While Donald Trump ponders demolishing the Kennedy Center unless his name is added to the memorial for the slain president, the United States Institute of Peace filed an emergency motion in federal court on Thursday asking a judge to block his administration “from carrying out plans to carve President Trump’s name into the façade of the iconic USIP headquarters building.”
The filing was made in a court battle that began in May 2025, when a federal judge ruled that Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, or US Doge service, illegally took over the the non-profit thinktank created and funded by the US Congress through “blunt force, backed up by law enforcement officers from three separate local and federal agencies”.
Musk’s Doge staff fired most USIP employees in a late-night email in March 2025, and then forcefully entered the thinktank’s building after cancelling its contract for private security.
In court, the USIP has maintained the organization is an independent creation of Congress and outside the president’s executive authority. The administration argues it is an executive branch organization, and pushed ahead, last December, with affixing Trump’s name to the exterior of the building, using bolted-on lettering. That change already offended the USIP board members who filed the suit, but carving Trump’s name into the stone, they argued on Thursday, “would cause irreparable harm”.



Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Christian Castro made his first appearance in state court in Minneapolis today in connection with the shooting of a Venezuelan man last January during a surge that brought thousands of federal agents to the Twin Cities area.
At least 10 people were injured, including a 10-year-old girl, according to the Kyiv City Military Administration.
Over the past year and a half, Donald Trump and his administration have launched a campaign to censor American history at US national parks and federal lands.
The human rights lawyer Noura Erakat was arrested on Tuesday at a Palm Beach county, Florida, budget hearing about the county’s more than $1bn investments in Israeli bonds.
A news helicopter crashed in a Los Angeles neighborhood on Tuesday and burst into flames, killing at least three people while reporters were covering the collision of an SUV and a city bus, officials and the news outlet said.
A Tuesday court ruling means David Streever of Rochester, New York no longer has to worry that federal officers may threaten him over a harsh email he sent to the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this year.





























