The House of Representatives voted Wednesday against a short-term extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, 198 to 218, and the Senate has also declined to act, according to ABC News. The program is set to expire at midnight tonight. It will be the first time Section 702 has lapsed since Congress passed it as part of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, in the years following the expansion of warrantless surveillance authorities after September 11.
Section 702 authorizes the National Security Agency to collect the communications of foreign nationals overseas without individual court warrants. Congress has reauthorized it several times since 2008. The immediate reason for Thursday’s lapse isn’t a philosophical rejection of the program itself. Democrats and nineteen Republicans voted against the extension because President Trump had appointed Bill Pulte, whose background is in real estate finance and who used his previous post at the Federal Housing Finance Agency to challenge institutions and individuals the administration found politically inconvenient, as acting director of national intelligence. Members of both parties said the nation’s top intelligence post required different qualifications.
After the vote, Trump announced his intention to nominate Jay Clayton, the current U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and a former SEC chairman during Trump’s first term, as permanent director of national intelligence. The Senate Intelligence Committee has scheduled a confirmation hearing for Clayton on June 17.
The expiration doesn’t shut off collection immediately. Nextgov reported that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recertified Section 702 operations through March 2027, and that certification remains in effect regardless of whether the underlying statute has lapsed. Collection continues. The legal basis for it is now entering contested territory that will likely produce litigation.
The original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978, in the years after the Church Committee hearings documented decades of illegal domestic surveillance by the FBI and other federal agencies. Congress created the FISA court as a mechanism to balance national security collection against constitutional protections. That tension has never been resolved. Thursday’s expiration adds a new variable: the surveillance statutes are now being used as leverage in a dispute about who should be running the intelligence agencies, which is a use of them that Congress in 1978 didn’t anticipate.
Three Indian sailors were confirmed dead after a U.S. military strike on the Palau-flagged tanker MT Settebello off the coast of Oman, Al Jazeera reported Thursday. India’s foreign ministry lodged a formal protest with Washington over the deaths.
U.S. forces struck the vessel after its crew repeatedly failed to comply with instructions from American military units enforcing the naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. A U.S. aircraft fired precision munitions into the ship’s engine room to disable it. The Settebello was attempting to carry Iranian oil in violation of the blockade.
The deaths of Indian nationals complicate a relationship New Delhi has worked to keep neutral. India hasn’t taken a side in the US-Iran confrontation. Losing sailors to American enforcement operations in waters India has an interest in keeping navigable doesn’t fit comfortably inside that position. There’s a historical parallel worth noting. During the 1987-1988 Tanker War phase of the Iran-Iraq conflict, the United States Navy escorted Kuwaiti tankers through the Persian Gulf to protect them from Iranian attacks. American forces were then protecting neutral shipping from an Iranian threat. Now American forces are striking vessels caught in the enforcement zone. The operational theater is nearly the same body of water. The alignment of interests has inverted.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the producer price index for May on Thursday, and CNBC reported the index rose 1.1 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis, bringing the twelve-month rate to 6.5 percent, the highest since November 2022. Economists had expected a monthly increase of 0.7 percent.
The producer price index tracks what businesses pay for inputs before those costs reach the consumer. Eighty percent of May’s monthly surge was attributable to energy costs elevated by the war with Iran, according to NBC News. The headline consumer price index, released Wednesday by the BLS, came in at 4.2 percent annually.
The connection between the Strait of Hormuz and the grocery bill runs through fuel, which costs everything else. The question economists are watching is whether the energy shock is temporary, as it would be if a diplomatic resolution came quickly, or whether it embeds itself into broader price expectations. In 1974, in the year following the OPEC oil embargo, U.S. consumer inflation ran at 11 percent annually. The present numbers aren’t there. They’re moving in that direction.
Vance Boelter pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court in Minneapolis to the killing of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, and to the shooting of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette. The Minnesota Reformer reported that Boelter accepted two consecutive life sentences plus forty years, a deal that removed the death penalty as a possible outcome.
The attacks occurred on June 14, 2025, nearly a year ago. Boelter disguised himself as a law enforcement officer before entering the Hortman home, where he shot and killed Melissa and Mark Hortman, then drove to the Hoffman home and shot the senator and his wife. Law enforcement called what followed the largest manhunt in Minnesota state history. Boelter evaded capture for forty-three hours.
Melissa Hortman was the first woman to serve as Speaker of the Minnesota House, a position she held from 2019 until her death. The criminal proceedings are now closed. The political violence that produced them doesn’t close with a guilty plea.
The Supreme Court blocked Alabama from executing Jeffery Lee by nitrogen gas Thursday, upholding a lower court injunction finding that Alabama’s protocol violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. NPR reported the court issued a one-sentence order denying the state’s emergency request. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch would have allowed the execution to proceed but filed no written dissent.
Lee was convicted of a 1998 double murder and was scheduled to die on July 11. His attorneys argued that nitrogen gas forces a person through several minutes of painful suffocation. The lower court found that Alabama’s protocol “presents a substantial risk of serious harm, severe pain over and above death itself.”
Alabama conducted the country’s first nitrogen gas execution in January 2024 and has performed seven of the nine nitrogen executions carried out nationally since then. The Supreme Court approved the method in that initial case. Thursday’s order doesn’t reverse that approval. It says that this particular protocol, applied to this particular case, doesn’t meet the constitutional standard. Where exactly the line runs between an acceptable and an unacceptable application of a method the court has already approved is a question the courts haven’t finished answering.
Pope Leo XIV arrived in Spain’s Canary Islands on Thursday to meet with migrants and survivors of the Atlantic crossing from West Africa, Al Jazeera reported. It was the first papal visit to the islands. Leo, who is the first American pope, had addressed Spain’s parliament earlier this week and criticized European immigration policies.
At the Port of Arguineguin in Gran Canaria, known to aid organizations as the Dock of Shame after severely overcrowded conditions were documented there during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Leo spoke to migrants and relief workers. “Human dignity has no passport and does not lose its value when crossing a border,” he said. He also said: “We cannot grow accustomed to counting the dead.”
Arrivals to the Canary Islands from West Africa reached roughly 46,843 in 2024. In the first five months of 2026, the figure has been just over 3,000, following diplomatic agreements between the European Union, Spain, and several West African governments. The numbers have come down considerably. The crossings haven’t stopped.
And one more thing worth reading.
Ruth Ann Pemberton wrote about the kind of relationship harm most people don’t recognize as harm in “The Toxic Relationship Signs Most of Us Learn Not to See” in the Living section today. The piece doesn’t deal in obvious cruelty or dramatic confrontations. It names four quiet patterns that build over years: the person who keeps score, the one who takes your good news and makes it their own, the one whose help always comes with a cost you can feel but can’t quite name, and the one who controls the room without anyone in the room admitting it. “A friendship where you’ve stopped sharing your joy isn’t a friendship at full capacity,” she writes. If you’ve ever come home from someone you’ve known for thirty years feeling less than when you left, this is the piece for that.
It is Thursday. A surveillance program that has been law since 2008 expires at midnight tonight. Three Indian sailors are dead in the Gulf of Oman. Producer prices rose at their fastest pace since late 2022. A man who killed a state house speaker pleaded guilty nearly a year after the attacks. The Supreme Court blocked an execution. The first American pope stood at a Spanish dock and said that human dignity has no passport. That’s the day.
