Your Tuesday night briefing from the staff of Courthouse News
Top CNS stories for today including the justices of the Supreme Court appeared divided over whether the Trump administration should be stopped from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census; Admitted Russian agent Maria Butina claims a declaration from a former FBI official wrongfully accuses her of espionage activity that she was never charged with; Former Alabama judge Roy Moore is looking at running for a U.S. Senate seat again in 2020, and more.
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National
1.) The justices of the Supreme Court appeared divided Tuesday over whether the Trump administration should be stopped from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census.
2.) Admitted Russian agent Maria Butina claims a declaration from a former FBI official wrongfully accuses her of espionage activity that she was never charged with.
3.) The D.C. Circuit on Tuesday tossed aside a challenge from a group of Northeastern states looking to force the Environmental Protection Agency to sweep neighboring states into a regional ozone regulation system.
4.) In yet another plot twist in the Jussie Smollett saga, the two brothers who claim they helped stage his attack sued the actor’s attorneys for defamation in federal court Tuesday.
Regional
5.) Alabama may not have heard the last from Roy Moore. The former judge, twice removed from the Alabama Supreme Court, lost to Alabama’s first Democratic senator in more than 20 years in a cataclysmic race in 2017 when women accused him of decades-old sexual improprieties. Now he’s looking at running again in 2020.
6.) MJ Hegar, the Air Force combat veteran who nearly unseated a Texas Republican congressman in last year’s midterms, announced Tuesday that she will challenge U.S. Senator John Cornyn in 2020.
International
7.) On Shankill Road in Belfast, the Union Jack flies from flagpoles, Queen Elizabeth II is revered and murals on buildings celebrate rifle-wielding pro-British paramilitary fighters. On this Protestant street, most people want Brexit to happen — the sooner the better.
8.) Scientists studying the impact of carbon released into the atmosphere by melting Arctic permafrost and heating up of the Earth’s surface reveal the potential multitrillion-dollar cost to the world economy in a new paper published Tuesday in Nature Communications.
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