The Pentagon has told senators it needs roughly $80 billion, mostly to cover the cost of the U.S. war against Iran, adding to an already sizable military spending boost sought by President Donald Trump. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been making the rounds on Capitol Hill ahead of a formal request as Iran’s president is in Pakistan to facilitate negotiations on ending the war.
Trump will visit a Mack Truck facility in a battleground district in swing state Pennsylvania Tuesday, shifting attention to the U.S. economy in his first major public event beyond the capital since he signed an interim agreement to end the Iran war.
National Guard members and U.S. Park Police have been patrolling around the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool as the Trump administration faces a self-imposed deadline to fix a botched renovation before the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration.
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Justices give US corporations big wins
The Cisco and ExxonMobil rulings, issued the same day, open U.S. courts in one case involving a foreign government while shutting the door in another. But they involved very different statutes.
The Cisco decision was the latest to rule against plaintiffs seeking to use U.S. courts as a venue to seek justice over the acts of foreign governments, especially those that took place abroad. Falun Gong members sought unsuccessfully to overcome that skepticism by arguing that a substantial portion of Cisco’s activities involving China took place in the United States.
The Cuba case hinged on whether the 1996 Helms-Burton law removes the shield from lawsuits in U.S. courts that typically cover foreign countries and state-owned businesses. The justices reversed a lower-court ruling that found that the Cuban state-owned companies are immune from lawsuits in U.S. courts.
Supreme Court OKs ExxonMobil suit over property seized by Castro’s government
The Supreme Court has ruled that ExxonMobil can sue Cuban state-owned companies in American courts over property on the island nation that was seized after Fidel Castro took power.
The 6-3 decision was the second in as many months in favor of U.S. owners of Cuban property confiscated by the Communist government more than 65 years ago.
The outcome in the two cases could be an additional lever for the Trump administration to exert pressure on Cuba, which is already being squeezed by a U.S. oil embargo.
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Supreme Court kills suit claiming Cisco’s technology helped China persecute Falun Gong members
The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted tech giant Cisco’s bid to shut down a lawsuit that claimed the company’s technology was used to persecute members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement in China.
The justices ruled that American courts are the wrong forum, rejecting plaintiffs’ attempts to litigate under the 18th-century Alien Tort Statute (ATS) and the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA), first enacted in 1991.
An Associated Press investigation last year showed that American tech companies, to a large degree, designed and built China’s surveillance state, encouraged by both Republican and Democratic administrations, even as activists warned such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious groups and target minorities. Last month, AP won the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for its stories.
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Wall Street points to another day of losses, led by an ongoing sell-off in tech
Futures for the S&P 500 fell 1.2% before the opening bell Tuesday, while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average retreated 0.4%. Futures for the technology-heavy Nasdaq tumbled 2.6% following a 1.3% loss Monday. The Nasdaq has suffered heavy selling for days as investors grow anxious over massive spending by artificial intelligence companies and looming interest rate hikes in the U.S., which will make it more expensive for companies to fund growth through borrowing.
Chip companies were among the biggest losers in overnight trading, with Micron and Intel both down more than 7%. Qualcomm fell 6.3%. Companies that specialize in memory and data storage were also taking a beating. Sandisk fell nearly 9% and Seagate was down 7.2% early.
And Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which owns xAI, slipped another 1% before the bell after a 16.4% tumble to start the week.
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Iran’s president visits Pakistan for crucial talks on ending war
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also joined the delegation in Masoud Pezeshkian’s first visit to Islamabad since the conflict started with the U.S. and Israeli attack on Iran on Feb. 28.
