timelets

The US has cleared the way for India to temporarily increase its purchases of Russian oil, reversing months of pressure on the world’s third-largest crude importer as an escalating conflict in the Persian Gulf upends energy flows.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-06/us-issues-license-to-allow-some-russian-oil-sales-to-india-mme5qix4

In court on Wednesday, a Justice Department lawyer asked for Eaton to pause his order while the government appeals, but the judge denied that request.

The judge said the repayment process should be straightforward and grew impatient when a Justice Department lawyer said the government hadn’t yet formalized its position on refunding the tariffs, which President Trump imposed by citing a decades-old law. “Your position is clear,” the judge said. “The Supreme Court told you what your position is.”

The Justice Department lawyer, Claudia Burke, said that any refund process would be time-consuming for the tariff collector, CBP. The government agency would have to manually go through millions of import entries, she added.

“We live in the age of computers,” Eaton said. “It must be possible for Customs Service to program its computers so it doesn’t need a manual review."

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/judge-orders-government-to-begin-refunding-more-than-130-billion-in-tariffs-fdc1e62c.

First lady Melania Trump expressed condolences to families who have lost loved ones to death and injury during an address to the United Nations on Monday that described “these challenging times.”

In an unprecedented role for a first lady, she opened a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on behalf of the U.S. as the country assumed the rotating presidency of the council. “I extend my earnest wishes for a swift and smooth recovery to all those who have been injured. You are in my thoughts and prayers during these challenging times,” Trump said, without mentioning any particular conflict.

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-israel-us-strikes-2026/card/speaking-at-un-melania-trump-expresses-condolences-for-the-dead-4oUsYCq5A2LzcAeEHn9Z

The federal government will stop working with Anthropic and designate the artificial intelligence company a supply-chain risk, a dramatic escalation of the government’s clash with the company over how its technology can be used by the Pentagon.

The company’s red lines had been domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, areas the Pentagon said Anthropic didn’t need to worry about because the military would never break the law with AI. Defense Department officials said Anthropic needed to fully trust the Pentagon to use the technology responsibly and relinquish control.

“We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said on Thursday.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/trump-will-end-government-use-of-anthropics-ai-models-ff3550d9

South Texas is a heightened example of what contractors are facing across the country in areas where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity has intensified. Home builders in Minnesota relayed similar experiences of raids picking up whole work crews, even those with legal documentation, said Grace Keliher, executive vice president of the Builders Association of Minnesota. Nationally, a third of commercial contractors reported being affected by immigration-enforcement actions in the past six months, according to a January report by trade group Associated General Contractors of America.

Two guards at a nearby immigration detention center said they frequently see detainees come in still wearing dusty work clothes from construction jobsites. A significant portion of the men they now guard have valid work permits, they said, which they haven’t seen in previous administrations, but those detainees still wait weeks to see a judge before being released.

Because of that, people are afraid to work whether they have legal authorization or not, a reality that has hit the industry and broader regional economy hard. Paul Rodriguez, CEO of Valley Land Title, estimated that residential construction activity fell 30% in recent months in Hidalgo County.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/texas-immigration-raids-economy-87e23e2e

Democrats (93 - 2 percent) and independents (65 - 20 percent) think the Trump administration has not given an honest account of the incident, while Republicans (60 - 19 percent) think the Trump administration has given an honest account of the incident.

https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3947

Two months after the March meeting, the administration committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters. The framework agreement called for roughly one-fifth of the chips to go to G42, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

The agreement was widely viewed as a coup for the emirate’s ruling family, overcoming longstanding U.S. national security concerns and allowing the country to compete with the most powerful economies in the world at the cutting edge of AI advances. Proponents hailed the deal for unlocking a flood of investment into the U.S. and for helping entrench American technology as the global standard.

What wasn’t publicly known: Tahnoon’s emissaries had signed the deal to purchase 49% of World Liberty that January.

At the time of the investment, World Liberty had no products. It had raised $82 million by selling a token called WLFI. Aryam’s investment, though, didn’t give it the rights to future WLFI token sales, leaving the Tahnoon-backed entity out of what was then the company’s only source of revenue, the documents said.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/spy-sheikh-secret-stake-trump-crypto-tahnoon-ea4d97e8

Only 13% of those arrested at the beginning of 2025 didn’t have either a conviction or a pending charge.

Since October, 73% taken into ICE custody had no criminal conviction and only 5% had a violent criminal conviction, according to a Cato Institute review of ICE data.

Many of the criminal immigrants the Administration counts among those in detention are convicted criminals culled from prisons.

Syracuse professor Austin Kocher, who tracks official ICE data, finds that between Sept. 21, 2025, and Jan. 7, 2026, single-day ICE detentions increased 11,296. But only 902 of those were convicted criminals, 2,273 had pending criminal charges and 8,121 were other immigrant violators. ICE arrests have been trending upward since January 2025, but criminal arrests have plateaued.

White House aide Stephen Miller’s undisciplined mass deportation and zero-immigration policy is building distrust, and the White House pitch that public safety justifies its enforcement is losing credibility.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/mass-deportation-trump-administration-ice-criminals-minnesota-tim-walz-kristi-noem-7f3bb88b