Key events
Uwa Ede-Osifo
The FBI has arrested a former military special operations employee accused of providing classified information to the media, the agency’s director Kash Patel announced on Wednesday.
The US Department of Justice said in a press release that the former employee, identified as Courtney Williams, 40, was arrested on Tuesday and indicted on Wednesday for allegedly sharing classified material with a journalist.
While the journalist is not named in the criminal complaint, Williams was interviewed by the investigative reporter Seth Harp for his 2025 nonfiction book about Fort Bragg, the North Carolina headquarters of the US Army’s Delta Force, a clandestine special operations unit.
The book, titled The Fort Bragg Cartel, examined a string of deaths at the base and the alleged involvement of elite soldiers in drug trafficking.
Williams worked at Fort Bragg for six years, according to the FBI’s criminal complaint. She was a custodian of sensitive documents, including fake passports for undercover agents, and would occasionally field calls related to the unit’s front companies, according to an August 2025 excerpt of Harp’s book published in Politico.
A federal judge on Wednesday halted a move by US president Donald Trump’s administration to end legal protections granted to over 5,000 Ethiopians that have allowed them to live and work in the United States.
The ruling by district judge Brian Murphy in Boston marked the latest legal setback for the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to terminate the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for 13 countries in furtherance of Trump’s hardline immigration agenda.
TPS under federal law is available to people whose home countries have experienced natural disasters, armed conflicts or other extraordinary events.
It provides eligible migrants with work authorization and temporary protection from deportation.
Democrats demand passage of Iran war powers resolution despite House recess
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Democratic party leaders have vowed to renew the effort to curb Donald Trump’s war in Iran after several days of escalating tactics that culminated in a temporary ceasefire.
Democratic lawmakers plan to seek to pass the war powers resolution introduced by New York representative Greg Meeks via unanimous consent later this morning, when the House of Representatives meets for a pro forma session. There is a press conference scheduled for after.
In a statement on today’s push, Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said: “House Republican leadership remains completely silent on the president’s unhinged behavior. Instead, they continue to enable and excuse his dangerous conduct. We will continue to unleash maximum pressure on Republicans to put patriotic duty over party loyalty and join Democrats in stopping the madness.”
Representative Glenn Ivey, of Maryland, will lead the effort, and will invite all members who are in Washington today to join. However, the motion is unlikely to succeed, since a single objection would block unanimous consent and require Democrats to pursue a formal vote on the resolution.
In recent months, several war powers resolutions have failed in Congress after a handful of Democrats voted alongside Republicans. But Trump’s aggressive overtures this week – including a Truth Social post that said “a whole civilization” could be wiped out if Iran did not agree to demands, have pushed some to act.
“We need a permanent end to Donald Trump’s reckless war of choice,” said Jeffries on CNN shortly after Trump announced the two-week ceasefire with Iran on Tuesday.
“House Democrats have demanded that Speaker Mike Johnson immediately reconvene the House back into session so we can move a war powers resolution that will end this conflict permanently.”
Read the full story here:
In other developments:
After a private meeting at the White House with Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, Donald Trump seemed to renew his threats against the defensive military alliance for not helping fight the US-Israeli war on Iran, and hinted he could again try to seize Greenland from Nato member Denmark.
Before Trump stepped into his meeting with the Nato secretary-general, and as the ceasefire with Iran seemed to be falling apart on its first day, the president found time to continue a social-media feud with his former ally Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Speaking to reporters in Hungary, the US vice-president, JD Vanceclaimed not to recognize the name of the Vatican ambassador to the US when he was asked about reports that a Pentagon official had reprimanded that Catholic diplomat, Cardinal Christophe Pierreover the American-born pope’s opposition to US militarism.
At a Pentagon press conference, Pete Hegseth said that Iran “begged for this ceasefire”, and claimed that Operation Epic Fury “decimated” Iran’s military.
The US justice department announced that the FBI arrested Courtney Williamsa military veteran who later worked in support of Delta Force, a covert commando unit, after she was indicted for “alleged transmission of classified national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it, including a journalist”.
Trump, who announced with some fanfare last year a doubling of tariffs on imported steel, plans to use tens of millions of dollars worth of donated foreign steel to build his $400m White House ballroom, the New York Times reported.
