The Department of Homeland Security says it has suspended any actions to implement Trump’s travel ban, and the Louvre in Paris reopens after Egypt identifies the man who attacked soldiers with a machete.
President Trump pauses as he talks to journalists.
Carlos Barria / Reuters
—The Department of Homeland Security said it has suspended all actions to enforce President Donald Trump’s travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries.
—Egypt identifies the man who attacked soldiers outside the Louvre Museum in Paris.
—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
The Justice Department Appeals the Federal Court Stay on Trump's Travel Ban
Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
The U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) appealed a decision on Saturday night by a federal judge in Seattle that temporarily halted President Donald Trump’s travel ban. The judge’s ruling was made Friday night, and by the next morning the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department both said they would quit enforcing the ban that stopped people in seven majority-Muslim countries from coming to the U.S. The move by the DOJ takes the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where it could go before three judges, one appointed by former-President George W. Bush, another by Jimmy Carter, and the third by Barack Obama. As POLITICO reported, a potential hurdle for Trump’s ban is that “temporary restraining orders” like those issued by the federal judge in Seattle “are not ordinarily appealable. Usually a party who wants to appeal has to wait until the next stage in the process, a preliminary injunction.” If the Ninth Circuit Court refuses to hear the appeal then it could go to the Supreme Court.
The judge opens up our country to potential terrorists and others that do not have our best interests at heart. Bad people are very happy!
Romanian Prime Minister Rescinds Decree that Legalized Corruption
Stoyan Nenov / Reuters
The prime minister of Romania, Sorin Grindeanu, bowed to massive protests on Saturday against a decree that would have protected politicians from prosecution for corruption. The decree decriminalized some offences of graft and bribery of up to $48,000. It was pitched as a way to relieve pressure on the prison system, although it mainly would have protected dozens of government officials. Protesters had taken to the streets for five days, with as many as 330,000 showing up in 70 different cities—140,000 of whom were in a plaza near the prime minister’s office building. The decree would have especially helped Social Democrat leader Liviu Dragnea, who was convicted of electoral fraud and was accused of using his political influence to get state salaries for two people. The conviction barred Dragnea from serving in political office. He is viewed as the power behind the prime minister, who took office last month.
Egypt Identifies the Man Who Attacked Guards at the Louvre
Christian Hartmann / Reuters
An Egyptian Interior Ministry official said on Saturday that the man who attacked soldiers at the Louvre Museum in Paris was 28-year-old Abdullah Reda Refaie al-Hamahmy, a man with no history of political activism or criminal activity, the Associated Press reported. Al-Hamahmy came to Paris on a tourist visa and bought two military machetes at a gun store in the city. Then, while trying to enter the Louvre’s underground shopping center, he rushed at French guards. The guards shot al-Hamahmy four times, and he is recovering from those wounds, which are no longer listed as life-threatening. Al-Hamahmy is Egyptian, although he is believed to have been living in the United Arab Emirates. He came to Paris last week and sent his family a photo of himself with the Eiffel Tower. During the attack, al-Hamahmy yelled "Allahu akbar!" and French President Francois Hollande has said there is “no doubt” this was a terror attack. Al-Hamahmy’s father denied to reporters that his son was radicalized or involved in any militant group. The Louvre, which houses countless masterpieces of art, reopened Saturday morning.
The Department of Homeland Security and the State Department Suspend Trump's Travel Ban
Brian Snyder / Reuters
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Saturday it would suspend all actions to implement President Donald Trump’s travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries, and the State Department said it would allow visa holders from those countries to to enter the U.S. Both announcements came after a federal judge in Seattle ruled to temporarily block Trump’s executive order, a ruling that derived from a lawsuit filed by the state of Washington, and joined by Minnesota. “This decision shuts down the executive order immediately,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said Friday night after the ruling was made. “That relief is immediate, happens right now.” In accordance with that ruling, the State Department said it would allow people with visas from the previously banned countries to enter the U.S., and in a separate statement DHS said it would stop enforcing Trump’s order, effectively returning to the standards prior to the ban. In its statement, DHS said it had “suspended any and all actions implementing the affected sections of the Executive Order entitled, 'Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.'” Trump denounced the judge’s decision via Twitter, saying:
The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!
When President Trump last summer implored Republicans to launch a nationwide gerrymandering blitz to pad their narrow House majority, the fight he started did not seem fair. GOP lawmakers had both the will and the power to draw their party new seats, while Democrats were hamstrung by limits of their own making. The question was not whether Republicans could expand their edge in Congress, but by how much.
This morning the landscape looks a lot different, after Virginia voters yesterday approved a lopsided new House map that could hand Democrats an additional four seats that Republicans currently hold. The Democratic redistricting victory is the party’s second in a statewide referendum. When combined with new lines that California voters endorsed in November, Democrats have now succeeded in drawing districts that will likely yield them nine more seats this fall, at least matching what Republicans have been able to achieve in states that they control. By some measures, Democrats have jumped into the redistricting lead, bolstering their chances of winning back the House majority in the midterm elections.
Patients are getting stuck in the emergency department for days while waiting for a spot in an inpatient ward.
In the last months, weeks, and days of his life, “I will not go to the emergency room” became my husband’s mantra. Andrej had esophageal cancer that had spread throughout his body (but not to his ever-willful brain), and, having trained as a doctor, I had jury-rigged a hospital at home, aided by specialists who got me pills to boost blood pressure; to dampen the effects of liver failure; to stem his cough; to help him swallow, wake up, fall asleep.
“I will not go to the emergency room”—emphasis on not—were his first words after passing out, having a seizure, or regurgitating the protein smoothies I made to pass his narrowed esophagus. He said it again and again, even as fluid built up in his lungs, rendering him short of breath and prone to agonizing coughing spells. He had been a big, athletic guy, but now, in the ugly process of dying, he was looking gaunt. Ours was a precarious existence, but I understood his adamant rejection of the emergency department. Most prior visits had morphed into extended trips into a terrifying medical underworld—to a purgatory known as emergency-department boarding.
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The mystery of the missing scientists began with a Silver Alert. In late February, a retired Air Force major general named Neil McCasland left his house in New Mexico for a walk and never returned. Rumors spread on social media that the elderly former astronautical engineer had been abducted or killed. Forget Nancy Guthrie, they said. Here was a guy who used to run a “UFO-linked” lab. Here was a guy with knowledge of “America’s deepest, darkest secrets.” So where was this guy?
McCasland’s wife did her best with a post on Facebook to address what she called the “misinformation circulating about Neil and his disappearance,” but wild notions only multiplied. Dots were added, then connected: Another scientist—an advanced-materials researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) named Monica Reza—had disappeared while hiking near Los Angeles in June 2025. A physicist at MIT had been murdered in December. “What is going on seems to be an enemy action,” Walter Kirn, the novelist and podcast contrarian, said last month.
For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.
At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.
Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.
Kash Patel has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.
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On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log on to an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.”
Patel oversees an agency that employs roughly 38,000 people, including many who are trained to investigate and verify information that can be presented under oath in a court of law. News of his emotional outburst ricocheted through the bureau, prompting chatter among officials and, in some corners of the building, expressions of relief. The White House fielded calls from the bureau and from members of Congress asking who was now in charge of the FBI.
Even in the best of times, the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner is an awkward and ethically fraught affair. Journalists spend the evening partying with the president and administration officials whom they’re supposed to cover rigorously and skeptically. I’ve been to the dinner several times over the years. It’s typically crowded and a little chaotic, and the ratio of non-journalists to journalists is about 10 to 1. The evening is promoted as a celebration of journalism and the First Amendment, but it has always been a bit of an embarrassment.
These aren’t the best of times for White House correspondents or, for that matter, the First Amendment. And this year’s gala figures to be even more awkward and embarrassing than usual.
Over the past 15 years or so, Democrats have won a lot of races because the opposing party’s primary voters decided to nominate right-wing ideologues (Christine O’Donnell, Todd Akin, Kari Lake) rather than normal Republicans. In all of these races, the Republican establishment warned that nominating an archconservative would undermine their chances of victory, and was proved completely correct.
Now Democrats finally have the chance to do the same thing. In Michigan, a purple state that Donald Trump won twice, the physician Abdul El-Sayed is running a competitive race for the party’s Senate nomination. If successful, he would turn a very likely Democratic win into a jump ball.
The people we were died at the exact moment our child did.
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My husband, David, hates Valentine’s Day. He once called it “New Year’s Eve with nuclear weapons.” I pretend not to care. Still, when the day passes entirely unremarked on, a woman can’t help but feel overlooked.
On Valentine’s Day 2024, David found a way out. He booked a speech on February 14 that required traveling from our home in Washington, D.C., to Toronto. I couldn’t object—he was getting paid. Anyway, I had my own plans: an “anti–Valentine’s Day” dinner hosted by one of the foreign embassies.
As I got ready, I called our oldest daughter, Miranda. She answered from her Brooklyn bathroom, getting ready for her own party. She propped her phone up beside her sink and laughed when I told her about her father’s strategic Valentine’s Day escape.
Fifteen years after Steve Jobs’s death, the company is a successful, if unexciting, powerhouse.
Tim Cook’s job was to make Apple boring—and he did. Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, is stepping down after 15 years in the role. He had succeeded Steve Jobs after the visionary co-founder of Apple Computer Company left only months before dying of pancreatic cancer in 2011. Since then, Apple has grown in market value by 2,000 percent. It has also transformed into a staid, if immensely effective, firm that sells people glass rectangles, wireless earbuds, and, sometimes, computers. This legacy is not tragic, but it is somber. The crucible in which the personal computer and the smartphone were forged is just a big company now.
Jobs and Steve “Woz” Wozniak started Apple Computer in 1976 to bring Woz’s design for an early personal computer to market, but Jobs did not serve as CEO until 1997, when he returned after years away. Before then, a series of more ordinary businesspeople had run the company—mostly former semiconductor executives including Michael Scott, Mike Markkula, and Gil Amelio, along with the former PepsiCo CEO John Sculley. But by the mid-2000s, after the iMac, iPod, and iPhone had appeared, Jobs had become the apotheosized Visionary CEO—a model for the technology industry and beyond. His exacting and sometimes unreasonable demands, which dated back to the design of the Macintosh in the early 1980s, had made him a singular and irreplaceable presence: a figure who could bend an organization, an industry, and the public who would be transformed by its products to his will.
WAR-FIGHTERS! As a step to making sure we are ready for warfare at all times, we have decided to ELIMINATE THE MANDATORY FLU SHOT! Nothing says “we are ready for war” like “we all have the flu.”
Get your hot-water bottles! Get your ibuprofen! Not Tylenol, though! It knows what it did. Because we are bringing FLU to the war-fighters! Are you ready to have a RUNNY NOSE and an ITCHY THROAT? Are you ready to get REALLY SERIOUSLY DEHYDRATED AND NEED MEDICAL ATTENTION? Hoo-RAH!
We will terrify the enemy by coming in hot! And when I say hot I mean our temperatures! We will need COUGH DROPS, and we will knock those back, CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH, with a sound more frightening than gunfire. This will strike fear into the hearts of the enemy. They will say things like “Do you need a tissue?” and “Are you okay?,” and when they are offering us that tissue, we will strike. And then we will go back to bed and lie under a tactical pile of war-fighting blankets. Peak performance is when you have a terrible headache and want to be asleep, and whenever you open your mouth you sound like someone took lawn shears to your vocal cords. YEAH!
