THE PRICE OF WAR: Pentagon officials revealed in testimony before Congress that the controversial war on Iran so far has cost $25 billion as Secretary Pete Hegseth put in a defiant appearance.

  “The biggest challenge, the biggest adversary we face at this point are the reckless, feckless and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans,” Hegseth said to the House Armed Services Committee before members had asked a single question.

  The secretary dismissed questions from Democrats about the increased costs of gas and food as a result of the war as “gotcha” questions. “What would you pay to ensure that Iran doesn’t get a nuclear bomb?” he shot back.

  Oil prices yesterday surged to a wartime high of $126 a barrel.

  Asked whether the US is winning the war, Hegseth said, “Militarily it’s been an astounding success.”  Iran has not surrendered and is still blocking traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. 

VOTING RIGHTS: The conservative majority of the Supreme Court yesterday threw out the lines of a majority black congressional district in Louisiana, punching a major hole in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

  Ever since passage of the  Voting Rights Act lawmakers have created districts where nonwhite voters are in the majority to protect their ability to elect candidates.

  Justice Samuel Alito  wrote that from hereon to challenge district maps under the Voting Rights Act litigants would need to show evidence supporting “a strong inference” that a state “intentionally drew its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.” 

  The problem here is that in some areas race and party loyalty are closely linked. Texas, for instance, broke up Democrat-leaning districts and in so doing diluted the minority vote.

  Justice Elena Kagan, in dissent, wrote that it will now be nearly impossible to use race drawing up voting maps to protect minority voters, saying that “the court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity.”

  Yesterday’s ruling could set off a Republican rush to draw favorable new districts before the midterms. Only a few hours after the court’s ruling the Florida legislature approved a congressional district map designed to give their Republicans four more seats in Congress.

  In Georgia, where in 2023 a federal court ruled that the redistricting map discriminated against Black voters, Republicans called for an immediate re-drawing of the lines to give themselves more seats.  

THE SEA SHELL PLOT: Lawyers for former FBI Director James Comey said in court yesterday that they will file a complaint of malicious prosecution against the Justice Department for its indictment accusing Comey of threatening to kill President Trump in an Instagram post.

  A little under a year ago on a North Carlina Beach Comey came across the numbers “8647” arranged in seashells, took a picture of it, and posted it. The term “86” is generally taken to mean cancelling a menu item or throwing a drunk out of a bar … in this case throwing out the 47^thpresident. But Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche takes it as a threat to kill.

  Trump said 86 “is a mob term for ‘kill ‘em’” and that his life was “probably” in danger from the Comey posting. 

  Veteran prosecutors have given the DOJ a snowball’s chance of winning a conviction.

INTELLIGENCE: The best brains in tech are fighting over money and artificial intelligence.

  Testimony started this week in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman and Open AI claiming he invested in the company believing it would be a nonprofit rather than what it became, a $730 billion for-profit enterprise.

  Musk testified that he had invested $38 million and that, “I was a fool who provided them free funding to create a start-up.” He walked away from his investment.

  The trial that could re-shape the business world of artificial intelligence is expected to take about four weeks in Oakland, California.

THE CROWN JEWELS. Britain’s King Charles visited New York yesterday. Mayor Zohran Mamdani was not able to get a private audience, but he said that if he had he would have asked the king to return to India the priceless Koh-i-Noor Diamond that is now part of the crown jewels. 

  The 105.6-carat diamond  was taken from an 11-year-old Indian prince in the 1840s when India was a British colony and given to Queen Victoria.  It’s a sore subject in India where Mamdani’s parents were born.

THE MONEY BEAT: The Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged yesterday in the Fed’s last meeting with Trump-enemy Jerome Powell as chairman. Powell says he will stay on as a governor even though the chair usually resigns.

  Speaking of President Trump’s campaign for lower interest rates and insults, Powell said, “I really worry that these attacks are battering the institution and putting at risk the thing that really matters to the public, which is the ability to conduct monetary policy without taking into consideration political factors.”

  Trump’s nominee Kevin Warsh is moving through the approval mill to become the next chair of the Fed and he will likely also face pressure from Trump. But the chairman does not have dictatorial power over interest rates. Twelve people have a vote on monetary policy. 

THE OBIT PAGE: Peter Raven, a botanist who warned that climate change, deforestation, over population, and unchecked development are existential threats to the planet, died Saturday in St. Louis at age 89.

  Raven made the Missouri Botanical Garden into a premier research institution and was one of science’s most influential voices on threats to the planet. “As we destroy the environment, we are destroying ourselves,” he told the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. “We are part of the web of life, and what we do to the web, we do to ourselves.” 

BELOW THE FOLD: President Trump yesterday told reporters that he plans to release government files on UFOs.

  No one needs to see the UFO files for evidence of alien life in Washington.

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