order

The estranged wife of former Chargers defensive end Marcellus Wiley has been granted a three-year restraining order against the former Los Angeles sports radio personality two months after she accused him of raping her and physically abusing her and their children.

The former Pro Bowl player has denied the allegations that Annemarie, a nurse anesthetist and former cast member of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” made in a declaration submitted July 6 to the Superior Court of Los Angeles County with her request for a restraining order against her husband of 12 years. She filed for divorce the same day.

Marcellus and Annemarie Wiley both testified in person during a hearing on Wednesday. Evidence presented by both sides included texts and WhatsApp messages, social media posts, court filings and media coverage of the couple.

“The Court finds that Petitioner has met the burden of proof by preponderance of the evidence,” Judge Esther P. Kim wrote in her ruling, which was issued the next day. “Petitioner’s request for a Domestic Violence the minor children are included as protected person in the Restraining Order After Hearing.”

Annemarie Wiley was granted full legal and physical custody of their three children, with a visitation plan detailed for her husband.

“I’m grateful for the court’s decision and welcome the opportunity for our family to finally begin healing after an incredibly difficult and trying time,” Marcellus Wiley said in a statement to The California Post on Thursday. “From the beginning, my fight has been about being present in my children’s lives, loving them, supporting them, and being their father every day.

“I’m thankful I get to return to that role. Annemarie deserves the space to protect her peace, our children deserve the love and presence of both parents, and our family deserves the opportunity to move forward without conflict defining us. My hope now is simple: healing, peace, and getting our family back to a place where love leads the way.”

On July 4, Marcellus Wiley was arrested in Florida after his wife told police he poked her in the face with his finger and threatened to kill her. He was released the next day on $1,000 bond and faced a possible charge of misdemeanor domestic battery. Last month, the state opted not to file charges because of a lack of sufficient evidence.

In the declaration she submitted with her restraining order request, Annemarie Wiley documented numerous alleged incidents that she said demonstrated “a continuing and escalating pattern of physical violence, sexual abuse, verbal and emotional abuse, financial control, and intimidation, much of which our children have witnessed.” She also mentioned four instances in which her husband allegedly raped her, once in 2012 and three times in January.

A temporary restraining order was granted on July 7. On the same day, Marcellus Wiley wrote on X that he has “videos, photographs, text messages, emails, and other evidence that directly contradicts those baseless claims and provides a factual record of our family and the events leading to this unfortunate divorce.”

Sept. 6, 2026 8:33 AM PT

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Sunday renewed its appeal to the Supreme Court after a federal judge blocked new restrictions on mail ballots ahead of the midterms.

The filing came after U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani extended an order against the U.S. Postal Service enforcing President Trump’s executive order for the November elections.

The legal wrangling comes even as states start sending out mail ballots, leaving the administration little time to make big changes in mail ballot rules.

“Ballots have already begun to be mailed in North Carolina, and more States will begin the mailing process as the injunction remains in place — including Alabama on September 9 and at least five States the week of September 13,” Solicitor Gen. John Sauer said in the filing.

“Once those ballot envelopes enter the mailstream, there is no retrieving them. And while the injunction allows the Postal Service and the States to continue taking steps to ensure that their envelopes satisfy the Rule’s requirements … each day the injunction is in place risks sowing confusion and chaos because the injunction makes those preparatory steps voluntary, rather than mandatory.”

The appeal marks the third time the administration has asked the high court to intervene. The high court has allowed the plan to move forward but not ruled on whether it is legal.

The battle could have major ramifications for this year’s elections, when control of Congress is at stake. Nearly one-third of voters in the U.S. cast mail ballots. Mail ballots are sent to every California voter.

Democratic states and voting rights groups say the changes are unconstitutional and amount to voter suppression. Election officials contend that there isn’t enough time to revise their systems to comply with the new Postal Service directives.

The Trump administration has framed the restrictions as commonsense changes that are within its power to regulate the mail.

“Simply put, the best way to address respondents’ fears about inability to comply with the Rule is to grant an immediate administrative stay of the order, followed by a full stay pending further review,” Sauer said. “That will remove the improper cloud of uncertainty that the district court has cast over the Rule, making clear to all involved that compliance with the Rule is not optional and must start without further delay.”

Trump has long sought to limit mail voting, even though he himself often uses that method to cast his own ballot. He has falsely blamed mail balloting for his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, spreading baseless claims of fraud. But so far, he has been unable to change the long-standing voting procedure.

Whitehurst and Fields write for the Associated Press.

A federal judge again Friday blocked the U.S. Postal Service from enacting President Trump’s sweeping new mail ballot rules for the November election, finding that the Postal Service lacks such authority over elections and that neither it nor states such as California are capable of implementing the changes without causing chaos and disenfranchising voters.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani noted that election officials from across the country told the court that it is “likely impossible” to comply with the rules, which “makes disenfranchisement more than likely, if not probable” if the Postal Service were to proceed with them.

Talwani’s order — her latest of several halting the plan since this summer — came after a Postal Service whistleblower alleged the agency’s new computer systems for the project are fundamentally flawed; a top Postal Service official acknowledged a key online portal was unfinished; and the Trump administration filed an emergency petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the plans to proceed anyway.

All this unfolded this week as some of the first mail ballots of the election cycle started going out.

The new rules — which Trump required in a March executive order — would require states to submit complete voter lists to the Postal Service and to adopt new ballot envelopes with individualized voter bar codes designed by the Postal Service, and empower the Postal Service to reject any mail ballots that don’t match those lists.

Trump’s executive order also required the Department of Homeland Security to develop its own lists of eligible citizen voters, ostensibly to be compared against the state lists.

Trump has said the changes are necessary to combat widespread voter fraud, including by non-citizens, though independent election experts say there is no evidence that such fraud exists in large numbers.

Leading Democrats and elections officials in California and other states say the new rules constitute an unlawful federal overreach into state-run elections and a thinly veiled effort by the Trump administration to suppress the vote in a midterm election the GOP is poised to lose.

Talwani, an appointee of President Obama, agreed, finding that the states and voting rights groups are likely to succeed in their claims that the U.S. Constitution reserves the right to regulate elections to the states and Congress — not the executive branch.

Talwani issued her order after holding a contentious hearing in federal court in Boston on Thursday, where she questioned the Postal Service and the dozen conservative-led states supporting it on their ability to implement the changes in time for the Nov. 3 elections. She also heard from California, other liberal-led states and voting rights groups that it would be impossible.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, whose office is helping lead the states’ challenge, hailed Talwani’s order as a crucial reprieve.

“We’ve now secured longer-term relief that will keep the USPS changes blocked while our case moves forward,” Bonta said in a statement to The Times. “We will continue to take all steps to stop the Trump Administration from trampling on voting rights and restricting mail voting.”

Bonta’s office also criticized Department of Justice attorneys for rushing to the Supreme Court before Talwani could issue her order or the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals could weigh in on an appeal the department had already filed on the matter.

Walter Garcia, a Bonta spokesman, said the Justice Department had “flouted standard procedural rules” by approaching the high court before the lower courts had weighed in, despite the fact that the Postal Service acknowledged Thursday that it was not ready to launch its new portal.

“It defies common sense that they would seek emergency relief from the U.S. Supreme Court when USPS is unprepared to implement the rule now,” Garcia said.

State law requires that all registered voters be sent a ballot in the mail, and more than 80% of California voters have used those ballots to vote in recent elections.

In its emergency petition to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration argued that an earlier temporary restraining order by Talwani to halt the new rules from taking effect was “baseless” and would cause “serious irreparable harm” to the federal government, states and voting public.

“To forestall those harms and protect the public interest, this Court should grant an immediate stay, making clear to States that they should begin efforts to comply if they have not done so already,” wrote Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer.

The swirl of litigation has created uncertainty around the Nov. 3 election. It also reflects the Trump administration’s desperate race to get the lower court orders lifted and the new rules implemented in time for that election — the rushed nature of which was a prime focus of the whistleblower.

The unidentified Postal Service employee alleged in a statement released Tuesday by congressional Democrats and submitted in court by Bonta’s office that the agency has been rushing to implement the changes — in defiance of an earlier court order — using “an entirely new and untested set of IT systems” that could cause “catastrophic problems” and disenfranchise millions of voters nationwide.

The Postal Service in a statement Friday said that while its system was developed on an “accelerated schedule,” quality and security standards “were not compromised,” and the agency stands behind “both the rigor of our process and the resulting system.”

At Thursday’s hearing, Talwani appeared frustrated when a Justice Department attorney was unable to tell her the status of the portal.

In a subsequent declaration hours later, Steven W. Monteith, the Postal Service’s chief customer and marketing officer, said officials were still making “refinements” to the portal, but anticipated being able to make it available “for voluntary use by sometime next week.”

Talwani previously issued an order blocking the Postal Service changes from being implemented in California and more than 20 other suing states in June. The Trump administration appealed that decision to the 1st Circuit, which declined to lift it, and then on an emergency basis to the U.S. Supreme Court. In early August, Talwani issued a second ruling for the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups, blocking the changes nationwide.

On Aug. 24, the Supreme Court set aside Talwani’s order in the states’ case, finding that the states’ challenge was essentially premature because the Postal Service had yet to formally initiate the changes or require state compliance. However, the court explicitly noted that it was not reaching any conclusions as to the legality of the pending rules themselves. “On that score, time will tell,” it said.

The states and voting rights groups promptly filed new lawsuits challenging the legality of the rules, which the Postal Service formally issued Aug. 21. And it is in those cases that Talwani issued her ruling Friday.

She wrote that the voting rights groups had standing to challenge the Postal Service rules nationwide in part because the “chaos” created by the rules’ stiff deadlines significantly interfered with their mission to provide voters with accurate and reliable information about how to vote — and whether to use mail ballots to do so.

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said in remarks prior to Talwani’s Friday order that he was “very, very confident” that the Postal Service changes will be blocked for the upcoming elections, and that “mail voting is going to go forward as conveniently and securely as it always has.”

That’s in part because election officials nationwide are “telling the courts that even if they wanted to, they could not implement it,” he said — including in a legal filing Becker helped nearly 100 local elections officials from red and blue states file in separate litigation challenging the rules.

The U.S. Postal Service is poised to launch a hastily built, error-riddled computer system that could jeopardize the process of mail voting relied upon by one-third of all voters, according to a whistleblower statement released Tuesday by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

The effort is part of the implementation of President Trump’s executive order limiting mail voting and has been temporarily halted by a federal judge. The ruling is being appealed by the administration and the directive may ultimately end up back before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The disclosure from the unidentified whistleblower contends that the Postal Service has been scrambling to try to build a complex system that would normally take a year or more in only three months, sometimes in defiance of the judge’s orders halting work. The goal is to have it ready for use in the midterm elections.

The disclosure contends that, due to the new procedures, a single scanning error in a batch of tens of thousands of ballot envelopes could prevent any from reaching voters. It details a system that election officials have already warned could not be implemented before the first mail ballots begin going out Friday in North Carolina.

“The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans,” Blumenthal told reporters in advance of releasing the whistleblower information. “This administration seems hell-bent on changing the framework on casting ballots in this country clearly for political reasons.”

Executive order is subject to furious court action with midterms nearing

Trump’s executive order, signed in March, directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the commissioner of the Social Security Administration to develop state citizenship lists and then required the Postal Service to send mail ballots only to voters who are on such a list. Ballot envelopes would have to comply with new Postal Service rules and include bar codes.

The online portal that is the subject of the whistleblower complaint is intended for states to deliver their lists of verified voters to the Postal Service.

The Postal Service did not comment on Monday night. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. The White House has called the mail voting provisions “commonsense measures” necessary to combat fraud.

Trump has long opposed voting by mail, even though he has repeatedly used the method to cast his own ballot. He falsely blamed mail voting for his 2020 election loss and has spent years spreading conspiracy theories about it. A report by the Brookings Institution published in 2025 found that mail voting fraud occurred in only about four cases out of every 10 million mail ballots cast.

Since returning to office, Trump has said Republicans should be “taking over” vote counting in Democratic areas and launched a sweeping attempt to reinvestigate the 2020 election, despite a mountain of evidence that he lost fairly to Democrat Joe Biden.

Until Trump came out against mail voting in 2020, the system was used equally by both parties. Since then, it has become more common among Democratic voters. More than 29% of all voters in 2024 cast their ballots through the mail.

After Trump issued his executive order, Democrats and civil rights groups sued and eventually won a ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani in Boston barring implementation of the system before the November midterms. But without ruling on the legality of Trump’s order, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority last week found that was premature and overruled Talwani, momentarily clearing the way for its implementation.

On the night of Aug. 21, the Postal Service released a final rule outlining how it would implement the order.

It said it would only send mail ballots for states that got approval for the design of their envelopes and submitted a list of voters receiving them through the still-not-active online portal. That rule gave plaintiffs a chance to sue again, and Talwani on Thursday night issued a 14-day restraining order against implementation of the measure.

Whistleblower complaint says portal development is rushed and sloppy

The letter from Blumenthal and an accompanying summary of the whistleblower’s statements says the Postal Service began work on the portal on June 15 and stopped on June 25 after Talwani’s initial order. Then on July 29, the Postal Service restarted the work. That was when the administration appealed the judge’s order to the Supreme Court. The high court did not strike Talwani’s injunction down until Aug. 24.

Talwani last week found the Postal Service violated her order by continuing to work on the final rule, but she imposed no sanctions on the government. On Monday, she issued a ruling refusing to lift the restraining order that also said the Postal Service could continue work on its portal, as long as it wasn’t forcing states to use it.

In its summary of the whistleblower’s statement, the group Whistleblower Aid says the hurried construction of the portal, with a goal of being active on Tuesday, meant it did not undergo full testing.

“The apparently sloppy and rushed manner in which the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and supporting IT systems are being built poses significant risk,” the group wrote. “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”

The statement also says the Postal Service is implementing a “zero percent” rule in which any errors in any mail ballots sent out by an election office could lead to all of them being discarded — even if it’s simply one problem amid tens of thousands of legitimate ballots.

The rule requires ballots to be handled in a physical post office by an election official. Those will then be scanned to ensure they match the voter database. During three layers of checks, a single apparent error could cause the whole batch to be rejected, the statement says.

Blumenthal said he has “a very strong hope and some faith that our system of justice will strike down this unconstitutional and unconscionable rule.” But, he added, if it somehow goes into effect for the midterms, he would not advise voting by mail.

Riccardi writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this story.

WASHINGTON — President Trump said Thursday he is renaming Lake Ontario to be known as “Lake America” in the United States as he exacerbates his trade war with Canada.

The Republican president signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to update the lake’s name in the U.S. geographic naming service. Trump cannot force Canada to follow his preferred naming convention, however.

Trump has been floating the idea of the name change in recent days as the U.S. announced it was imposing 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods over the weekend after talks between the countries broke down. Trump has been needling America’s northern neighbor since he returned to the White House last year, suggesting the ally with whom the U.S. once had warm relations instead should be absorbed as the 51st state.

Canada responded to Trump’s import taxes this week by imposing retaliatory tariffs on $20 billion worth of American goods, including steel, dairy products, appliances and farm equipment.

Trump, who signed the order as he was sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, had a large sign behind him propped on a stand with a map of the Great Lakes. Over Lake Ontario, in big red letters, the map read “Lake America.”

On the other side of the president was another map with the words, “MAKING THE GREAT LAKES EVEN GREATER.”

The lake is one of multiple Great Lakes that the U.S. and Canada share borders along.

The office of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

There is no single international body that determines names of international bodies of water, and Trump has wide latitude over how the U.S. government recognizes geographic places and landmarks.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has traded insults with Trump, this week brushed aside the prospect of Trump changing the lake’s name as “a lot of rhetoric.”

The name Lake Ontario comes from the Huron Indigenous people’s word “oniatarí:io,” that means “lake of shining waters.” The province of Ontario, founded in 1867, took its name from the lake.

Trump said that while his action was not meant to send any particular geopolitical message, “Canada’s been ripping us off for a long time” on trade and military issues.

“They wanted to be treated like a state and they’re not a state,” the president said. “We just can’t do that anymore.”

“We love the people of Canada,” Trump added. “I don’t think their representatives do an appropriate job. Maybe they’ll change. I really don’t know. It doesn’t make much difference.”

The move is reminiscent of his move last year to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”

Trump scribbled his name with a Sharpie pen on the executive order, then held it up for the cameras, offering, “And we filed all the necessary papers, documents, everything else.”

“We’ve notified all of the various people that we have to notify. So, we’ve done everything that you have to do,” he said. “And this is official, effective immediately.”

The executive order Trump signed shows that the changes, in fact, are supposed to be made within 30 days.

He also suggested his push to rename bodies of water may not be finished.

“So, if you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake. Now, all we need is an ocean,” Trump said. “So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them.”

Price and Weissert write for the Associated Press. AP writer Rob Gillies in Toronto contributed to this report.

Aug. 27 (UPI) — President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America” after his dispute with Canada over tariffs last week.

Trump threatened to rename the lake Tuesday on Truth Social, saying, “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.”

“We’re going to be changing the name of Lake Ontario, effective immediately, to Lake America,” the president said just before signing the order.

In the Oval Office, a reporter asked what message he was trying to send with the renaming.

“No message,” he said. “As you know, Canada has been ripping us off for a long time on trade, very, very sadly. Even the military. You know, we defend Canada for nothing.”

Canada is a founding member of NATO.

The order says that within 30 days, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum will update the Geographic Names Information System. The GNIS works with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to standardize geographic names for federal use.

Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and Mount Denali to Mount McKinley on his first day in office in 2025. He can’t force other countries or private entities to use the new names, but he can force the federal government to.

Because it’s an international boundary water, Canada and the U.S. jointly manage Lake Ontario through the International Joint Commission under the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909.

Order declares a national emergency over an ‘unusual and extraordinary foreign threat’ to the grid.

United States President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency over what his administration describes as security risks linked to foreign-made equipment used in the US electricity grid.

Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that restricts the purchase and installation of certain foreign-produced equipment used in the bulk-power system.

The order cited an “unusual and extraordinary foreign threat” from foreign-made systems, saying they could create vulnerabilities for US national security.

The directive targets certain bulk-power system equipment as well as related software and digital capabilities that the Trump administration said could create cybersecurity or operational risks.

The Department of Energy has 120 days to publish formal rules implementing the policy. In the meantime, experts are watching utility companies, which face the enormous task of compiling an inventory list of equipment flagged by the Trump administration.

“Blocking new purchases is the easy part. Knowing what’s already running is where the real work starts,” John Bruggeman, virtual chief information security officer of the telecommunications company CBTS, told Al Jazeera. “Utilities running foreign-sourced grid equipment … have a live compliance clock starting today.”

The move is the latest effort by the White House to address potential foreign security threats against the grid. Last year, US experts reported finding undisclosed communication devices in some Chinese solar power inverters. In July, the Federal Communications Commission banned all new foreign-made power inverters designed with remote communication capabilities and operating within the electric utility grid.

Still, the order does not prohibit all foreign-made equipment used in the US electricity system. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been directed to establish conditions for the continued use and operation of affected equipment.

“The executive order establishes the authority to act,” Michael Centrella at the cybersecurity company SecurityScorecard, told Al Jazeera. “The difficult next step will be giving operators scalable, independent visibility into which assets and vendor relationships present the greatest risk without disrupting the reliability of the power system.”

BROWNSVILLE, Texas — An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer charged with shooting a man and lying about it during the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis was released from a Texas jail Thursday, after a judge refused to order his return to Minnesota.

Christian Castro was released at the break of dawn from a detention center in Brownsville. He motioned his hand toward a few camera operators and a reporter crowding around him and quickly got into an SUV that drove off.

A day earlier, U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. wrote in an order that said he couldn’t prevent a county sheriff from releasing Castro or order Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to sign his extradition warrant.

Castro is charged in Minnesota with assault and falsely reporting a crime in the Jan. 14 shooting of 24-year-old Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis.

Castro is accused of firing gun through door of home

Castro is accused of firing a gun through the front door of a Minneapolis home, shooting Sosa-Celis in the leg. Prosecutors say Castro also falsely accused Sosa-Celis and another man of attacking an ICE officer with a broom handle and a snow shovel.

After a Minnesota judge issued a nationwide warrant for Castro’s arrest in May, authorities, including Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, arrested Castro in Cameron County on May 29. Minnesota authorities have sought his extradition since his arrest, but he remained in custody in Brownsville, a city bordering Mexico.

Under Texas law and barring extradition, Castro had to be released after 90 days of detention, which was Thursday.

Minnesota officials believe Castro could flee to Mexico.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed a request for a temporary restraining order last week seeking to block Castro’s release or to order his return to Minnesota.

Abbott waiting for internal state investigation about Castro

Texas attorneys on Tuesday argued the judge could not rule on a decision that’s still pending. Abbott has not denied the extradition. Instead he is waiting for the outcome of an internal state investigation considering whether Castro was legally a “fugitive” under the Extradition Clause, the lawyers said.

The judge wrote in Wednesday’s order that the court couldn’t yet step in.

“The Court concludes that it lacks subject matter jurisdiction because the case is not ripe for adjudication,” the order read. “Minnesota cannot premise its causes of action on the allegation that Governor Abbott may violate those authorities in the future; it must prove that a violation has already occurred.”

The judge said in his order that the extradition laws do not outline how long the Texas governor can take to make that decision.

Ellison said in a statement that his office would keep litigating the case but didn’t specify what it would do next.

Abbott’s press secretary, Andrew Mahaleris, welcomed the ruling and said it was the governor’s duty to carefully consider the merits of extradition requests.

Abbott said last week he would not respond to the extradition request, citing the ongoing investigation into fraud in government social service programs in Minnesota, which President Trump used to justify his immigration crackdown there.

Minnesota officials say Castro could flee the country, citing calls he made from jail to a woman in Mexico, talking “about marrying her and buying a house in Mexico when he is released,” according to the lawsuit.

The judge conceded that Castro could flee the country but added that “the threat of injury by itself does not create an issue ripe for adjudication.”

Michael Gonzalez and Valerie Gonzalez write for the Associated Press. Valerie Gonzalez reported from McAllen, Texas. AP writer Kathy McCormack in Concord, N.H., contributed to this report.

A federal judge on Wednesday lifted a major obstacle to President Trump’s executive order limiting mail voting, even as Democratic state officials filed a new court challenge with the midterm elections fast approaching.

The fresh round of legal wrangling comes just two days after the Supreme Court handed down a procedural ruling in Trump’s favor, and could mean the issue lands before the high court again before the pivotal contests for control of Congress. The first mailed ballots are set to be sent out next week.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston agreed to lift an order prohibiting the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out Trump’s order for November’s elections. She wrote that she was “compelled” to do so after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that a similar injunction she granted in a separate case was premature.

Talwani nevertheless said the executive order could unleash “chaos” and referred to it as “likely unconstitutional.”

The administration can now move forward and implement a Postal Service rule published late Friday. It would require states to follow a uniform envelope style for mail ballots and to give the Postal Service a list of voters eligible to receive them. Talwani found on Tuesday that the rule’s issuance technically violated her injunction, but she declined to penalize the administration.

The new lawsuit, filed by about two dozen Democratically controlled states against the U.S. Postal Service, marked a new phase in the high-stakes litigation creating confusion around the midterm elections.

It came after the Supreme Court ruled against them in a separate case, but did not say Trump’s order was legal.

The high court majority found the initial Democratic lawsuit was premature, but that was before the Republican administration issued a rule governing Postal Service delivery of mail ballots. Election officials warn it will be impossible to implement before the first wave of mail ballots are sent out next week.

“Across the country, states are already deep into preparations for the 2026 elections. Now, at the last moment, the federal government is attempting to meddle in those preparations and potentially threaten countless Americans’ right to vote,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, one of 25 Democratic attorneys general filing the lawsuit, said in a statement. “USPS has no authority to decide who can and cannot vote by mail.”

The Trump administration plan faces a third lawsuit originally filed in May in the nation’s capital, though judges there have so far declined to block it.

All previous challenges were filed before the administration published its mail ballot rule Friday night.

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis on Wednesday said the Postal Service’s proposals were “commonsense measures that protect the security of mail-in ballots” and that the administration would continue to work to implement them to boost “the safety and security of our elections.”

The Postal Service said it would not comment because of the pending lawsuit.

National Democrats on Tuesday cited the rule in asking the federal judge in the Washington case to block Trump’s order after he declined to do so last spring, saying the administration at the time had not taken concrete action. In Boston, Talwani also found that the administration had violated a separate injunction she had placed on the Postal Service in drafting the new rule, although she did not take any action against the government.

Talwani had issued the injunction against Trump’s executive order in the prior Democratic state case, which is the one the Supreme Court overturned on Monday. She also issued a second injunction Aug. 11 in a case filed by the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups, while the Supreme Court was considering the administration’s appeal of the judge’s first order.

Trump has long targeted mail voting, which he falsely blames for his 2020 election loss and is disproportionately used by Democrats as a result of Trump’s condemnations. Since returning to power, Trump has tried to claim authority over election rules, saying he thinks Republicans should “take over” vote counting in Democratic areas.

He issued his first election executive order just months after retaking office, attempting to require documentary proof of citizenship to vote, among other changes. He has also been pushing a sweeping election bill that has stalled in the Senate amid opposition from Democrats and even some within his own party.

Riccardi and Whitehurst write for the Associated Press.

Aug. 24 (UPI) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled that President Donald Trump can begin implementing measures from an executive order intended to restrict mail-in voting in many states and Washington, D.C.

However, legal challenges to that order could still cause issues for that plan before the midterm elections in November.

The ruling Monday means that the Department of Homeland Security can begin moving forward with compiling state-specific lists of people it believes are eligible to vote in the states — all led by Democrats – that had challenged the executive order.

Another part of the executive order required the U.S. Postal Service to require states that want to send ballots through the mail to submit lists of eligible voters with information allowing those ballots to be tracked by the government. A lower court had blocked that policy nationwide in a separate case, meaning that more legal action will be needed before the postal service can continue.

The high court’s ruling did not address the overall legality of the executive order.

“If the Postal Service’s final rule harms the states, theymay challenge that rule,” the ruling said.

The postal service entered an unpublished version of that final rule into the Federal Register late Friday despite the court injunctions against it.

Trump has repeatedly and without evidence claimed that mail-in voting is “inherently corrupt” and full of fraud, although voting experts have criticized the order and say such fraud is exceedingly rare. The president himself has voted by mail as recently as this year, NPR reported.

The high court handed down the ruling in an unsigned order over the dissent of three of its members: Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

In a dissent, Jackson said the ruling “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections,” CNN reported.

She noted that, in the past, the Supreme Court has turned away challenges to election law because they were too close to elections. “Today’s revelation is that such claims can also come too early — never mind that an election is looming and related harms are presently occurring.”

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for President Trump to seek new limits on the use of mail ballots, but they are not likely to take effect this year.

Acting by a 6-3 vote, the court’s conservatives granted an emergency appeal from Trump’s lawyers and set aside a judge’s order that blocked new federal regulations on states and their use of mail ballots.

It’s not clear, however, what happens now, since the midterm elections are less than three months away.

About 30% of the nation’s voters — and 80% of Californians — cast their ballots by mail in 2024. Trump, however, has long maintained the voting by mail leads to fraud, including voting by noncitizens.

The court’s order stressed the new regulations do not put new requirements on the states this year.

Trump’s executive order “is internal directive from the President to his subordinates mandating that certain agencies pursue certain policies. It neither requires nor forbids anything of anyone outside the Executive Branch,” the court said.

The Department of Homeland Security will compile state-by-state lists of citizens who are over 18 and eligible to vote.

“States are not required to use the Lists,” the court said, although they could lead to future prosecutions.

The most disputed provision could have authorized the Postal Service to restrict mail ballots to those who are on the Homeland Security lists, but that is a future proposal, not a rule that will take effect this year.

The unsigned order spoke for the six Republican appointees. The three liberals, all Democratic appointees, dissented into two separate opinions.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said Trump’s order was unlawful and should have been struck down. “It needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections,” she said.

“Today’s decision does not address whether the President’s attempts to interfere with States’ administration of the November 2026 elections are lawful,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent joined by Justice Elena Kagan. “Nor does it suggest that the Executive Branch has any constitutional or statutory authority to implement the President’s directives. Instead, today’s decision merely postpones adjudication of those challenges.”

Trump issued his executive order on March 31 with the aim of “ensuring citizenship verification” in federal elections. California and 22 other Democratic-led states sued a few days later and said Trump sought to use the Postal Service to impose new restrictions on voting by mail. They also argued the Constitution gives states and Congress the power to regulate elections, not the president.

A federal judge in Boston and 1st Circuit Court agreed with the challengers and blocked Trump’s executive order from taking effect for the November elections.

The case on appeal was Trump vs. California because California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta was a leader of the Democratic state attorneys who sued.

SEOUL, Aug. 19 (UPI) — South Korea and the United States will significantly scale down their ongoing Ulchi Freedom Shield joint military exercise, Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said Wednesday, cutting it short by almost a week following an order by U.S. President Donald Trump.

“South Korea and the United States have agreed to make partial adjustments to the exercise period and scale at the suggestion of the U.S. side,” the JCS said in a statement.

“First, it was decided to adjust the duration of this UFS exercise to run from the 17th to the 21st,” the statement said. “Second, it was decided to conduct the combined field maneuver training on a reduced scale.”

The allies are discussing specific details of the field training reduction, the JCS added.

Ulchi Freedom Shield began Monday and was originally scheduled to run through Aug. 27.

The move comes after Trump called for the 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 Korean Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said Wednesday morning that Seoul was not given advance notice of Trump’s directive.

“Neither our government nor officials within the U.S. government had any prior knowledge of what President Trump revealed on Truth Social,” Cho said at a parliamentary hearing. “Consequently, we were not notified beforehand.”

In his Sunday post, Trump said Pyongyang “has been unthreatening and respectful” while he has been in the White House.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump touted his personal relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, saying Kim had “always treated me with great respect.”

“I understand him. He understands me,” Trump said, adding that Kim had responded to his requests for talks but providing no further details.

The Wall Street Journal, citing U.S. officials, reported Tuesday that Trump is pushing aides to arrange a meeting with Kim as soon as this fall, although no official planning is underway. Trump has privately discussed holding talks during his next trip to Asia, which could come in November when world leaders gather for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China.

North Korea, meanwhile, has not publicly responded to Trump’s overture. In a commentary published earlier Wednesday, before Seoul announced the reduction, the state-run Korean Central News Agency criticized Ulchi Freedom Shield as “frantic exercises” pushing the Korean Peninsula to the “threshold of a war.”

The commentary threatened that Pyongyang would continue exercising its “right to self-defence” to counter what it called military threats from the allies.

North Korea frequently condemns U.S.-South Korean military drills as rehearsals for an invasion.

Trump similarly called for suspending or scaling back the exercises in his first term, when he pursued direct diplomacy with Kim that included summits in Singapore and Hanoi and a brief meeting at the DMZ.

After the 2018 Singapore summit, Trump surprised observers by announcing that the United States would halt what he called “provocative” joint military exercises with South Korea. That year’s Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise was canceled, while several subsequent drills were reduced in scale.

The Trump administration again on Wednesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene — and fast — to save President Trump’s plan for the U.S. Postal Service to place new nationwide limits on mail voting ahead of the November midterms.

It did so after a lower court judge blocked the Postal Service plan from moving forward for a second time on Tuesday.

Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer wrote to the high court that if it does not act quickly to lift both of the lower court’s “erroneous” rulings blocking the plan, those orders “will effectively run out the clock on the government’s ability to implement” the changes in time for the November election, “thereby causing irreparable harm to the federal government, the public, and election integrity.”

Sauer’s latest argument was filed in an emergency case already before the Supreme Court, in which the Trump administration is challenging a June decision blocking the Postal Service’s rule changes by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani.

Talwani, an appointee of President Obama, ruled in favor of California and 22 other states that had challenged the new rules as coming far too late in the election year to be implemented without causing significant disruptions and harming voters. That decision, which was upheld by an appellate court in July, had barred the new measures from being implemented in the states that sued, but not elsewhere.

However, Sauer filed his latest argument in response to a second ruling by Talwani in a separate case Tuesday, in which she sided with the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups to block the Postal Service plans from moving forward nationwide.

“That it is now less than 90 days before the November 3, 2026 midterm elections underscores the critical need for an injunction to prevent Defendants from changing election rules on the eve of the election,” Talwani wrote.

The court battle follows an executive order Trump issued in March, in which he called on the Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security to ensure “citizenship verification and integrity in federal elections” by compiling their own state-by-state lists of citizens who are eligible to vote and then using those lists to restrict who may vote by mail in each state.

The order said the Postal Service “shall not transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual unless those individuals have been enrolled on a State-specific list.”

The order was immediately slammed by Democratic attorneys general and independent voting rights groups as a ploy by the Trump administration to get its hands on state voter rolls, which it has failed to secure in separate legal challenges, and severely limit mail voting, which Trump has without evidence alleged is a major source of voter fraud.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta helped lead the states’ lawsuit challenging Trump’s order, and has praised Talwani’s orders blocking it from taking effect. Bonta has said the law is clear that states control elections, not the federal government, and that Trump’s order is an illegal and dangerous power grab ahead of a pivotal election in which the president’s party is poised to lose power.

A spokesperson for Bonta’s office said it was aware of Sauer’s filing and considering “next steps” Wednesday.

The Trump administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court is limited in scope, in that it hinges on a technical argument that the challenges to the new rules are premature — and that the Postal Service should be allowed to continue preparing for the new rules to be implemented while the legal battle over their legality continues.

Sauer reiterated that argument in his filing Wednesday, asking the high court to not only issue its order soon, but to make clear in it that not one but both of Talwani’s orders are premature.

He wrote that courts cannot block the implementation of an executive order “that merely instructs agencies to pursue a proposed policy in a manner that is consistent with law,” particularly before those agencies “actually take concrete actions that injure” the groups suing to block the order.

Therefore, Sauer wrote, it would be “prudent” for the high court to make clear that it was halting Talwani’s first order “based on the uncertainty concerning the government’s future actions, not anything specific to the individual plaintiffs” — or, in other words, on grounds that would apply to her second order, too.

He wrote that it was “critical” that the court “act promptly.”

The states have asked the high court to block Trump’s order, which they said would deny mail ballots to “many of the millions of voters who rely on mail voting — especially voters with disabilities and those in rural areas.”

The League of Women Voters hailed Talwani’s order Tuesday as a win for voters and for the U.S. Constitution, which it said makes clear the president does not have the authority to rewrite election rules.

“Millions of Americans, including seniors, military voters, voters with disabilities, rural voters, and citizens living overseas, rely on voting by mail to participate in our democracy,” said Marcia Johnson, the group’s chief of activation and justice. “Today’s decision reaffirms that the rules governing our democracy must be set by the Constitution and the law, not by executive overreach.”

When the high court will rule is unclear, though the emergency nature of the appeal calls for a prompt response.