that “it will be difficult to overstate the disruption that this will cause.”

Trump’s executive order, the second one aimed at elections during his second term, comes as he continues to raise the specter of widespread voting by noncitizens as a reason to change election rules. But states already have detailed processes aimed at keeping their voter rolls accurate, and voting by noncitizens has been shown to be rare. It also is a felony that can be punishable by deportation.

His latest order is being challenged through multiple lawsuits, including two filed in U.S. District Court in Boston.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the League of Women Voters in one of the two Boston cases, has called the order “a dangerous attempt to disenfranchise eligible voters nationwide.” The group said the order transforms “the U.S. Postal Service from a neutral mail carrier to an arbiter of who may cast a ballot by mail.”

“This case challenges an extraordinary and abusive assertion of executive power over the administration of federal elections,” the organization said in its complaint.

The hearing comes less than a week after another judge declined to halt the order. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee in Washington, agreed with the Trump administration’s contention that it was too early to block the order because it has yet to be implemented.

The administration, in its motions to dismiss the lawsuits, argued that the plaintiffs lack standing to bring their claims. They also argued the motions are premature and that plaintiffs lack the legal basis to bring their Administrative Procedure Act claim, which governs how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.

Stephen Pezzi, a lawyer for the Trump administration, said the harms the plaintiffs referred to were subjective, since much can change with the voting list before it is finalized. He also said no one would be prosecuted for violating the executive order.

Missouri Solicitor Gen. Lou Capozzi, speaking for the states supporting the list, argued it was too early to say how his state might use the list, but that it was “unlikely” any voter would be removed this year from the voter rolls because of it.

“We are not exactly sure how we would use it,” Capozzi said, adding that “we don’t want this process to be strangled in the crib, so to speak.”

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani took the requests for motions to halt the order, along with motions to dismiss the cases under advisement.

During oral arguments, Talwani expressed concerns about whether the federal system envisioned under the executive order could be ready for the upcoming midterm elections and about the risks posed to election workers who rely on a state list that differs from the federal one. She also raised doubts about the reliability of a federal list — noting, for example, women who changed their names after getting married or someone who has moved from state to state might be missed.

“Isn’t there a reasonable fear and concern on behalf of voters that they will be precluded?” Talwani asked.

Trump issued the order in March after a bill he supported to overhaul voting stalled in Congress. The order would have had the federal government create a list of eligible voters and then directed the postal service to deliver mail ballots only to those on the list. Election officials argued that it was ripe for abuse and could cause chaos, and the postal union has objected to the idea of mail carriers policing ballots.

The postal service has published a proposed rule required by Trump’s executive order in the Federal Register. Among other things, the rule would not apply to primary elections or overseas ballots.

Since his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, Trump has groundlessly claimed mail voting is rife with fraud and has launched a federal investigation into that year’s vote, even though repeated audits and investigations, including ones run by Republicans, found it was free of widespread fraud. Trump also has said he wants to “take over” election administration in Democratic areas.

Casey writes for the Associated Press.