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The US Supreme Court on Monday delivered a significant blow to Republican efforts to lock in control of the House, refusing to let Missouri use a newly gerrymandered congressional map in November's midterm elections. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, handling emergency appeals from the state, rejected without comment the request from Missouri officials and the state GOP to override a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that had greenlit a voter referendum on the map.

The disputed map, drawn by the Republican-led legislature last year at President Trump's urging, dismantled a Democratic-held district in Kansas City to give Republicans a strong advantage in seven of the state's eight House seats. Opponents organized under the banner People Not Politicians Missouri gathered enough signatures to force a referendum, which the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruled must proceed. Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway warned the justices that scrapping the map now would inflict "unprecedented chaos" on the state's election administration.

The ruling arrives as Trump has pressed red-state legislatures nationwide to redraw maps mid-decade to shore up the GOP's fragile majority. The court has previously sided with Republicans in Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, Virginia and New York redistricting fights, and with Democrats in California. With control of the House on the ballot in a cycle where Trump's approval ratings are underwater and Democratic enthusiasm is climbing, every seat matters — and Missouri just took one off the Republican side of the ledger.

OpenAI on Tuesday claimed one of the most audacious scientific breakthroughs ever announced by an AI lab: a solution to the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems posted by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000 and unsolved for roughly nine decades. In a blog post, the company said an internal model more powerful than the recently released GPT-6 Astra, working alongside 10,000 concurrent agents, produced the solution. Training on the model reportedly began just 11 days earlier, on August 28.

The Navier-Stokes equations describe how fluids and gases flow — the mathematical spine of everything from weather forecasting to aircraft design. Proving that smooth, well-behaved solutions always exist in three dimensions has resisted the best mathematicians for generations, and the Clay Institute attaches a $1 million reward to a valid proof. OpenAI is calling the result "unprecedented," but the mathematical community will not take the claim on faith. Verification of a proof at this scale typically requires months of peer scrutiny, and AI-generated mathematics has a track record of impressive-looking outputs that unravel under expert examination.

The announcement — coming just as OpenAI ships new consumer tools like ChatGPT Sketch and competes against Meta's newly launched Muse agent — reads as much as a demonstration of raw model capability as a scientific contribution. If the proof holds, it would mark the first time an AI system has cracked a problem at the frontier of pure mathematics. If it doesn't, it will become the highest-profile cautionary tale yet about hype cycles in frontier AI. Either way, the era of AI systems being turned loose on humanity's hardest open problems has arrived.

The trade war between the world's largest bilateral trading partners went from cold to hot on Tuesday, as Canada's retaliatory tariffs on roughly $20 billion of American goods took effect at midnight. Prime Minister Mark Carney defended the move as "dollar for dollar" retaliation and used the moment to double down on his broader pivot away from US dependence, accelerating trade agreements with European and Asian partners and pledging support for affected Canadian workers and industries.

President Trump responded by threatening to ban US sales of aircraft from Bombardier, the Montreal-based planemaker, unless it moves manufacturing to the United States. Bombardier noted its supply chain already includes about 2,800 US companies across 47 states — meaning the threatened ban would gut American aerospace jobs as collateral damage. The escalation follows months of tit-for-tat measures that former Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland, who negotiated the original USMCA with Trump's first administration, described as a fundamental rupture in the relationship.

Carney's Canada has emerged as the highest-profile test case for whether a smaller economy can absorb Trump's tariff regime and push back rather than capitulate. Allies from Mexico to the EU are watching closely: if Ottawa succeeds in reorienting trade away from the US without an economic collapse, it becomes a template. If it fails, Trump's tariff-as-coercion strategy gains momentum globally. Either outcome will reshape the post-war Atlantic economic order that Washington itself built.

Lonnie G. Bunch III, the historian who built the National Museum of African American History and Culture from a congressional mandate into one of the most visited institutions on the National Mall, announced Monday that he will step down as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. His departure follows a punishing year of White House attacks on how the Smithsonian and other federally supported cultural bodies portray American history — attacks that intensified in the run-up to the country's 250th anniversary.

Bunch became the Smithsonian's 14th secretary in 2019 and its first Black leader. Under his tenure, the sprawling network of 21 museums and the National Zoo weathered pandemic closures, a funding crunch, and, most recently, an executive order accusing the institution of "anti-American ideology." Trump has pushed to strip exhibits touching on slavery, systemic racism, and other subjects his administration deems divisive, and has threatened funding for museums that resist.

Bunch's exit removes the highest-profile institutional defender of an evidence-based approach to American history at a moment when the White House is aggressively rewriting the narrative for the 2026 semiquincentennial. Whoever the Smithsonian's Board of Regents chooses next — and how much deference they show the administration — will shape how tens of millions of visitors encounter the story of the United States for years to come.

LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed rival that upended men's professional golf when it launched in 2022, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States, according to reports Tuesday. The filing releases players from their guaranteed contracts — some worth hundreds of millions of dollars — and opens the door for them to return to the PGA Tour or other tours as restructuring proceeds.

LIV insisted the move is not a shutdown. The league said it intends to relaunch its competition schedule in early 2027 alongside a new lead investor, and framed the bankruptcy as a strategic reset. Backed by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, LIV spent billions of dollars luring away marquee names including Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau, forcing the PGA Tour into a still-unresolved framework agreement and reshaping the economics of the sport.

The filing is a significant setback for Saudi Arabia's sportswashing playbook, which has poured money into golf, soccer, boxing and Formula 1. Whether LIV can emerge leaner and viable, or whether the world's top players simply walk away, will determine whether the disruption of golf's establishment produces a durable second tour or just a very expensive footnote.

US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asked his newly installed CDC director to remove references to two Pennsylvania measles deaths from the agency's online outbreak tally, according to sources familiar with the request. Kennedy — a longtime vaccine skeptic whose confirmation was fought bitterly by public health experts — questioned whether measles had actually "contributed" to the fatalities. Measles is one of the most infectious diseases known to medicine, and both deaths were reviewed by state and federal disease investigators before being counted.

The request lands amid a broader collapse of trust in federal public health data under the Kennedy-led HHS. Childhood vaccination rates among US kindergartners have slid since the pandemic, and outbreaks of measles — a disease the CDC declared eliminated from the US in 2000 — have returned to levels not seen in a generation. Public health researchers warn that scrubbing verified deaths from official tallies would not just mislead the public; it would corrode the surveillance infrastructure the country relies on to respond to outbreaks.

Separately on Monday, the Supreme Court declined to grant a New York kindergartener a religious exemption from that state's mandatory school vaccination law, letting stand rules requiring polio, chickenpox and other standard childhood immunizations. The scientific consensus on measles is unambiguous: the vaccine is safe, extraordinarily effective, and prevents a disease that kills roughly one in a thousand children infected. Anything at HHS that softens that message — including quietly editing the death count — puts children at risk.