Virginia’s supreme court on Friday ruled that the state cannot use new congressional maps approved by voters to help Democrats gain as many as four new seats in the US House of Representatives, handing Republicans a major win before November’s midterm elections.
In a 4-3 decision, the court found that the state’s general assembly did not follow the appropriate constitutional procedure in approving the map, which voters then passed in a referendum last month.
The ruling is a setback for Democrats’ efforts nationwide to counter gerrymanders approved by Republican-led states that may oust Democratic House representatives and boost the odds that Donald Trump’s allies retain their majority in Congress’s lower chamber in the November midterm elections.
Texas, North Carolina and Missouri have enacted new maps that could gerrymander as many as seven Democrats out of their districts, while voters in Democratic-led California have approved a new map that may cost the Republican party as many as five seats.
Republicans cheered the court’s decision, with Trump calling it a “huge win for the Republican Party, and America”.
In win for Republicans, Virginia court blocks new congressional maps
The decision in Virginia comes as Republican-led southern states scramble to redraw their congressional maps following a US supreme court decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act and allowed lawmakers to break up majority-Black districts, whose voters tend to favor Democrats.
US awaiting response from Iran over proposals for ceasefire deal, says Rubio
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said that Washington is expecting a response from Iran on Friday to its proposals for an interim deal to end the conflict in the Middle East, as Iran accused the US of breaching the increasingly fragile ceasefire announced last month.
Supreme court’s Voting Rights Act ruling cited misleading data from DoJ
Exclusive: The claims Samuel Alito, a supreme court justice, made about voter turnout in Louisiana in a landmark Voting Rights Act case were based on a misleading data analysis, a Guardian review has found.
In his opinion gutting section 2 of the Voting Rights Act last week, Alito said that Black voter turnout had exceeded white voter turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. Alito’s claim was copied almost verbatim from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the justice department. It was a critical data point Alito used to make the argument that the kind of discrimination that once made the Voting Rights Act necessary no longer exists. But a review of turnout and racial data in Louisiana reveals that assertion relies on an unusual methodology.
Trump administration arrested parents of 27,000 kids in seven months
The US government has targeted thousands of parents like LT for deportation since Donald Trump took office in January 2025. A Guardian analysis of government records has found that, during the first seven months of his presidency, the administration arrested the parents of at least 27,000 children. During this period in 2025, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was deporting about twice as many parents each month compared with 2024.
Trump administration relaxing hunting restrictions in US parks and refuges
Donald Trump’s administration is quietly pushing national park, refuge and wilderness area managers to dramatically scale back hunting restrictions, raising questions about visitor safety and the impact on wildlife.
Pentagon releases previously secret files on UFOs
The Pentagon on Friday released an initial group of previously secret files documenting reports of UFOs – a move sought for decades by some.
“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation – and it’s time the American people see it for themselves,” Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, said in a statement posted on X.
What else happened today:
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The White House has branded Star Wars actor Mark Hamill “a sick individual” after an AI-generated image showing Donald Trump in a shallow grave, with the words “If Only” as an overlay was posted to one of star’s social media accounts.
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US employers added 115,000 jobs in April and the unemployment rate remained steady at 4.3%, a surprisingly robust gain to the labor market as the US-Israel war with Iran continued to drive up economic uncertainty.
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The recent outbreak of hantavirus on a Dutch cruise ship is a warning sign that reveals how cuts to US capacity have severely limited the ability of officials and scientists to track and understand pathogens like these, with troubling implications for rare outbreaks and for pandemic preparedness writ large.
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General Motors (GM) agreed to pay $12.75m to resolve claims that it illegally sold hundreds of thousands of Californians’ location and driving data to two data brokers, said the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, on Friday.
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A federal judge ruled on Thursday that the terminations of hundreds of humanities grants last year by the Trump administration’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) were unconstitutional and involved “blatant” discrimination.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on Thursday, 7 May 2026.
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