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KYIV, Ukraine — Russia launched its biggest aerial attack against Ukraine overnight, a Ukrainian official said Sunday, part of an escalating bombing campaign that has further dashed hopes for a breakthrough in efforts to end the 3-year-old war.

Russia fired a total of 537 aerial weapons at Ukraine, including 477 drones and decoys and 60 missiles, Ukraine’s air force said. Of these, 249 were shot down and 226 were lost, likely having been electronically jammed.

The onslaught was “the most massive airstrike” on the country since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, taking into account both drones and various types of missiles, Yuriy Ihnat, head of communications for Ukraine’s air force, told The Associated Press. The attack targeted several regions, including western Ukraine, far from the front line.

Poland and allied countries scrambled aircraft to ensure the safety of Polish airspace, the country’s air force said.

Three people were killed in each of the drone strikes in the Kherson, Kharkiv and the Dnipropetrovsk regions, according to the three governors.

Another person was killed by an airstrike in Kostyantynivka, local officials said. In addition to aerial attacks, a man died when Russian troops shelled the city of Kherson, and the body of a 70-year-old woman was found under the rubble of a nine-story building hit by Russian shelling in the Zaporizhzhia region.

In the far-western Lviv region, a large fire broke out at an industrial facility in the city of Drohobych following a drone attack that also cut electricity to parts of the city.

Ukraine’s air force said one of its F-16 warplanes supplied by its Western partners crashed after sustaining damage while shooting down air targets. The pilot died.

Russian troops reportedly advance in Donetsk

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had shot down three Ukrainian drones overnight.

Two people were wounded in another Ukrainian drone attack on the city of Bryansk in western Russia, regional Gov. Alexander Bogomaz said Sunday morning, adding that seven more Ukrainian drones had been shot down over the region.

Meanwhile, Russia claimed Sunday that it had taken control of the village of Novoukrainka in the partially Russian-occupied Donetsk region.

Russian forces have been slowly grinding forward at some points on the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line, though their incremental gains have been costly in terms of troop casualties and damaged armor.

In other developments, Russia’s foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, said he had spoken on the phone with his U.S. counterpart, CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

“I had a phone call with my American counterpart and we reserved for each other the possibility to call at any time and discuss issues of interest to us,” Naryshkin said in remarks to state TV reporter Pavel Zarubin, who posted them on his Telegram channel on Sunday.

Sunday’s attacks follow Russian President Vladimir Putin’s comments two days ago that Moscow is ready for a fresh round of direct peace talks in Istanbul. Two recent rounds of talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul were brief and yielded no progress on reaching a settlement.

Zelenskyy withdraws Ukraine from an anti-land mine pact

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a decree to withdraw Ukraine from the Ottawa Convention banning antipersonnel land mines, a Ukrainian lawmaker said Sunday. The move follows similar recent steps by the Baltic states and Poland.

The 1997 treaty prohibits the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of antipersonnel land mines in an effort to protect civilians from explosives that can maim or kill long after fighting ends.

“This is a step that the reality of war has long demanded,” said Roman Kostenko, secretary of the Ukrainian parliamentary committee on national security, defense and intelligence. He noted that Russia is not a party to the convention “and is massively using mines against our military and civilians.”

A T-shirt worn by Beyoncé during a Juneteenth performance on her “Cowboy Carter” tour has sparked a discussion over how Americans frame their history and caused a wave of criticism for the Houston-born superstar.

The T-shirt worn during a concert in Paris featured images of the Buffalo Soldiers, who belonged to Black U.S. Army units active during the late 1800s and early 1900s. On the back was a lengthy description of the soldiers that included “their antagonists were the enemies of peace, order and settlement: warring Indians, bandits, cattle thieves, murderous gunmen, bootleggers, trespassers, and Mexican revolutionaries.”

Images of the shirt and videos of the performance are also featured on Beyoncé’s website.

As she prepares to return to the U.S. for performances in her hometown this weekend, fans and Indigenous influencers took to social media to criticize Beyoncé for wearing a shirt that frames Native Americans and Mexican revolutionaries as anything but the victims of American imperialism and for promoting anti-Indigenous language.

A spokesperson for Beyoncé did not respond to a request for comment.

Who were the Buffalo Soldiers?

The Buffalo Soldiers served in six military units created after the Civil War in 1866. They were comprised of formerly enslaved men, freemen, and Black Civil War soldiers and fought in hundreds of conflicts — including in the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II — until they were disbanded in 1951.

As the quote on Beyoncé’s shirt notes, they also fought numerous battles against Indigenous peoples as part of the U.S. Army’s campaign of violence and land theft during the country’s westward expansion.

Some historians say the moniker “Buffalo Soldiers” was bestowed by the tribes who admired the bravery and tenacity of the fighters, but that might be more legend than fact. “At the end of the day, we really don’t have that kind of information,” said Cale Carter, director of exhibitions at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston.

Carter and other museum staff said that, only in the past few years, the museum made broader efforts to include more of the complexities of the battles the Buffalo Soldiers fought against Native Americans and Mexican revolutionaries and the role they played in the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. They, much like many other museums across the country, are hoping to add more nuance to the framing of American history and be more respectful of the ways they have caused harm to Indigenous communities.

“We romanticize the Western frontier,” he said. “The early stories that talked about the Buffalo Soldiers were impacted by a lot of those factors. So you really didn’t see a changing in that narrative until recently.”

There has often been a lack of diverse voices discussing how the history of the Buffalo Soldiers is framed, said Michelle Tovar, the museum’s director of education. The current political climate has put enormous pressure on schools, including those in Texas, to avoid honest discussions about American history, she said.

“Right now, in this area, we are getting pushback from a lot of school districts in which we can’t go and teach this history,” Tovar said. “We are a museum where we can at least be a hub, where we can invite the community regardless of what districts say, invite them to learn it and do what we can do the outreach to continue to teach honest history.”

Historians scrutinize reclamation motive

Beyoncé’s recent album “Act II: Cowboy Carter” has played on a kind of American iconography, which many see as her way of subverting the country music genre’s adjacency to whiteness and reclaiming the cowboy aesthetic for Black Americans. Last year, she became the first Black woman ever to top Billboard’s country music chart, and “Cowboy Carter” won her the top prize at the 2025 Grammy Awards, album of the year.

“The Buffalo Soldiers play this major role in the Black ownership of the American West,” said Tad Stoermer, a historian and professor at Johns Hopkins University. “In my view, (Beyoncé is) well aware of the role that these images play. This is the ‘Cowboy Carter’ tour for crying out loud. The entire tour, the entire album, the entire piece is situated in this layered narrative.”

But Stoermer also points out that the Buffalo Soldiers have been framed in the American story in a way that also plays into the myths of American nationalism.

As Beyoncé’s use of Buffalo Soldiers imagery implies, Black Americans also use their story to claim agency over their role in the creation of the country, said Alaina E. Roberts, a historian, author and professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies the intersection of Black and Native American life from the Civil War to present day.

“That’s the category in which she thought maybe she was coming into this conversation, but the Buffalo Soldiers are even a step above that because they were literally involved in not just the settlement of the West but of genocide in a sense,” she said.

Online backlash builds ahead of Houston shows

Several Native influencers, performers, and academics took to social media this week to criticize Beyoncé or decry the shirt’s language as anti-Indigenous. “Do you think Beyoncé will apologize (or acknowledge) the shirt?” indigenous.tv, an Indigenous news and culture Instagram account with more than 130,000 followers, asked in a post Thursday.

Many of her critics, as well as fans, agree. A flood of social media posts called out the pop star for the historic framing on the shirt.

“The Buffalo Soldiers are an interesting historical moment to look at. But we have to be honest about what they did, especially in their operations against Indigenous Americans and Mexicans,” said Chisom Okorafor, who posts on TikTok under the handle @confirmedsomaya.

Okorafor said there is no “progressive” way to reclaim America’s history of empire building in the West, and that Beyoncé’s use of Western symbolism sends a problematic message: “That Black people, too, can engage in American nationalism.”

“Black people, too, can profit from the atrocities of (the) American empire,” she said. “It is a message that tells you to abandon immigrants, Indigenous people, and people who live outside of the United States. It is a message that tells you not only is it a virtue to have been born in this country, but the longer your line extends in this country, the more virtuous you are.”

WASHINGTON — Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said that President Donald Trump’s military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities were “illegal” but dodged when asked if he should be impeached for ordering the attacks without congressional approval.

“That’s a decision the House makes. That’s not a decision the Senate makes. But it is clear that this is illegal,” Murphy said when asked whether he agreed with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s comments that Trump’s strikes were grounds for impeachment.

The House votes on whether to impeach a president, while the Senate votes on conviction.

A president can launch military attacks if there is a “declaration of war,” congressional authorization or “a national emergency created by an attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, its armed forces,” according to the War Powers Resolution, a law passed in 1973. Trump’s strikes, some Democrats argue, breach the resolution.

The Senate last week voted against a resolution that would have required Trump to seek congressional approval before authorizing any additional military action against Iran. The vote was almost entirely along party lines, with Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., siding with Democrats.

Asked a second time by moderator Kristen Welker whether the New York Democrat was on the right track by suggesting impeachment, Murphy said that Trump’s conduct during his second term has been worse than in his first.

“Again, that’s a decision the House makes. But I will say, I mean, if you compare his conduct in this administration to the conduct that he got impeached for in the first administration, his conduct in this administration is much worse, much more lawless and much more unconstitutional,” Murphy said.

Trump was impeached twice during his first term, though he was never convicted by the Senate. Democrats are in the minority in both the House and Senate, making any impeachment efforts unlikely to move forward.

Murphy has called Trump’s decision to strike Iran illegal because the president did not seek congressional authorization.

“I’ve been briefed on the intelligence — there is no evidence Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States. That makes this attack illegal,” Murphy said in a statement in the hours after the attack. He added that “only Congress can declare preemptive war.”

Trump has repeatedly insisted that the U.S. attacks “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities, while U.S. officials have also said it would take weeks to fully understand the impact of the strikes.

An initial Defense Intelligence Agency assessment, which was leaked, said the bombing may have only set back Iran’s nuclear program by several months. NBC News has reported that the DIA labeled its assessment “low confidence,” and several U.S. officials have said the intelligence indicated that the nuclear sites were heavily damaged or destroyed.

Murphy said on Sunday that Iran’s nuclear capability “just was not obliterated.”

He said if he were the commander in chief, he would not have authorized the strikes.

“No, I would not have authorized strikes literally at the moment that we were sitting down with the Iranians trying to come to a peaceful settlement,” Murphy said. “The only way that you are going to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is an agreement.”

The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a CBS News interview released Sunday that Iran could resume enrichment within months.

“The capacities they have are there,” said Rafael Mariano Grossi, according to a transcript released ahead of the interview. “They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that. But as I said, frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there.”

The boys of summer have captivated baseball fans for generations with sweet swings, savory hot dogs and a welcome escape during the sweltering months. But what if, for a few weeks of the year in a handful of ballparks across the country, they became the boys under the black lights?

Cosmic Baseball offers an electric new take on America’s pastime that features UV-reflective neon balls and fluorescent jerseys, and is played before screaming fans and children lucky enough to score tickets.

The first half of the game generally looks like a regular matchup, with a few quirks like pitchers in helmets and players running the bases backward. But after a brief intermission, there’s a cosmic “transformation” for a completely new nocturnal game.

“For us, it’s how big of an environment can you create,” said Chris Martin, the creator and co-founder of the league. “And how many memories can you bring when the black lights go on?”

Martin says about 80%-85% of the players who make up the two teams — the Cosmic Chili Peppers and the Glow Mojis — are former professionals who competed in either the minor leagues or abroad and wanted to be a part of something breaking new ground.

With a huge smile, he added, “You’re going to see something and go, ‘This is absolutely insane.’”

Martin founded the Tri-City Chili Peppers a few years ago as part of a summer collegiate league. He told NBC News that one day a lightbulb went off in his head during a glow stick and ’80s night — what if they tried to play the game in the dark?

Martin said he initially was rebuffed by lighting companies tasked with trying to pull it off.

“We met with a group and they said, ‘It doesn’t exist,’” Martin recalls. “You could put 300 black lights out and it’s still probably not going to illuminate, because there’s nothing that’s in existence that’s going to have that much spread play on a field like this.”

Fast-forward six months with some heavy-duty R&D, and the same company called him back to let Martin know they’d cracked the code.

“I got a text message saying, ‘Hey, your black lights are ready,’” Martin said. “I was not expecting that. … I thought [that vision] was over.”

Far from it.

In its second season, Cosmic Baseball has been flooding social media feeds and currently boasts a 300,000- to 400,000-person waitlist.

The Cosmic Chili Peppers and Glow Mojis — selling attractive merchandise and swag that generate long lines at stadiums — play at Shepherd Stadium in Colonial Heights, Virginia, with a seating capacity of about 2,000 people.

But the game’s immense popularity has already led to an expanding summer schedule, with the teams taking their act on the road to larger parks in cities like Nashville, Tennessee; Sugar Land, Texas; and Durham, North Carolina.

Major League Baseball has been backing the initiative, as well, pumping up the exhibition games that could someday be played in a host of minor and even major league parks.

“I think the biggest piece for us is, how do you create a family environment?” said Martin. “And everybody walks up to us at the end of the day and says, ‘This is built for families.’”

More than one-third of the people in the tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu, which scientists predict will be submerged by rising seas, have applied for a landmark climate visa to migrate to Australia, according to official figures.

Tuvalu’s ambassador to the United Nations, Tapugao Falefou, told Reuters on Sunday he was “startled by the huge number of people vying for this opportunity”, and the small community was interested to learn who the first lot of climate migrants would be.

Tuvalu, one of the countries at greatest risk from climate change, which experts say is boosting sea levels, has a population of 11,000 on its nine atolls scattered across the Pacific between Australia and Hawaii.

Since applications for Australia’s visa lottery opened this month, 1,124 people have registered, with family members bringing the total seeking the visa to 4,052 under the bilateral climate and security treaty.

Applications close on July 18, with an annual cap of 280 visas designed to ensure migration to Australia does not cause brain drain from Tuvalu, officials said when the treaty was announced in 2023.

The visa will allow Tuvalu residents to live, work and study in Australia, accessing health benefits and education on the same basis as Australian citizens.

“Moving to Australia under the Falepili Union treaty will in some way provide additional remittance to families staying back,” Falefou said.

By 2050, NASA scientists project daily tides will submerge half the main atoll of Funafuti, home to 60% of Tuvalu’s residents, where villagers cling to a strip of land as narrow as 65 feet. That forecast assumes a 1-metre rise in sea levels, while the worst case, double that, would put 90% of Funafuti under water.

Tuvalu, whose mean elevation is just 6 feet 7 inches, has experienced a sea-level rise of 6 inches over the past three decades, one and a half times the global average. It has built 7 hectares (17 acres) of artificial land, and is planning more, which it hopes will stay above the tides until 2100.

LOS ANGELES — An abandoned ice cream cart has become a symbol of resistance to residents of a west Los Angeles neighborhood who oppose President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration policies.

The cart belonged to a beloved ice cream vendor who was arrested by federal agents Monday afternoon while walking his usual route through Culver City.

The sudden disappearance of Ambrocio “Enrique” Lozano stunned residents who said the vendor was a welcome fixture in their neighborhood for more than 20 years.

“There was always a bright light around him,” said Patricia Pande, a Culver City resident who spent countless days enjoying Lozano’s ice cream with her granddaughter. “The happiest times I know with her are from the ice cream man.”

A photo of Lozano’s lone ice cream cart spread quickly across social media, triggering a tidal wave of responses from immigration advocates, residents and lawmakers.

Hyperlocal grassroots organizations like Siempre Unidos LA began sharing the image, and soon a crowdfunding campaign for Lozano and his family hit its goal of $6,000 to cover their legal fees and living expenses. The campaign topped $57,000 after the photo drew national attention.

The response to Lozano’s arrest highlights a new strategy emerging after large-scale protests overtook downtown Los Angeles earlier this month. Instead of focusing on marches outside federal buildings, residents of sprawling L.A. County are zeroing in on their own blocks and neighborhoods to show their opposition to Trump’s mass deportation efforts.

A loose coalition of dozens of grassroots organizations whose cellphone-toting members are broadcasting immigration arrests in real time over social media to millions of followers has taken shape across the region.

These groups post and repost the locations of arrests, organize spontaneous protests, help families find information about relatives who have been detained and set up donation drives when needed.

It’s difficult to measure the direct effect these actions have had since Trump’s immigration crackdown, but affected families say the outpouring of support is immeasurable.

“I’m in disbelief,” said Kimberly Noriega, Lozano’s niece. “We felt so hopeless, and then suddenly there was this whole community of Culver City and now an even bigger community behind him.”

His relatives will host an event in support of Lozano on Sunday in Culver City, where they hope to sell his remaining ice cream and popsicles before they turn stale.

Lozano is among more than 1,618 people in Los Angeles who have been arrested by the federal government since it began clamping down on residents without citizenship earlier this month, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

The detentions have spread fear across Southern California, where some 1.4 million people are estimated to live without full legal authorization, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

Many Home Depot parking lots, where day laborers congregate to find work, now sit empty. Familiar taco trucks have vanished from street corners. Fresh produce is left to rot in fields because employees are too afraid to report to work.

At one multilingual church whose members hail from Iran and Spanish-speaking countries, parishioners with tenuous legal status have been advised to stay home rather than attend service.

A pastor from the Los Angeles church posted a video last week of an Iranian husband and wife being arrested by federal agents on a west L.A. street. The woman suffered a medical emergency during the encounter, which was filmed by the pastor and shared widely on social media.

Activists who saw the video rushed to the hospital where the woman was being treated and recorded interactions with federal officials inside and outside the medical facility.

The woman was released from the hospital into federal custody, and the viral video has helped to warn the Iranian community that immigration officials are working in the area, the pastor told NBC News.

Liz Ramirez, founder of Siempre Unidos LA, which first reposted the image of Lozano’s ice cream truck, said the proliferation of videos developed organically and the trend shows no signs of slowing down.

“Everyone has a vision for what message you’re trying to get across and to whom,” she said of activists. “For Siempre Unidos, our main focus is to mobilize folks from the comfort of their own home.”

Another group, Union del Barrio, posted a video to Instagram that appears to show four federal officers detaining a U.S. citizen. The family of Andrea Velez said she was wrongfully detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and falsely accused of “forcefully obstructing” them during an immigration raid in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday morning.

She was charged Thursday with assaulting a federal officer while he was attempting to arrest a suspect and was released on $5,000 bail. She did not enter a plea and is due back in court on July 17.

The group also posted a video this week appearing to show Los Angeles police officers working with immigration officials, which drew widespread criticism from activists.

The Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement that officers had responded to reports of a kidnapping and encountered an aggressive crowd when they arrived to the scene. The department has a longstanding policy dating back to 1979 of not voluntarily participating in immigration enforcement.

Ron Gochez, a member of Union del Barrio, said dozens of volunteers patrol the streets every day and sift through hundreds of videos submitted each week. Not all content is posted — only what the group can verify through lawyers or firsthand accounts.

“We’re here and we’re here to stay,” he said Wednesday at a rally in downtown Los Angeles.

Centro CSO, a grassroots organization based in the Boyle Heights neighborhood in east Los Angeles, said its social media audience has more than doubled since the raids started this spring.

Like Siempre Unidos, Centro CSO shares videos submitted by residents who witness immigration arrests, and it organizes protests to draw attention to specific cases.

Organizer Gabriel Quiroz Jr. said the group depends on community members to text with information about immigration actions, which it can use to alert vulnerable residents.

“People trust us, rightfully, because we’re out there doing the work,” he said.

Democratic legislators mostly in blue states are attempting to fight back against President Donald Trump’s efforts to withhold funding from their states with bills that aim to give the federal government a taste of its own medicine.

The novel and untested approach — so far introduced in Connecticut, Maryland, New York and Wisconsin — would essentially allow states to withhold federal payments if lawmakers determine the federal government is delinquent in funding owed to them. Democrats in Washington state said they are in the process of drafting a similar measure.

These bills still have a long way to go before becoming law, and legal experts said they would face obstacles. But they mark the latest efforts by Democrats at the state level to counter what they say is a massive overreach by the Trump administration to cease providing federal funding for an array of programs that have helped states pay for health care, food assistance and environmental protections.

“Trump is illegally withholding funds that have been previously approved,” said David Moon, the Democratic majority leader in Maryland’s House of Delegates. “Without these funds, we are going to see Maryland residents severely harmed — we needed more options on the table for how Maryland could respond and protect its residents.”

Moon said the two bills are in response to various Trump actions that have withheld federal funding for programs that pay to assist with children’s mental health and flood wall protections. He compared the bills he’s introduced to traditional “collections” actions that one would take against a “deadbeat debtor.” Even if they were not to move forward, Moon said the bills would help to bring about an audit and accounting of federal money to the state.

Early in his second term, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency unilaterally froze billions of dollars in funding for programs that states rely on. He’s also threatened to withhold federal funding from states that implement policies he politically disagrees with, including “sanctuary” policies for undocumented immigrants, though some such freezes have been halted by courts.

A Trump White House spokesperson didn’t respond to questions for this story.

Wisconsin state Rep. Renuka Mayadev, a Democrat, introduced two near-identical bills that she said would seek to compel the federal government to release money it has withheld that had previously been paying for Department of Agriculture programs that help farmers, and for child care centers that mostly serve low-income families.

“We’ve seen the Trump administration is willfully breaking the law by holding back federal funds to which Wisconsinites are legally entitled. So these bills are really about providing for a legal remedy and protecting Wisconsinites,” she said.

In all four states, the bills direct state officials to withhold payments owed by the states to the federal government if federal agencies have acted in contravention of judicial orders or have taken unlawful actions to withhold funds previously appropriated by Congress. Payments available for withholding include the federal taxes collected from the paychecks of state employees, as well as grant payments owed back to the federal government.

In Wisconsin, the bills are unlikely to move forward because Republicans control both chambers of the Legislature. But the trajectory of the bills in Maryland, New York and Connecticut — where Democrats control the legislatures and governorships — is an open question.

The same is true in Washington, where Democratic lawmakers plan to introduce similar bills next session.

“It’s a novel concept,” said Washington state Sen. Manka Dhingra. “I don’t think states have ever been in this position before … where there’s someone making arbitrary decisions on what to provide funding for and what not to provide funding for, contrary to current rules and laws and congressional allocation of funds.”

Legal experts have raised substantial questions about the hurdles such bills would face if they were enacted.

For one, they said, the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause clearly gives the federal government precedence over states, which could complicate legal arguments defending such laws — even though it remains an open legal question whether the executive branch has the power to single-handedly control funding.

More immediate practical obstacles, they explained, stem from the fact that there’s vastly more money flowing from the federal government to the states than the other way around.

“So withholding state payments to the federal government, even if there were no other obstacles, isn’t likely to change very much,” said David Super, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who specializes in administrative and constitutional law.

Super added that states withholding money could potentially further worsen the status of programs affected by federal cuts.

“There’s also the potential that some of the money going to the federal government has to be paid as a condition for the state receiving one or another kind of benefit for itself or for its people,” he said. “The federal government could say, ‘You didn’t make this payment, therefore you’re out of this program completely.’”

But that doesn’t mean states, working in the current hostile political environment, shouldn’t try, said Jon Michaels, a professor at the UCLA School of Law who specializes in the separation of powers and presidential power.

“Where can you try to claw back money in different ways? Not because it’s going to make a huge material difference for the state treasury or for the people of the state, but just to essentially show the federal government like, ‘Hey, we know what you’re doing and we don’t like it,’” he said. “States need to be enterprising and creative and somewhat feisty in figuring out their own scope of authority and the ways in which they can challenge the law.”

But another potential drawback is one foreseen by the Democratic lawmakers themselves: further retribution from Trump.

“We would all be foolish to not acknowledge that the feds hold more cards than states do with respect to the budget,” said Moon, the Maryland legislator. “There’s certainly a risk of retaliation by the White House.”

Is living an artist’s life worth the sacrifice?

“The writing life,” author Stephanie Elizondo Griest says, “is like the ultimate hazing experience, because it tests you at every level. You are continually confronted with rejection — plus how are you going to pay the bills?”

Now a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Elizondo Griest is out with a new book, “Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life.”

In it, she travels to 10 nations and interviews writers, artists and performers from around the world who have devoted their lives to creative pursuits. From Mexico to Qatar, from Rwanda to New Zealand, Elizondo Griest poses the question: Is the pursuit of art worth it?

Elizondo Griest draws from her own experience pursuing a writing career. Though she was constantly working, she had no stable job, no 401(k) and no health insurance. And although she traveled all over the world, she had no home of her own: She was an educated adult woman who at times moved back in with her parents and slept in her childhood bedroom.

She didn’t even own her own cutlery until she was in her early 40s.

“I didn’t set out to live this life, but it has been my fate, a fate that I chose, but not one without serious consequences that become more obvious to me as I aged,” Elizondo Griest said in an interview with NBC News. “’Art Above Everything’ is not a guidebook, it’s more of a prayer if you’ve already done this… There is hope, there is reason and you’re not alone.”

Elizondo Griest, 51, is from Corpus Christi, Texas. She’s the author of several books, including “Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana” (2004) “Mexican Enough” (2008) and “All the Angels and Saints” (2017). She has written for The New York Times and The Washington Post, and her awards include a Margolis Award for social justice reporting and a PEN Southwest Book Award. She wanted to write and travel and she’s done that — driving thousands of miles across the U.S., for example, to write about the nation’s history when she worked for an educational website.

The life of the ‘art monk’

Elizondo Griest introduces readers to the concept of the “art monk,” an idea that came to her when she spent time in a Catholic house of prayer in South Texas. The residents of the house had taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. “And I had done something rather similar in being an artist. I had put off my fertility to pursue my writing projects,” she recalled.

“But once I got to my 40s, I realized that there were consequences of doing this. So I decided, if I were going to continue down this ascetic path, I needed to find other chanters in the dark,” she writes.

For “Art Above Everything,” Elizondo Griest spent a decade interviewing 70 artists, including acclaimed ballerina Wendy Whelan, bestselling author Sandra Cisneros, leading Rwandan playwright Hope Azeda, acclaimed Indian dancer Surupa Sen and others. Along the way, she belly-danced in Havana, pored over medieval manuscripts in Iceland and wandered through the parliament building in Romania.

Publishers Weekly praised “Art Above Everything” as “inspiring” and “a potent testimony to the value of pursuing one’s passion.”

Elizondo Griest made the decision to focus on female artists because women are underrepresented and undervalued across disciplines in the art world. It wasn’t until the 1970s that women rated a mention in visual art history textbooks, she said, and women are routinely denied leadership roles in major arts organizations. The current political climate, in which diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs have been targeted by the government, could entrench existing gender disparities.

“The creative life is never easy. It’s not a simple path … but it is one that has tremendous rewards and allows one to fulfill a vision,” Sheryl Oring told NBC News. Based in Philadelphia and one of the artists interviewed by Elizondo Greist, Oring is known for her “I Wish to Say” project, in which she travels the country dressed as a 1960s-era secretary and types up people’s messages to the president on a vintage typewriter.

Oring pointed out that some funding that artists have traditionally relied on — like grants from the National Endowment for the Arts — has been cut or is at risk of being eliminated.

“Many presenting organizations, nonprofits and museums are concerned about their very existence,” Oring said. “There is a simultaneous concern about showing art that might be viewed as controversial. So it is a really difficult time for artists, but that makes our work more important.”

The difficulty of making a living through the arts is shared by all genders. Orlando Rios, a Los Angeles-based actor who’s appeared in “Selena: The Series” and “CSI: Vegas,” said his business “can be like a rollercoaster — but you figure out how to work and sustain yourself. It is not a profession with a linear path, and you have to accept that.”

If people only give themselves a few years to achieve success as a performer,” Rios said, it will likely not happen, since it requires time and patience.

Because Rios also works as a voice actor, he’s concerned about the increasing use of artificial intelligence technology in the entertainment industry. “But you just have to stick with it, to know that you are in it for the long haul,” he said.

As Cisneros tells Elizondo Griest, “It takes a lot of courage to go against societal expectations, gender expectations, cultural expectations. We have to invent our own camino (road). It is a political choice.”

Living one’s most ‘creative life’

For Elizondo Griest, her devotion to writing ultimately helped her through some of the greatest challenges of her life — including the pandemic, the death of her father and a catastrophic illness.

“There was a moment when I began rethinking my life, when I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue living a life, due to this (cancer) diagnosis,” she recalled. “I realized that, thank God I had chosen this path, because all I’d ever wanted to do was travel the world and write about it, and I’d done that … I had zero regrets.”

It was art that enabled Elizondo Griest to persevere through crises. Note-taking grounded her during chemotherapy and the Covid lockdowns. “The sacrifices I made to be an artist caused the bulk of the volatility I experienced in the 20s and 30s,” she writes, “so it is wild that art became my primary self-soothing technique during the turbulence of my forties.”

Now having embarked on a national book tour, she believes that art can help people live through fear, trauma and uncertainty.

“Something really deep, beautiful and powerful about art is that it really, really teaches you that all we have is this moment,” Elizondo Griest said. “So if art is the place that you feel the most fulfilled, then that is how you must fill it, to live your most creative life and make it glorious.”

“And yes,” she adds, “today I have cutlery!”

WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump reveled in a major Supreme Court victory that curbed the ability of judges to block his policies nationwide, he had special praise for one of the justices: Amy Coney Barrett.

“I want to thank Justice Barrett, who wrote the opinion brilliantly,” he said at a White House press conference soon after Friday’s ruling.

Barrett’s majority opinion in the 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, which at least temporarily revived Trump’s plan to end automatic birthright citizenship, is a major boost to an administration that has been assailed by courts around the country for its broad and aggressive use of executive power.

It also marks an extraordinary turnaround for Barrett’s reputation among Trump’s most vocal supporters.

Just a few months ago, she faced vitriolic criticism from MAGA influencers and others as she sporadically voted against Trump, including a March decision in which she rejected a Trump administration attempt to avoid paying U.S. Agency for International Development contractors.

CNN also reported that Trump himself had privately complained about Barrett.

That is despite the fact that she is a Trump appointee with a long record of casting decisive votes in a host of key cases in which the court’s 6-3 conservative majority has imposed itself, most notably with the 2022 ruling that overturned the abortion rights landmark Roe v. Wade.

One of those outspoken critics, Trump-allied lawyer Mike Davis, suggested that the pressure on Barrett had the desired effect.

“Sometimes feeling the heat helps people see the light,” he said in a text message.

Quickly U-turning, MAGA influencers on Friday praised Barrett and turned their anger on liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson instead.

They seized upon language in Barrett’s opinion in which she gave short shrift to Jackson’s dissenting opinion, in which the President Joe Biden appointee characterized the ruling as an “existential threat to the rule of law.”

Barrett responded by accusing Jackson of a “startling line of attack” that was based on arguments “at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”

Jack Posobiec, a conservative firebrand who a few months ago called Barrett a “DEI judge,” immediately used similar language against Jackson, who is the first Black woman to serve on the court.

In an appearance on Real America’s Voice, a right-wing streaming channel, he call Jackson an “autopen hire” in reference to the unsubstantiated allegation from conservatives that Biden’s staff was responsible for many of his decisions.

He then described Barrett as “one of the nicest people. She’s not some flame-throwing conservative up there.”

It is not just the birthright citizenship case in which the Trump administration has claimed victory at the Supreme Court in recent months.

The court, often with the three liberal justices in dissent, has also handed Trump multiple wins on emergency applications filed at the court, allowing various policies that were blocked by lower courts to go into effect.

In such cases, the court does not always list exactly how each justice voted, but Barrett did not publicly dissent, for example, when the court allowed Trump to quickly deport immigrants to countries they have no connection to or ended temporary legal protections for 500,000 immigrants from four countries.

Barrett defenders dismiss suggestions she would be influenced by negative comments from MAGA world, with Samuel Bray, a professor at Notre Dame Law School, saying her ruling that limited nationwide injunctions simply shows her independent qualities as a judge.

“It should reinforce the sense that she’s her own justice and she’s committed to giving legal answers to legal questions. We shouldn’t be looking for political answers to political questions,” he said.

Barrett, via a Supreme Court spokeswoman, did not respond to a request for comment.

More broadly, legal experts said that in the Supreme Court term that just ended, Barrett showed that on many traditional conservative issues she is “solidly to the right,” Anthony Kreis, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law.

There were fewer examples of her going her own way than in the previous term, when which she staked out her own path in some significant cases.

On Friday alone, she was part of a conservative 6-3 majority in three of the five rulings, including the birthright citizenship case. The others saw the court rule in favor of religious conservatives who objected to LGBTQ story books in elementary schools and uphold a Texas restriction on adult-content websites.

“I don’t think we can say she was ever drifting left, but she was occupying a center-right position on the court that occasionally made her a key swing vote,” he added. “This term’s docket at the end just wasn’t that.”

One notable wrinkle in the birthright citizenship case is that Barrett, as the most junior justice in the majority, would not have been expected to write it. Often, Chief Justice John Roberts, who gets to assign cases when he is in the majority, will write such rulings himself.

Carolyn Shapiro, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law, said the assignment suited Barrett, who is known for her expertise on legal procedure. But she also wondered if Roberts might have considered the impact of the complaints against Barrett and wanted to “give her a place to shine from the perspective of the right.”

Even if that were a consideration in Roberts’ thinking, Shapiro added, “I don’t see much evidence that she is doing things that she wouldn’t have done if not for the criticism she received.”

Almost 500 flights traveling into and out of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport have been canceled due to severe weather impacting the Atlanta metropolitan area.

On Friday night, a long-lasting cluster of storms produced torrential rainfall across much of the Atlanta area, according to the National Weather Service field office in the city.

The heavy rainfall resulted in significant flash flooding in the area surrounding the airport, as well as Grant Park, College Park and Forest Park.

A video posted to social media showed travelers who were stuck at the airport amid delays and cancelations sitting on the floor as some other travelers slept. Another video on X depicted lightning illuminating the sky in Hampton, a suburb south of Atlanta.

Thunderstorms were expected to continue in the area this weekend, specifically during afternoons and evenings, according to the weather service’s field office in Atlanta.

As of 4 p.m. on Saturday, 478 flights traveling out of and into Atlanta’s airport have been canceled and 617 have been delayed, according to FlightAware.com. Many of the flights are operated by Delta Air Lines, which is headquartered in the city’s airport.

“Delta people are working as safely and quickly as possible to recover flights impacted by thunderstorms, lightning, hail and winds at our Atlanta hub Friday night,” the airline said in a statement. “We thank our customers for their continued patience and understanding.”

Intense thunderstorms that impacted the airport, including with strong winds and quarter-inch hail, resulted in over 90 diversions to other airports in the Southeast on Friday, according to the airline. The severe weather also caused a pause in the Atlanta airport’s operations for safety reasons on Friday night.

The Federal Aviation Administration evacuated the airport’s control tower due to strong winds, the administration said in a statement to NBC News Saturday morning.

“A few controllers remained in the facility to handle inbound aircraft,” the FAA said.

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Delta also said it expects additional delays and cancelations Saturday as teams work to reset aircraft and crew members get their rest. The airline has more than 900 daily scheduled flights from Atlanta’s airport.