By John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday blocking President Donald Trump from sending the National Guard into American cities is likely to raise a politically fraught debate about the president’s willingness to invoke a 19th-century law to deploy the regular military on American soil instead.

Throughout his campaign and in the early months of his second term, Trump and his aides repeatedly teased the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military for domestic purposes — a move that, while perhaps politically unpopular, would give him broad discretion to skirt the general prohibition on using the military domestically.

In its order Tuesday, the Supreme Court focused on another federal law Trump tried to use to federalize hundreds of members of the Illinois National Guard. That law allows a president to call up the guard if he is unable to execute the nation’s laws with the “regular forces.” Over dissent from three conservative justices, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump had not met that law’s requirements.

But the decision on the court’s emergency docket did not deal directly with other authorities Trump could attempt to use.

“As I read it, the court’s opinion does not address the president’s authority under the Insurrection Act,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative who sided with the majority, wrote in a footnote. “One apparent ramification of the court’s opinion is that it could cause the president to use the US military more than the National Guard to protect federal personnel and property in the United States.”

That is a possibility that has lurked in the case at the Supreme Court for months as the administration has attempted to send National Guard troops into Democratic-run cities to help protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and facilities.

Trump has repeatedly flirted with invoking the Insurrection Act, which would give him broad authority to evade the restrictions on using the military domestically imposed by the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act.

“I’d do it if it’s necessary. So far it hasn’t been necessary,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office in October. “But we have an Insurrection Act for a reason.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement after the court’s order Tuesday, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said that nothing in the Supreme Court’s decision detracts from the administration’s “core agenda” of ensuring that “rioters did not destroy federal buildings and property.”

The current version of the Insurrection Act was last invoked by President George H.W. Bush during the 1992 Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of four White police officers in the beating of Rodney King. Perhaps the best-known use of the Insurrection Act was in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to integrate its schools.

That order followed the Supreme Court’s historic decision three years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education that declared segregated schools unconstitutional.

William Banks, a Syracuse University law professor and expert on the Insurrection Act, told CNN that such a move would almost certainly be more polit

Por CNN Español

El Departamento de Justicia publica nuevo lote de archivos de Epstein. La Corte Suprema bloquea el despliegue de la Guardia Nacional en Chicago. Lo que los votantes dicen que quieren para Navidad. Esto es lo que debes saber para comenzar el día. Primero la verdad.

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En medio de la creciente tensión, y cuando el Gobierno de Trump ya lleva incautados dos buques petroleros, Venezuela anunció una ley que impone penas de entre 15 y 20 años de cárcel para quienes respalden “piratería y bloqueo” naval de Estados Unidos. En un acto transmitido por VTV, Nicolás Maduro detalló que la normativa se llama Ley para Garantizar la Libre Navegabilidad y Comercio contra la Piratería en los Mares del Mundo.

• EE.UU. asegura que impondrá sanciones “al máximo” a Venezuela tras bloqueo de petroleros
• ANÁLISIS: El nuevo plan de acorazados de Trump podría transformar la Marina estadounidense… o hundirla

El Departamento de Justicia publicó un nuevo lote de documentos relacionados con el delincuente sexual convicto Jeffrey Epstein, que incluyen muchas más menciones al presidente Donald Trump que los de la tanda de la semana pasada. Aquí hay cuatro conclusiones sobre la última publicación. (Análisis).

• Departamento de Justicia afirma que la carta firmada por ‘J. Epstein’ y que hace referencia a ‘nuestro presidente’ es falsa
• Read more

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Optimal growing conditions are a crucial component of what enables modern agriculture to continue delivering efficiently. As commercial growing needs evolve, having an alternative to open-field farming that allows you to control the microclimate and growth of crops or cannabis without seasonal or climate-related concerns is essential.

Well-optimized grow houses can contribute to year-round crop production and help develop faster growth cycles for healthier plants. For these reasons, learning to create and maintain a suitable environment for plants that offer high yields is important.

Here is Meritus Gas Partners‘ guide on how to maintain optimal conditions in your grow house, which elaborates on the science behind creating ideal grow house conditions and how to control the environment to ensure maximum yield.

What Are the Best Conditions for a Grow Room?

Understanding the best conditions for a grow room requires some basic knowledge about controlling the room’s environment. The ideal conditions for a specific grow room will depend on growth stages and the type of plant being grown. However, the key environmental factors to achieve the best conditions will always revolve around the following aspects:

• Light
• Temperature and humidity
• Carbon dioxide (CO2)
• Air circulation and ventilation

Meritus Gas Partners

Exploring Each Element of Your Grow House Environment

Optimal growing conditions are an important balancing act to get right. It can provide plants with an environment that encourages growth by replicating the conditions that help them thrive in their natural habitat. For grow houses, achieving this means exploring ways to replicate each important environmental factor indoors to cultivate those ideal growth conditions.

Below are the critical factors that go into maintaining optimal conditions and how they can be achieved in a well-crafted grow house environment.

Light

Optimal growing conditions indoors require lights that can imitate sunlight. These are used for photosynthesis — a process that green plants use to convert light, water and carbon dioxide into chemical energy, releasing dissolved oxygen in the process. To achieve photosynthesis, your plants will need to grow under a specific light spectrum, which mainly consists of blue and red light.

While different plants and phases will need

Sha Hanting // China News Service / VCG via Getty Images

You can count on it: When the Federal Reserve changes its interest rate, news headlines about mortgage rates will follow.

This cycle unfolds up to eight times a year, so many home shoppers get the idea that the Fed regulates mortgage rates.

Fed decisions affect mortgage rates, but the Fed doesn’t control mortgage rates directly. In fact, as Better discusses here, the Fed’s actions can have unpredictable effects on the rates new home buyers pay on their mortgage loans.

Does the Fed set mortgage interest rates?

The Federal Reserve is the most powerful financial institution in the U.S., and its decisions reverberate throughout the global economy, including the mortgage market.

When the Fed adjusts rates, it’s changing the Federal Funds Rate, which is the overnight interest rate banks charge each other when they lend reserve funds to manage their cash flow. This rate influences short-term borrowing costs throughout the economy, including rates on credit cards, auto loans, and home equity lines of credit (HELOCs).

But 30-year fixed mortgage rates are long-term rates. They’re shaped mostly by broader financial markets, not by the Fed’s policy committee.

What actually drives 30-year mortgage rates

Mortgage rates are closely tied to:

• U.S. Treasury yields, especially the 10-year Treasury.
• The price of mortgage-backed securities (MBS).
• Inflation and jobs data.
• Predictions about future economic growth.
• Demand for U.S. bonds globally.
• Risk premiums required by investors.

All this affects mortgage rates because a single home loan doesn’t exist in an economic vacuum. After a borrower closes a mortgage loan to buy a primary residence, the lender will often sell this loan into the secondary market.

Multiple mortgage loans get combined into mortgage-backed securities, a financial asset investors can buy and sell. Investors who buy mortgage-backed securities expect returns that compensate them for inflation risk, interest-rate risk, and the chance borrowers refinance earlier than expected.

Because of this expectation, mortgage rates come with future risks and payoffs already built into their pricing. The rate you pay on a home loan this month reflects what investors believe will happen to inflation, economic growth, and Fed policy over the next few years.

How do mortgage rates react when the Fed lowers its rate?

When the Fed cuts the Federal Funds Rate, as it did three times between September and December, many borrowers expect mortgage rates to fall immediately. Sometimes rates do fall, but not always.

One reason for this: The mortgage markets have

By Chris Isidore, CNN

(CNN) — For years, a huge Amazon contract has been one of the few bright spots in the US Postal Service’s finances. But now the USPS plans to offer those last-mile services to additional customers to stem billions in ongoing losses – a move that risks losing its biggest customer.

The USPS faces a tight squeeze. With fewer people using the mail, it’s lost more and more money: $9 billion in the 12 months ending in September alone.

“We certainly have a precarious cash position. You know, within probably 12 to 24 months, we are out of cash,” USPS Commissioner David Steiner said in a recent interview with Reuters. Simply making additional cost cutting measures won’t solve the problem, he said.

The Amazon contract reportedly brings in about $6 billion a year to the agency, money it can’t afford to lose.

But the post office now plans to accept bids from other shippers for access to the service’s distribution centers – even though Amazon says that might prompt it to pull back from the using the USPS so much.

“We’ve been working for nearly a year to extend our partnership that started more than 30 years ago,” said Amazon spokesman Steve Kelly.

“We were surprised to hear they want to run an auction after nearly a year of negotiations, and, given the change of direction and the uncertainty it adds to our delivery network, we’re evaluating all of our options that would ensure we can continue to deliver for our customers.”

Universal service

The very thing that makes the postal service so attractive to Amazon is also the reason why the agency so badly needs more money: universal service.

The postal service is legally required to deliver mail all across the United States all at the same price, what’s called universal delivery. That includes rural, far-flung or hard-to-reach destinations, expensive places for mail carriers to get to.

For Amazon, that means it’s sometimes cheaper to use USPS for that last stretch of delivery to a customer’s door.

But while that contract is important to USPS, it’s not nearly enough.

“We may not have sufficient liquidity to meet all of our existing legal obligations when due while also repaying our maturing debt and making the critical infrastructure investments… without putting our ability to fulfill that primary mission at undue risk,” it said in its most recent annual report.

Trying to get more customers to deliver pre-sorted packages in bulk directly into the USPS system makes operational sense, said Elena Patel, senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institute and an expert in Postal Service finances. But she said there is a risk if those negotiations with smaller shippers pushes Amazon to no longer use the USPS as much as it has in the past.

“I don’t know what the state of negotiations is, but it certainly would not be good for the financial situation at the Postal Service for the negotiations with Amazon to fall apart,” she said.

USPS has already started to see package volumes start to slip after years of growth fueled by online consumer purchases. Total parcel and package volume slipped nearly 6% in the most recent fiscal year. But packages are still up nearly 500% from where they were 20 years ago, while first-class letter volume has plunged in the same period.

Patel said that it’s in the national interest for the government to continue to provide universal service, even if it means between $6 billion to $10 billion in annual congressional appropriations to USPS.

“The premise of (the USPS) is that it would deliver everywhere at an affordable rate, and we will let you keep the letter monopoly to pay for that,” she said. “Well, the second half of that is