What the Voting Rights Act Decision Means, and Hegseth’s Heated Testimony

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From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Thursday, April 30th. Here's what we're covering.

The consequence of this decision is as clear as it is dangerous. Fewer protections for voters, more power for politicians to draw maps that silence them, particularly historically disenfranchised voters.

In Washington and across the U.S., Democrats are blasting the Supreme Court's ruling on the Voting Rights Act, calling it a betrayal of the civil rights movement. At the same time, Republicans are calling it a major win for the constitution, and hailing the decision, which could open the door for more red states to redraw their election maps to benefit the GOP.

They determined that the the last map that was drawn for Louisiana was done unconstitutionally, and we've been saying that consistently from the beginning, for that was the obvious result.

In its ruling yesterday, the court's conservative majority threw out a Louisiana voting map, saying that lawmakers there illegally used race as a consideration when drawing a majority black congressional district. Under the Voting Rights Act, states across the country have long done what Louisiana did. They created districts where non-white voters are the majority to protect those voters' ability to elect candidates of their choice.

What is clear though is that the national redistricting wars that define politics in this country for the past year will continue in earnest ahead of the twenty twenty eight election. The guardrails that had kept some states in check are now gone because of this Supreme Court ruling. So it's likely that Republicans in states across the South will redraw their maps, potentially targeting Democrats.

Nick explains more about how the ruling could supercharge the nationwide gerrymandering arms race on today's episode of The Daily.

Secretary Heseth, you have been lying to the American public about this war from day one.

On Capitol Hill yesterday, lawmakers grilled Secretary of Defense Pete Heggseth about the war in Iran as he sat for his first public testimony since the conflict began.

Who you cheering for here? Who you pulling for? Our troops are doing incredible work.

In the fiery hearing, Hegseth lashed out at lawmakers who've criticized the conflict.

The biggest challenge, the biggest adversary we face at this point. are the reckless, feckless, and defeatist words of congressional Democrats.

Over the course of nearly five hours, he faced sharp questions about the justifications for U.S. involvement, how much longer the war will continue, and how much it's costing American taxpayers. Hegseth would not commit to any timeline, but for the first time the Pentagon did provide an official estimate for how much the war has cost. $25 billion. Much of that expense has been from the tens of thousands of bombs and missiles that the U.S. has used in the conflict.

One evening last summer, Dr. David Rellman, who's a microbiology and biosecurity expert at Stanford University. was working in his home office and he had been hired by an AI company to pressure test its chatbot. What Dr. Rellman had been hired to do

My colleague Gabriel Dance has been looking into the guardrails that AI chatbots are. Have or don't have. He says Dr. Rellman was shaken by his experience with the chatbot, which seemed to be offering a blueprint for biological warfare. And Rellman's not the only specialist in that field who's concerned. Several other experts who've been hired by leading AI companies to vet their chatbots for potential safety risks.

So, being that I'm not a biologist or virologist myself, I took these transcripts and put them in front of more than a half dozen. Experts in those fields. All of the scientists found them concerning to some degree, but some of them were much more concerned than others. On one hand, I had several experts telling me that these chatbots were offering basically roadmaps to very dangerous biological weapons.

Gabriel says that some experts are pushing for companies to censor swaths of biological information to try and head off these kinds of potential threats. But others say that's an overreaction, and that restricting that info from AI could stifle breakthrough medical research, like for developing new drugs. In response to questions from the Times about the chatbot transcript.

If you're gonna go out to uh run a race, you should really run a race to try to win.

The man who held the record for being the fastest known runner over age 100 has died at 103.

I don't know how you can run to be second. Or Thurs.

Lester Wright earned the title a few years ago, running the hundred meter dash in twenty six point three four seconds. That's more than twice as long as it took Usain Bolt to clinch his world record for that race. But you know, Bolt was twenty-two when he did that. Born in New Jersey in the early 1920s, Wright ran track in high school before joining the Army and serving in World War II. Then he opened a dental lab making prosthetic tea.