Internal documents obtained by Guardian show White House meetings, scheduled calls with top Trump officials and communications with Fox News producers

A US Navy guided-missile destroyer spent four days last month without working toilets, galley services and air conditioning in the blistering heat of the South China Sea after the warship lost power.

The incident was due to an engineering failure aboard the warship, the US 7th Fleet said in a statement to CNN, another setback as concerns mount over the heavy strain on the US Navy due to the Iran war and global commitments.

The USS Benfold, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, was on routine operations in the Indo-Pacific on July 24 when an “engineering casualty involving its generators” occurred, Navy Cmdr. Matthew Comer, spokesperson for the 7th Fleet, said.

Waves of Ukrainian drones targeted the massive logistics center outside Moscow overnight. The next morning, it was still ablaze, dark smoke rising into the sky from what was one of Russia’s largest retail warehouses.

Hundreds of miles away, Ukrainian drone crews had barely paused after the night’s work before starting to prepare for another attack.

A small group of soldiers quickly assembled in a sunflower field in southern Ukraine, gathering around 20 small planelike drones laden with explosives, before launching them toward Russia.

The launch by the Ukrainian 413th “Raid” Unmanned Systems Regiment on Sunday morning was observed by a team of Associated Press journalists — a rare glimpse into a rapidly expanding part of Ukraine’s war effort.

The federal agency tasked with studying ways to improve America’s outstandingly poor healthcare system is “on the brink,” experts warn. The Trump administration has cut its staff by 75 percent, canceled its grants en masse, and is refusing to spend tens of millions of dollars appropriated by Congress.

Whether the agency “will survive the second Trump administration is an open question,” health policy experts Aaron Carroll and David Atkins wrote in an opinion piece published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

A legal environmental group sued the U.S. government on Tuesday to halt the Trump administration’s plans announced last month to auction off massive sections of water surrounding American Samoa for potential deep-sea mining.

Earthjustice filed the federal lawsuit against the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on behalf of two groups: Fa‘asao Amerika Samoa and Conservation Council for Hawai‘i.

The legal nonprofit is requesting that a judge order the National Marine Fisheries Service to stop moving forward with its plans and to comply with the Endangered Species Act and other federal laws.

Mills lost to Republican Ryan Elijah, NBC News projects, while facing House Ethics Committee and Department of Justice investigations. Mills has denied wrongdoing.

Republican Rep. Cory Mills has lost his primary in Florida, NBC News projects, amid a swirl of investigations and negative publicity and despite running with the backing of Donald Trump.

Former television journalist Ryan Elijah captured the Republican nomination over Mills in Florida’s 7th District, a seat Trump carried by 12 points in 2024. Democrats have hoped to make it competitive this fall, especially if Mills was on the ballot.

With more than 80% of the expected vote counted, Elijah had 46% of the GOP primary vote to 34% for Mills.

A Trump administration task force created to combat antisemitism pushed for settlements with Ivy League universities despite government investigations that were rushed and incomplete or that failed to establish legal violations by the schools, a former Justice Department lawyer alleged in a whistleblower disclosure obtained by The Associated Press.

The complaint alleges that the investigations into some of the nation’s most prestigious academic institutions were designed to strong-arm the schools into cutting deals for political purposes. Outcomes of the investigations were “predetermined, without regard to the evidence” in a “politically mandated effort” to extract money from schools through settlement demands and funding freezes under the pretext of rooting out antisemitism, the complaint alleges.

Marco Rubio targets ICC’s Tomoko Akane and Abdoulaye Seye, who was investigating Israeli war crimes in Gaza

The US has sanctioned the president of the international criminal court (ICC) and a prosecutor tasked with investigating crimes committed by Israel during its war on Gaza.

The new sanctions designations were unveiled by Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, who called the Hague-based ICC a “corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority and exceeded its mandate”, in a statement.

Rubio announced that the US would sanction Tomoko Akane of Japan, the ICC president, and Abdoulaye Seye of Senegal, an ICC senior trial lawyer, because they had “directly engaged in efforts by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute officials whose government has not consented to ICC jurisdiction”.

Twenty-nine US states are seeking huge damages, claiming Meta’s platforms were addictive by design

In 1994, more than 40 US states came together to sue one of the most powerful industries on Earth: big tobacco.

The suits brought together diverse claims centred on tobacco companies’ misleading advertising and contribution to a mounting public health crisis. They ended in a negotiated settlement with the US government, in which the companies agreed to pay more than any industry ever, and the states agreed to drop a large portion of their claims.

Thirty years later, smoking is on the rise in the developing world, the companies involved remain profitable and the global tobacco market is worth nearly $1tn.

On Tuesday a major trial against Meta began, in which 29 states have brought the claim that the parent of Facebook and Instagram designed a deliberately addictive product and targeted it at children.

PJM Interconnection, the grid operator serving 67 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C., asked federal regulators on Thursday to approve rules that would cut power to new data centers ahead of households during supply shortages, Reuters reports.

The filing with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission follows two consecutive capacity auctions that failed to secure enough generation, and PJM's board projects roughly 70 GW of new large load by 2038 against roughly 15 GW of generation retired since 2022.

Disney is going to court to defend its ABC television stations from the Trump administration’s pressure campaign.

On Tuesday, the media company filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that Trump’s FCC is violating its First Amendment rights.

The administration “has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts,” the lawsuit filed in DC District Court alleges.

The legal action comes as the FCC investigates the ABC talk show “The View” and mounts an unusual challenge to the licenses held by ABC stations.

Health data appears to be most affected by administration’s attempt to wipe findings that don’t align with its priorities, tracker shows

A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct records. A survey measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and youth. Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality monitors from US embassies around the world.

These are among the hundreds of federal datasets that the Trump administration has taken down or altered as part of its aggressive campaign to wipe all mentions of data findings that do not align with the administration’s priorities.

Over the past year and a half, at least 28 federal datasets have been deleted and another 338 data collections have been modified, according to an online tracker released last week from dataindex.us, a group of data policy experts, researchers and developers that formed last year to monitor changes to government data.

“We’re at a very vulnerable point as a nation,” said Denice Ross, former US chief data scientist under the Biden administration and a cofounder of dataindex.us. “We’re facing a future where we are not going to have the information that we need to make decisions that will save lives and benefit American communities.”