By Patrick Svitek, CNN

(CNN) — The Virginia Supreme Court voided Democrats’ attempt to redraw the state’s US House map in an April referendum.

The court ruled that the process of creating the referendum violated the state Constitution.

The ruling is a damaging blow to national Democrats who hoped to gain as many as four US House seats in this fall’s fight for the midterms.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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By Kara Fox, Saskya Vandoorne, Niamh Kennedy, CNN

(CNN) — The porn website Motherless, which has faced international scrutiny over hosting content linked to gender-based violence and drug-facilitated sexual assault, has been taken offline by Dutch authorities following mounting pressure in the wake of a CNN investigation.

A spokesperson for the Dutch Public Prosecution Service told CNN that the site had been taken down by Dutch authorities and that prosecutors in Zeeland-West-Braband had opened a preliminary investigation.

The website appears to have been taken offline on Thursday evening. Motherless’ servers are located in the Netherlands and are hosted by NFOrce Internet Services, a company based in Steenbergen, in the south of the country.

Public attention focused on Motherless after CNN published its findings into a wider online ecosystem that highlighted the role that the site – and associated Telegram groups – play in hosting videos of non-consensual image sharing and drug-facilitated sexual assault. Previous investigations carried out by journalists in Germany and Canada also found thousands of videos in which unconscious women appeared to be raped and sexually abused.

The website has been hosted on Dutch servers since at least 2024, according to Dutch broadcaster NOS, whose reporting on the Netherlands’ connection to the platform in the wake of CNN’s investigation amplified calls for Dutch authorities to act.

NOS and current affairs program Nieuwsuur reported that an analysis of 20,000 videos that appeared on the Motherless homepage last week found those tagged “incest” by users were among the site’s most-viewed categories, while one of the platform’s most-watched videos in the past week had also been tagged with “rape,” “sister” and “school girl.”

CNN reported that Motherless was home to more than 20,000 videos of so-called “sleep” content uploaded by users, categorized using descriptive tags such as #passedout and #eyecheck at the time of publishing in late March 2026. While those tags appeared to have been removed since CNN’s report, icontent appearing to show drug-facilitated sexual abuse was still present as of this week.

In a Thursday statement, NFOrce said that it had launched an urgent compliance and abuse-handling review, giving Motherless 12 hours to respond. NFOrce told CNN that it “does not operate, manage, moderate, or control customer platforms or their content.”

“Our role is limited to infrastructure services. Abuse handling is performed based on reports received through established legal and operational procedures,” it said, adding that specific URLS need to be reported to the “appropriate abuse handling channels” in order to review and address allegations of illegal content.

The takedown of Motherless marks a major development in efforts to combat the spread of non-consensual imagery online.

Robbert Hoving of Offlimits, an independent online safety group based in the Netherlands, told CNN it was “a very important signal” from authorities that “websites normalizing sexual violence against woman, and turning that into a business model, a

By Lianne Kolirin, CNN

(CNN) — Artworks by Renoir, Degas and Rodin that are believed to have been looted by the Nazis from their Jewish owners have gone on display at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The museum, home to the world’s largest collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art, has this week taken a significant step in France’s effort to reckon with its dark past, opening a permanent space for work thought to have been looted by the Nazis, but whose rightful owners have not been identified.

The exhibition, titled “Who owns these works?,” is to feature a rotating selection of the 225 such pieces that are currently housed by the museum. Twelve paintings and one sculpture are currently on display.

Northern France was directly occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II, while much of the south fell under the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis and participated in the deportation of Jews to concentration camps.

Roughly 100,000 artworks were looted in France during the war, according to a report published by the Working Party on the Spoliation of Jews in France, set up by the French government in 1997.

Around 60,000 of these were recovered in Germany and Austria at the end of the war and three-quarters were returned to their rightful owners or descendants. However, some 15,000 of these pieces were not returned because their original owners’ and heirs’ identities could not be established.

Most of the works were sold off by the French state during the 1950s, according to the Musée d’Orsay’s website, but 2,200 were held back for safekeeping by the country’s national museums. As such they became the responsibility of the MNR (“Musées Nationaux Récupération” — National Museums Recovery), the museum said. Over the past 30 years, 15 MNR works held at the Musée d’Orsay have been returned to their rightful owners.

The museum has engaged a team of provenance researchers to look into the history of the unclaimed artworks, with a view to ultimately being able to restore some of them to their rightful owners.

Among the works on display is a painting by Belgian artist Alfred Stevens of his niece and nephew. According to provenance details from the museum, it was acquired “for Hitler” at a public auction in 1942 by a German art dealer. Its original owner has not been established.

Another work in the exhibition, a ballroom scene by Edgar Degas, is said to have been acquired in 1919 by Fernand Ochsé, a Jewish collector who was later deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.

The Musée d’Orsay’s president, Annick Lemoine, said in a press release announcing the creation of the new space that the issue of art looted by the Nazis is a “priority focus” for museums in France and is “more relevant than ever.”

“Today, by dedicating a room to these works, the museum hopes to both highli

By Bryan Mena, CNN

Washington (CNN) — Consumer sentiment continued to decline this month, reaching a fresh record low as the war in Iran drags on, keeping energy prices elevated.

The University of Michigan’s latest consumer survey, released Friday, showed sentiment fell early this month to a preliminary reading of 48.2, the lowest on records going back to 1952. Sentiment had previously reached its lowest point just last month, below anything seen during the Great Recession, the pandemic, and the inflation surge afterward.

“About one-third of consumers spontaneously mentioned gasoline prices and about 30% mentioned tariffs,” said Joanne Hsu, the survey’s director, in a release. “Taken together, consumers continue to feel buffeted by cost pressures, led by soaring prices at the pump.”

“Middle East developments are unlikely to meaningfully boost sentiment until supply disruptions have been fully resolved and energy prices fall,” she added.

Gas prices heavily influence people’s perception of the economy, and the national average price for a gallon of gasoline has been stuck above $4 for weeks. That’s because global energy prices have remained elevated as well, with the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a key global passageway through which 20% of the world’s oil passes, along with various other commodities.

Still, record-low sentiment likely won’t translate into a pullback in consumer spending, which accounts for about two-thirds of the US economy. Bouts of souring sentiment in recent years didn’t trigger weaker spending, such as in 2022, when inflation reached 40-year highs; and last year, when President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs.

A key reason why Americans haven’t cut back, despite feeling lousy about the economy: The US labor market’s resilience.

While hiring has downshifted compared to the robust post-pandemic years, layoffs haven’t risen more than usual, keeping a lid on the unemployment rate. New employment data on Friday showed that the unemployment rate held steady at 4.3% in April as employers added a stronger-than-expected 115,000 jobs that month.

This story is developing and will be updated.

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