Nightly Brief

Top CNS stories for today including President Donald Trump announcing he wants to use the military to secure the U.S.-Mexico border until his promised border wall is built; a court filing revealing that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave Special Counsel Robert Mueller the authority to investigate allegations of collusion between President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and the Russian government; Alex van der Zwaan, the attorney who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators in Mueller’s Russia probe, being sentenced to 30 days in federal prison; the Ninth Circuit ruling that the government was not doing enough to protect endangered salmon and steelhead trout in the Columbia River; California lawmakers and civil rights groups on Tuesday called for sweeping reforms to the state’s “reasonable force” rule; a new detection system aims to protect endangered species from poachers by incorporating software and techniques designed to detect and study stars and galaxies, and more.

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National

1.) President Donald Trump said Tuesday he wants to use the military to secure the U.S.-Mexico border until his promised border wall is built.

2.) Six cities, 18 attorneys general and a bipartisan group of U.S. mayors filed a federal complaint Tuesday to keep a question about citizenship status out of the 2020 census, as it has been on every survey since 1950.

3.) Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave Special Counsel Robert Mueller the authority to investigate allegations of collusion between President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and the Russian government, according to a court filing in the case Monday night.

4.) Alex van der Zwaan, the attorney who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, was sentenced to 30 days in federal prison Tuesday.

Regional

5.) A man who has never been to Florida seeks punitive damages from Alex Jones and InfoWars, claiming they used his photo to falsely portray him as the shooter in the Feb. 14 murders of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.

6.) The federal government must heed a federal court ruling that found it was not doing enough to protect endangered salmon and steelhead, and directing it to change dam operations along the Columbia River accordingly, the Ninth Circuit ruled Monday.

7.) A federal judge in Arizona ruled wildlife managers have not done enough to protect a subspecies of wolf endemic to the American Southwest.

8.) Backed by the family of an unarmed black man killed by Sacramento police last month, California lawmakers and civil rights groups on Tuesday called for sweeping reforms to the state’s “reasonable force” rule.

9.) The Border Patrol trains agents to de-escalate dangerous situations and to use lethal force only after all other options are exhausted, including retreat to cover, a former instructor from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center testified Monday in the murder trial of a Border Patrol officer.

10.) Attorneys for two families connected by two deaths within days of one another theorized during closing arguments Monday about a woman’s suspicious hanging death and whether she died at the hands of her wealthy boyfriend’s brother.

11.) At a special Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting on Monday, Chairman Andrew Do and Supervisor Shawn Nelson took turns criticizing city leaders and elected officials who have blocked action on providing emergency support services for the county’s homeless population.

Science

12.) A new detection system aims to protect endangered species from poachers by incorporating software and techniques designed to detect and study stars and galaxies.

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