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The justices halted a federal appeals court ruling that would have revived the Republican-friendly map for the November elections, which will determine control of Congress. There were no noted dissents.

The supreme court instead let stand a decision by the Missouri supreme court, which ruled earlier this month that a citizen petition prevents the new map from being used unless first approved by voters in a November referendum. The decision means Missouri residents will vote under the same congressional districts used in the 2024 and 2022 elections.

“At this late date, ordering reversion to the 2025 map in the midst of an ongoing election would usher in electoral chaos,” the high court wrote in an unsigned opinion. “The district court and court of appeals should not enjoin or otherwise prohibit the use of the 2022 map in the 2026 congressional election in Missouri.”

Republicans had hoped the new House map – which already was used in the August primaries – could help them win an additional seat as part of a nationwide redistricting battle pushed by Trump to gain an edge in the midterms.

A panel of the eighth US circuit court of appeals ruled on Monday that switching districts between the primary and general elections would violate the US constitution. The panel directed a district judge to bar Missouri from using anything other than the new map but delayed the order’s effect until next Monday to allow time for an appeal to the supreme court.

The legal wrangling has caused confusion for more than a million potential Missouri voters – nearly one in four statewide – who were shifted from one district to another, resulting in different candidates on their ballots. Absentee voting began Tuesday under the 2022 congressional districts, though some local election officials had urged voters to wait because of the legal uncertainty.

Republicans currently hold six of Missouri’s eight House districts. At the urging of Trump and Republican governor Mike Kehoe, Missouri lawmakers last September passed revised districts that were intended to help them win seven seats in the midterms.

The redistricting significantly reshaped a Kansas City-based district held by longtime Democratic congressman Emanuel Cleaver. It shed parts of Kansas City to neighboring districts with Republican incumbents and stretched the remainder of Cleaver’s fifth congressional district far eastward into rural Republican areas.

The result was about 59% of potential voters were new to the district, according to an Associated Press estimate. The ripple effects also shifted some voters in most of Missouri’s other congressional districts.

Cleaver was unopposed in the Democratic primary. Republican state senator Rick Brattin won a six-way Republican primary under the revised districts. They remain the candidates for the general election, even though the district boundaries have reverted to their prior lines.Brattin was a plaintiff, along with Republican congressman Bob Onder and two other voters, in a federal lawsuit that led to the eighth circuit’s ruling and the last two appeals to the supreme court.

At least 16 lawsuits have been filed in state and federal courts related to Missouri’s congressional redistricting. The battle has been the longest and most complex among roughly a dozen states that sought to change their US House districts over the past year.

Missouri’s new map survived most of the lawsuits, including ones contending that mid-decade redistricting violated the state constitution and that the new districts ran afoul of requirements to be compact . In one case, the Missouri supreme court allowed the new districts to be used while election officials worked to verify petition signatures seeking to put the map to a statewide vote.

Republican secretary of state Denny Hoskins waited until the legal deadline on 4 August – the day the new districts were used in the primaries – to reject the petition. He asserted referendum petitions aren’t allowed for congressional redistricting.

The Missouri supreme court ruled on 3 September that the referendum petition was valid. It ordered Hoskins not to use the new map and to instead use the districts adopted in 2022, after the last census. The supreme court let that ruling stand on 8 September. But minutes later, US district judge Stephen Clark issued a conflicting order in favor of the new map.

The supreme court on 10 September blocked Clark’s order from taking effect. That day, the Missouri supreme court held Hoskins temporarily in contempt for telling local election authorities to use the new map after Clark’s order.

But that wasn’t the end of the matter. The eighth circuit, hearing an appeal of Clark’s blocked order, ruled in favor of the Trump-backed map Monday. That’s what led to the latest decision from the US supreme court. %!s()

FlyKnight Enhanced Edition Announcement - YouTube

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That alone makes it one of my easiest recommendations on Steam, but it also just got a free update of the GOTY/Enhanced/Definitive Edition variety, from its solo dev, while still only asking new players for $6 upfront⁠—$4 at the time of writing, thanks to a sale running through September 30. Here are the big Enhanced Edition additions:

• Multiple difficulties, with a Miyazaki's Choice™ poison swamp exclusive to Hard
• Item and enemy randomization, with savable procedural generation seeds
• Four new weapon types, and an unspecified number of additions to previous weapon categories
• Performance improvements "especially noticeable on Steam Deck"—which is great, because that's definitely where I most recommend playing
• Graphics, UI, and balance tweaks, plus bugfixes

The update's pound-for-pound beefiness is appropriately proportional to FlyKnight's own: I loved the seven hours I spent with this game on Steam Deck last year, and always meant to revisit it⁠—now I have the perfect excuse.

FlyKnight has the vibes and the charm down, but so do a lot of entries in this growing subgenre of indie King's Field-alikes. What set it apart for me was its excellent combat. FlyKnight has this very unique, satisfying system of locational limb damage, letting you priority target weak spots or weapon-holding appendages. It also only just clicked with me how appropriate that is in a game about anthropomorphic bugs, which notably take severed limbs like champs.

It's very slow-paced, but high-skill, like a classico survival horror game. Think less dodging and i-frames, more controlling distance, taking advantage of stagger opportunities, and perfect blocking. I can't recommend FlyKnight enough at the price of "a pretty good cup of coffee," let alone "a slightly worse cup of coffee" on sale. Check it out on Steam.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch. You can follow Ted on Bluesky. %!s()

James Pater and Tommy Freeman ran in hat-tricks as Northampton Saints kicked off their title defence with a comfortable 59-26 win over new-look Newcastle Red Bulls at Franklin's Gardens.

Just three months after securing a second Prem title against Exeter Chiefs at Allianz Stadium, Saints were dominant against a much-changed Red Bulls side who have welcomed 25 new players through the door this summer.

Three tries each for Pater and Freeman and one each for George Hendy, Alex Coles and Ollie Sleightholme delivered an emphatic scoreline as Saints, brilliantly conducted by fly-half Fin Smith, ran in nine tries.

Yet for all that the scoreline delivered another defeat for Newcastle they still scored four tries and came away with a losing bonus point as they hope that, for the first time in five seasons, they may not be destined for bottom place in the Prem.

Pater went over twice inside the first 15 minutes with Hendy, Freeman and Coles all following him in during a first period Northampton bossed.

But two tries from Christian Wade which were both converted - with the first a brilliant end-to-end and side-to-side score which had levelled matters early - showed Newcastle will cause problems for plenty of teams this season.

If those were the positives, two yellow cards were the balancers for the visitors. A first for a trip by Harrison Obatoyinbo and the second for a no-hands tackle under the sticks by Pouri Rakete-Stones hampered their defensive effort.

Those mistakes allowed Saints to stretch clear in the second period.

Throughout the 80 minutes the visitors had no real answer to the power and pace of Henry Pollock, who celebrated his new £400,000 contract extension not only with an eye-catching braided hairstyle but a performance which justified it all.

Pollock was not alone in hitting the ground running with Smith superb and Freeman and Pater ruthless.

Freeman completed his hat-trick with two second-half tries either side of Cam Jordan's first for Newcastle, after signing from Gloucester in the summer.

Sleightholme pounced just seconds after coming on as a substitute and the impressive Pater rounded off the win with his own hat-trick.

However, the impressively mobile Werner Kok scored a consolation late on to ensure Newcastle left with a bonus point to their name.

Northampton Saints' Tommy Freeman told BBC Radio Northampton:

"Good start and lots of points on the board which good to see but I think there is loads more in us which is what we said at half-time, but overall a good result.

"Our set piece we need to tighten up a bit on that first phase. Defensively we were caught a bit tight, but credit to Newcastle for stressing us in those areas but we would like to see better movement.

"It is always a challenge and going back-to-back [titles] is not done by many teams. There is a reason for that but we will be looking to take each week as it comes and keep putting our DNA on the pitch."

Newcastle head coach Dan McFarland told BBC Radio Newcastle:

"We put a lot of good stuff out there but we were tested today by a really, really good team. We know where we stand now and where we've got to work. We have a long jounrey ahead of us and that was the first step.

"It was a fantastic score when we had a length of the field try and that was really us and we also had a lot of defensive sets where we had showed really good scramble and stopped them from scoring.

"But the game is up and down. We had that yellow card and then we had three tries which were scored during that yellow, and the try just before half-time was a real killer.

"Maybe we left a couple of tries out there but there is plenty in that that we will take away and see as a real positive."

Northampton: Pater, Freeman, Hutchinson, Dingwall, Hendy, F Smith, McParland, Iyogun, Langdon, Kundiona, Coles, Prowse, Kemeny, Pollock, Chick

Replacements: R Smith, Fischetti, Neculai, Lockett, Taylor, Mitchell, Belleau, Sleightholme.

Newcastle: Obatoyinbo, Wade, Hearle, Harris, Kok, Connon, Elliott, Rakete-Stones, McGuigan, Millar Mills, Usher, Jordan, Hicks, Christie, Graham.

Replacements: Fletcher, West, Harper, Molina, Leatherbarrow, Cruz, Henry, Sotutu.

Sin bin: Obatoyinbo (14), Rakete-Stones (43)

Referee: Anthony Woodthorpe. %!s()

The three-day state visit emphasised pageantry and personal rapport rather than substantial agreements. The US president and Xi discussed the wars in Iran and Ukraine and the status of Taiwan. Their biggest policy announcement was a modest two-month extension of a trade truce.

But despite the presence of top tech executives at a White House state dinner on Thursday night, Trump and Xi failed to deliver the AI breakthrough that some experts and foreign governments had hoped for amid warnings that the technology could pose an existential threat to humanity.

“It was such a layup,” said Ro Khanna, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives’ select committee on China. “If [Trump] had just said, look, we have established technical working groups and we’ve agreed to a framework that has called for DeepSeek and Moonshot and Alibaba to sit down with Anthropic and OpenAI and Gemini and with technical experts and they’re going to commit to at least a pause on any self-improving AI, he could have looked like he was a statesman taking the lead.

“I believe Xi Jinping would have agreed to some of at least the technical working groups. But he [Trump] didn’t want to; he has no interest in doing that.”

It was the first visit to the White House by a Chinese president in more than a decade and Xi’s second state visit to the US. Three days of pomp and circumstance culminated on Friday with Trump and Xi drinking tea. Trump said ⁠the summit ⁠had produced great strides and that “our ​farmers are going to be happy,” but did not provide details.

The pair then went to the National Archives, where Trump and Xi looked at the original Declaration of Independence, the constitution and Bill of Rights. Trump told reporters they were comparing China’s documents to America’s founding documents. “Ours goes 250 years, which is great, and we’re proud of. Theirs goes 6,000 years. So there’s a little difference between 6,000 and 250. But we’re very proud of our 250.”

On Thursday, Xi acknowledged that the US and China have the “responsibility to develop and manage AI for good” and “ensure that the development of AI is always ​under human control”. China aims to have next-generation smart terminals and AI agents reach more than 90% penetration by 2030.

But Trump – who has repeatedly said the US must forge ahead to maintain its lead over China – appeared more focused on his push to rebrand artificial intelligence as “super intelligence”, later claiming on social media that Xi “seems to like” the term without divulging the substance of their discussions.

Later Trump hosted a black-tie state dinner attended by titans of the tech industry. Bernie Sanders, an independent senator of Vermont, used social media to label a photo of Trump and Xi’s table with guests’ net worth: Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla ($928bn), Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices ($3.5bn), Jensen Huang of Nvidia ($186bn) and Tim Cook of Apple ($3.1bn). Sanders commented: “A government of, by and for the billionaire class.”

But their counterparts in the Chinese tech industry were not present and there was little sign of either country making even a symbolic gesture to apply the brakes.

Khanna commented: “Trump didn’t have to have some groundbreaking treaty like Reagan and Gorbachev did [on nuclear weapons]. He could have at least said, look, we’re going to have a working group of Chinese and American technologists working together to make recommendations and enforcement and verification of the labs.”

Jonathan Czin, a fellow in the China Center at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, agrees that an opportunity was missed. “We are in this potentially transformative moment for both countries and for the world and for technology and, instead of having a meeting that would meet the moment, you got theatre of the absurd in lieu of that,” he said.

“Even going into this meeting, you’re dealing with a septuagenarian and octogenarian who may or may not have ever had first-hand contact with actually using AI and what happens with this technology rests on their two shoulders. The only thing they seemed to agree about is that neither of them wants to slow down with this technology, regardless of their actual understanding of it.”

The state visit underlined the contrast between Trump’s treatment of democratic allies such as Canada and authoritarian rivals such as China. He broke from tradition to give Xi a red carpet welcome when he landed at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.

He also found time to show Xi around the White House, including a gallery wall of presidents where Joe Biden is mockingly depicted as an autopen, a construction site for his White House ballroom and a new helicopter landing pad. “He’s an expert on stone, aside from many other things, and he loves good granite,” Trump said.

But the summit was somewhat overshadowed by Trump’s decision last week to bar CNN, MS Now and Politico from the White House, sparking a legal fight. On Thursday, Chinese state media were welcomed into the White House grounds even as members of America’s free press were frozen out, though later they gained entry. As in May, when Trump visited Beijing, the leaders did not hold a press conference.

Czin of the Brookings Institution added: “I had very low expectations going into this meeting for anything of substance and the meeting managed to underwhelm even those low expectations. We went from the mezzanine down into the basement. In terms of the substance, it’s not clear to me what the US got out of this.”

Senate Democrats also criticised the summit, arguing that Trump failed to secure meaningful concessions from Beijing on trade, security, human rights or AI.

Chuck Schumer, the minority leader in the Senate, said: “As usual, Trump acts based solely on who flatters him at the moment, where the nearest photo op is, and what headline he covets. If you’re a foreign authoritarian, Trump won’t just invite you to visit America, he’ll greet you plane-side.”

Trump and Xi are on track to meet twice more this year. In November, Xi will host the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China, and in December the Group of 20 summit will be held at the Trump National Doral Miami golf club in Florida. %!s()

• "A content management system may suspend a user's interaction with the interactive software application based on the promoted content trigger event." (Emphasis mine)
• "A content management system may present the promoted audiovisual content to the user."
• "A content management system may establish a credit … the credit delays suspension of the user's interaction."

That's the sort of whimsical creativity that made me fall in love with games in the first place. In plain English: This is a system for showing advertisements during gameplay, one that pauses your game (suspends your interaction). Similar to ad-supported mobile games, Microsoft proposes a credit system where these tokens can be exchanged for more ad-free game time.

Microsoft explains that videogames do not lend themselves to regular commercial breaks in the same way as TV shows, necessitating a partially user-controlled, credit-based system for managing advertisement delivery. The other half of the equation: Having it monitor gameplay and avoid deploying ads during climactic or lean-forward moments. How thoughtful.

My bias is I would rather only play games made before 2005 on a primordial ThinkPad for the rest of my life than deal with whatever the hell is going on here.

This sounds, quite frankly, god-awful. One of the worst case scenario arguments against always-online consoles and subscription-based gaming outlined in a patent. I'm not sure there is a game good enough, or an ad-supported Game Pass package cheap enough, that would make me subject myself to this. Forget the inconvenience⁠—the indignity of it all is enough to drive you to the brink.

The silver lining, if you're still rooting for Xbox⁠—it still holds some of my favorite studios hostage⁠—is that patents are not always put into practice. Seventeen years ago, Sony signaled intent to have us all stand up and shout "McDonalds" to make a vision of a burger go away, and that never happened.

The popular outrage against the patent may already be giving the planners at Microsoft pause. On the other hand: Xbox's CSO Matthew Ball is still a big believer in in-game ads. Meanwhile, The ailing titan EA has already rolled out EA Advertising, a new platform for "in-game integrations, creative partnerships, and scalable advertising capabilities." I love scalable advertising capabilities.

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Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch. You can follow Ted on Bluesky. %!s()