Reuters World News - Todd Blanche, Lisa Cook, Typhoon Dolphin and Pet tarot

Episode Date: August 8, 2026

Todd Blanche wins Senate confirmation to become U.S. attorney general after weeks of political wrangling. U.S. President Donald Trump revives his push to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook. Typhoon Dolphin hits Japan's Okinawa leaving more than 50,000 buildings without power. And, why some South Korean pet owners are turning to tarot cards to better understand their animals Watch the latest On Assignment: Chasing Ebola Listen to the Morning Bid podcast ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠. Sign up for the Reuters Econ World newsletter ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠. Listen to the Reuters Econ World podcast ⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, I'm Peter Devon in London. It's Saturday, August 8th. Today, Todd Blanche is confirmed as Attorney General after a narrow Senate vote. A US appeals court blocks Trump's $400 million ballroom project. Trump renews his push to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. And why some people in South Korea are having their pets tarot cards read. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10,000. minutes, seven days a week. Right now, for a limited time, everyone's part of the Buick team, even you. Buick's employee pricing for you event is on now.

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and more than 50,000 buildings are without power at the time of this recording. China has suspended port operations and ferry routes head of the storm's expected landfall on its east coast. For the latest updates, head to Reuters.com. We start in Washington, where the US Senate has narrowly confirmed Todd Blanche as Attorney General. After weeks of lobbying Senate sceptics, Blanche secured the backing he needed,

including from Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who cast the decisive vote in the 50-49 results. The nomination was nearly derailed by bipartisan concerns over Blanche's independence. Publican senators have questioned his handling of the release of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents, as well as his role in creating Trump's $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund. Blanche now takes charge of a Justice Department transformed under Trump. Trump's second term. The department has pursued prosecutions of the President's perceived enemies, and declared it operates on the direction of the President, a sharp break from long-standing

norms of independence. The US Senate has passed a short-term spending bill to keep the government funded beyond November's mid-term elections. But the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a different version last month, and lawmakers must now reconcile the two. Democrats say the Senate bill would stop the Trump administration from reallocating funding to border security from other programs. Congress has until September 30th to reach a deal. Trump is once again trying to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, renewing a fight

of the independence of the nation's central bank. The White House has sent Cook a letter seen by Reuters, saying Trump is considering her removal and giving her three weeks to respond to mortgage fraud allegations. has long denied those claims and her lawyer calls the allegations baseless and says there's no valid cause to remove her. The move comes just weeks after a Supreme Court ruling

that Block Cook's firing and underscored the Federal Reserve's independence. Meanwhile, a separate legal battle is playing out over the White House itself, where President Trump's plan for a $400 million ballroom has hit another major legal roadblock. A federal appeals court has ruled that a president

can't fundamentally reshape the White House without Congress signing off first. The judges say construction can still move ahead if Congress approves the project. Legal reporter Mark Scarcella says the administration now has 14 days to ask the Supreme Court to step in. This case tested the power of the president

versus the power of Congress. And this administration really has put that clash in focus. And in this instance, and we've seen several others, in this instance, the court clearly says, to one opinion, that the president was out of bounds and that Congress should have, must have had a role. And so sideline in Congress sort of, you know, break things and move quickly and break things and ask for permission later, did not work in this instance, at least for now. We don't know what the Supreme Court will say in a few days or a few weeks about whether

or not construction will continue. But I think the case is sort of emblematic of the bigger Trump administration, you know, effort to sort of reshape Washington in the president's image. President Trump is called the order politically motivated and says in a social media post that he will take the case to the Supreme Court, arguing that the ballroom structure needs to be protected from attacks. Something Mike says that judges in this case didn't dispute. The appeals court majority, the two judges say we're not second-guessing. national security. In fact, we owe as a court great deference to the national security. What it said was that the national security can't be used as a justification for what the court

actually said a get out of law-free card and that there are measures here that will allow the national security to be protected, even with the injunction in place. The U.S. economy had been expected to add 80,000 jobs last month. Instead, it was a It lost 23,000, according to data released on Friday. Payrolls for May and June were revised down by over 100,000 jobs. Now, that may not sound great, but dig a little deeper, says our US economics editor Dan Burns, and you'll find a labor market that's more resilient than it looks. Actually, the number of people who reported having a job and then being unemployed losing a job,

being laid off, that was substantially lower than it had been the month before and is near a pretty low level, which is commensurate with what we see in the weekly unemployment claims data, which continues to be very benign showing there's just not a lot of firing going on. There's this, as a lot of Fed officials have described it, there's this weird balance in the market that has taken hold. It's part of this low hire, low fire environment. And, you know, the departures from the workforce are allowing the unemployment rate to drop in this kind of odd balanced workforce. Dan says this job's report will give officials at the Federal Reserve plenty to think about,

especially as inflation remains elevated. It did certainly in the markets view, reduce the expectations, reduce the probability that the Fed will hike rates when they meet again in mid-September. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19-speaker AKG surround audio system. This city demands agility and optic delivers with precision to make every drive extraordinary. Let's take the Cadillac. Find out more at Cadillac Canada.ca.

Luxury sales claim based on S&P Global Mobility Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Over to the Middle East now. where the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan are signing a mutual defense pact. The Mecca Joint Defense Agreement is intended to strengthen deterrence against any act of aggression and stipulates that an armed attack against any of the three would be regarded as an attack on all. Timor Azari is in Riyadh with the latest. There's a rearrangement, realignment happening in the region, and I think different states are looking for partners and new alliances to try and sort of face off against new threats. threats. Saudi Arabia has faced a lot of attacks from Iran over the past, more or less

half year this war has been going now. Turkey is a member of NATO, has a very big army, it has also importantly defense industry, and I think Saudi really wants to benefit from that. On the other end, Pakistan stands to benefit from this alliance through financial support from the Saudis, which we've seen them give, and Turkey also on the same count. And Saudi Arabia has the sites of Islam's two holiest cities and sites also carries that weight. And we saw the agreement today signed in Mecca, which is very important as a sign, as a symbol. Timor says we'll have to wait to see how the agreement is implemented. The agreement says an attack on one state is considered an attack on all. That's a nice language. We have to see how that's actually implemented.

Saudi Arabia has been attacked hundreds of times, I think more than a thousand times in the last five months. Pakistan already had an agreement that had those terms. We did not see the Pakistani Air Force intervene. We did not see Pakistani troops on the ground, you know, fighting. So we'll have to see how it's interpreted on the Turkish side. But I think the idea that an attack on Turkey would result in a Saudi military response or an attack on Pakistan would result in, you know, Turkey coming to Pakistan's aid. That's something that really we need to see. In South Korea, a growing number of pet owners are turning to tarot card readings for their animals. At a fortune-telling shop in Seoul's Gangnam district,

dog sniff and paw at tarot cards, and readers interpret the results as a window in what pets may be feeling. One owner, Ryu-Sumi, brought her rescue dog in to better understand what she believes is his trauma. She says in Korean, he sleeps next to me every night. and falls me around like a bodyguard, and I was genuinely curious whether that's hard for him. The trend is linked to a search in pet ownership as fewer South Koreans or having children.

Government surveys show 29.2% of households now own pets, up from 17.4% in 2010. Tarot reader Huan Suu Kyeong, who opened her shop in 2014, says demand has grown as owners increasingly view their pets as family members, or sometimes their only companion. And for today's recommended read,

it's a recommended watch. This week on assignment goes to Eastern Congo to witness the unseen work of containing an Ebola outbreak. The link is in the show notes. For more of any of the stories from today, check out Reuters.com or the Reuters app. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast

player. If you're listening on a smart speaker, just asked for the latest news from Reuters seven days a week. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show. Thank you.