Supreme Court blocks Trump's mail-ballot screening for the midterms
Today is Tuesday, September 15, 2026
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- Good morning, and welcome to Hark News. Here's what the world got up to while you slept. First, the weather in New York. A high of 73 and a low of 53, with clear skies.
- Leading tonight, because it decides how the 2026 midterms actually get run: the Supreme Court refused, late Monday, to let the Trump administration impose new orders requiring the Postal Service to screen mail-in ballots.
- ProPublica reporters say Umar Kremlev, a Russian businessman with ties to the Kremlin, put hundreds of thousands of dollars toward the May wedding of Donald Trump Jr. and Bettina Anderson, and brought along a crowd of Russian guests that left the other attendees scratching their heads.
- The most blunt reaction came from Frank Montoya Jr., a retired F.B.I. official who held senior counterintelligence roles. His take, as quoted by ProPublica, was that if he is paying for your wedding, at some point you are going to owe him something, and that this should be unthinkable for the son of a president.
- The family's answer was basically that this was a present, nothing more. A spokesperson for Don Jr. told The New Republic's Edith Olmsted the two men struck up a friendship a few years back, with no business dealings between them.
- The inspector general inside the Homeland Security Department has graded the now-closed detention camp in the Florida Everglades, the so-called Alligator Alcatraz, and it came up short on 6 standards: medical care, food, hygiene, recreation, environmental health and safety, and special management units.
- The detail that will stick: some detainees were locked in individual metal cages with roughly 18 square feet of floor space, some of them outdoors, for as long as two hours. Staff told inspectors those were voluntary calming areas, places to manage emotions and reflect on behavior choices.
- Not everyone read the inspector general's findings as accountability. Gillian Brockell at The American Prospect called the report likely part of a cover-up, pointing out that Amnesty International reported eight months ago that the outdoor cages were too small for someone to stand, had no awning, and that people were chained to them.
- The New York Times's Nick Corasaniti and Hamed Aleaziz reported on a whistleblower alleging that inspectors under top Homeland Security leaders may have violated state law while hunting noncitizens on voter rolls. The department's Unlawful Voter Initiative, launched last month, sent hundreds of agents through voter files.
- The specific allegation is that agents used birth dates and partial Social Security numbers, gathered from internal and external sources, to log in as the very voters whose records they were seeking. Some states require a user to declare they are the person whose record they're pulling.
- Here's the part that undercuts the whole initiative. Agents built records of people they labeled unlawful voters even though officers were worried about the quality of the databases, and Homeland Security itself noted the data was flawed and warned there will be U.S. citizens in that population. The department has also been opaque about how it compiled the list.
- Two Democratic senators, Chuck Schumer and Alex Padilla, say they found a Homeland Security training video explaining how its voter-fraud list was assembled. The video's own words, per their letter: supplemental magic. That matters, because the department has already conceded its data is unreliable and warned American citizens could get flagged as unlawful voters.
- There's a telling wrinkle in the markets story. After prominent AI figures spent the weekend warning that the technology needs government guardrails, shares in AI and chip companies slid.
- A fourth post rounded up the critics. People who say A.I. will destroy the world and data centers are bad for your neighborhood, he wrote, are the same people who said the world would be extinguished by climate change, a hoax that never worked out for them. He called them revolutionaries, but for a bad and evil cause.
- Also today, the Environmental Protection Agency said it is eliminating rules that limit greenhouse gas emissions from coal and natural gas power plants, which the agency framed as unleashing American energy. It also intends to stop future administrations from writing regulations of that kind again.
- Energy industry bosses are telling anyone who'll listen that America and the wider world have run into a genuine fuel crunch, according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal.
- And that's your world for today. The full stories and the links are waiting in the app. Tap through, bookmark what matters, and share what's worth sharing. And if you want to see what stuck, take today's quiz in the app: five quick questions. And if Hark is making your mornings a little better, share it with a friend. It's the best way to help us grow. I'll see you again tomorrow morning. Until then, have a great day.