Justice Samuel Alito has choice words for his high bench colleagues who released a blanket opinion “literally in the middle of the night” on Saturday, ordering the Trump administration to halt the deportation of Venezuelans suspected of being Tren De Aragua gang members from custody in the Northern District of Texas.
In his dissent joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, Alito argued the court “hastily and prematurely granted unprecedented emergency relief” to an expanded number of suspected criminal aliens in a “legally questionable” manner — especially because “it is not clear that the Court had jurisdiction.”
Contrary to his fellow justices’ assumption of authority, Alito noted even the Fifth Circuit “held that it lacked jurisdiction” because it was unsure whether a District Court’s failure to rule on the alleged gang members’ request for a temporary restraining order “before the expiration of a truncated counsel-imposed deadline” counted as a denial. Alito clarified later in the dissent that the counsel for the Venezuelans “insisted on a ruling within 45 minutes on Good Friday afternoon” and proceeded with an appeal when that demand was not met.
Paramilitary shelling on Sudan’s besieged city of El-Fasher, in the western region of Darfur, killed more than 30 civilians and wounded dozens more, activists said on Monday.
The attack, which took place on Sunday, involved “heavy artillery shelling” and targeted the city’s residential neighbourhoods, said the local resistance committee, one of hundreds of volunteer groups coordinating aid across Sudan.
Since April 2023, the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have been locked in a brutal war.
El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, remains the last major city in the vast Darfur region that the paramilitary group has not conquered.
Last week, the RSF launched a renewed offensive on the city and two nearby displacement camps — Zamzam and Abu Shouk — killing over 400 and displacing some 400,000 people, according to the United Nations.
US President Donald Trump on Sunday said Russia and Ukraine could reach an agreement “this week,” possibly to end their war of more than three years. He also said the two rivals could then do “big business” with the United States and “make a fortune.”
“Hopefully Russia amd (sic) Ukraine will make a deal this week. Both will then start to do big business with the United States of America, which is thriving, and make a big fortune!” Trump posted to his Truth Social network.
However, he did not share details of any progress in peace talks Washington has sought to push forward between Moscow and Kyiv, since he took over from Joe Biden in January.
The US president’s Truth Social post comes just days after his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, warned that Washington could “move on” from its push to broker an agreement to end the conflict, which began in February 2022.
“We need to figure out here now within a matter of days whether this is doable in the short term, because if it’s not, then I think we’re just going to move on,” Rubio said on Friday in Paris, after high-level discussions with European and Ukrainian leaders.
“If they had advisers who had their hand on the pulse of the Democratic Party or national politics, they would have understood the intense level of anger or indifference to them that remains inside our party and isn’t going away anytime soon,” LaRosa said in a recent interview withThe Hill.
“I love both Bidens dearly, but staff loyalty means there is a responsibility to provide them with an honest situational awareness, especially when it comes to their public image, no matter how hurtful it is to hear,” LaRosa added.
China on Monday issued a direct warning to countries considering trade deals with the US that could disadvantage Beijing.
The warning came in the aftermath of reports that the Trump administration in the US may offer tariff exemptions to other nations in return for limiting their trade with China.
President Trump this month paused major tariff increases on other countries for 90 days, while hiking duties further on goods from China to 145 percent.
“China firmly opposes any party reaching a deal at the expense of China’s interests. If this happens, China will not accept it and will resolutely take reciprocal countermeasures,” the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said, CNBC reported.
Dejuan Moore had been held on an $810,000 bond, but Judge Khadija Babb lowered it to $304,000.
A Nashville man charged with raping two teenage girls at gunpoint had his bond significantly reduced by a Davidson County, Tennessee judge, prompting backlash from sexual assault victim advocates.
Dejuan Moore was being held on an $810,000 bond, but Judge Khadija Babb lowered it to $304,000. Moore faces a series of serious charges, including two counts of aggravated rape, three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, three counts of especially aggravated kidnapping, as well as resisting arrest, evading arrest, and evading arrest by a motor vehicle.
Moore’s defense attorney, Jennifer Thompson, argued the original bond was excessive, pointing to Moore’s lack of criminal history and what she called “strong ties to the Nashville community.” She said Moore wants to be released to support his girlfriend and her children.
“He was supportive of him and his girlfriend and their household,” Thompson claimed. However, victim advocates expressed outrage over the judge’s decision.
“It makes it seem like his life is more important than the victims he sexually assaulted,” said Lorraine McGuire, Vice President of Community Relations at the Sexual Assault Center, according to Fox 17 News.
An activist group supporting Karmelo Anthony, who is accused of murdering fellow teenager Austin Metcalf at a Texas track meet, posted a bizarre POV-style video on social media showing their security team escorting the alleged killer from jail after he made bond.
In the clip posted by the Next Generation Action Network [NGAN], a member of the organization’s security team shakes the teen’s hand and tells him to “get behind us” and “just stay close” as they walk past the media while leaving the Collin County Jail.
One female reporter shoves a microphone in Anthony’s face and asks if he has anything he’d like to say to the Metcalf family and why he was armed that day, calling him “sweatheart.”
Accused teen killer Karmelo Anthony seen in a newly released video captured by a pair of Ray-Ban glasses. @niquealex/Instagram
Anthony stays mum as they continue to the vehicle, where the security team ushers him into the backseat, the video shows.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) raised $9.6 million in the first three months of the year — more than double her second-highest quarter — a massive haul that comes amid increasing calls by progressives for her to mount a 2028 primary challenge against Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
A leader of the progressive movement, Ocasio-Cortez has long been a fundraising powerhouse who draws upon a vast network of small-dollar donors.
She said in a post on X that the average campaign donation was $21, and campaign manager Oliver Hidalgo-Wohlleben said in a statement that 64 percent of contributions came from first-time donors, adding that “AOC doesn’t take a dollar from lobbyists or corporate PACS. Our top donor professions are teachers and nurses.”
“I cannot convey enough how grateful I am to the millions of people supporting us with your time, resources, & energy,” Ocasio-Cortez said of her fundraising. “Your support has allowed us to rally people together at record scale to organize their communities.”
A federal judge in Puerto Rico issued a scathing order last week accusing Democratic prosecutors on the island of plagiarizing nearly their entire 241-page complaint that blamed oil companies for causing global warming.
In the order Wednesday, district court judge Aida Delgado-Colon outlined how David Efron, the lead attorney representing Puerto Rico’s capital city San Juan, appears to have plagiarized a similar but separate complaint that 16 Puerto Rican municipalities filed a year earlier. A side-by-side comparison of the two complaints shows large blocks of text are copied word-for-word.
Delgado-Colon wrote that the situation should serve as a cautionary tale for all members of the bar, characterizing San Juan’s complaint and subsequent briefs as “copycat filings” and stating that the case presents an “astonishing example of plagiarism in the legal profession.” She added that a monetary sanction charging Efron would be insufficient to address the seriousness of the circumstances and said a separate order is needed to properly address it.
“Attorney Efron’s plagiarism constitutes attorney misconduct and an ethical violation,” she wrote. “The touchstone of plagiarism is lack of attribution. As in law school, passing someone else’s work off as one’s own is wrong as a matter of fact and professional ethics.”
Two years after Gallup said that more Americans identified as Republicans than Democrats for the first time in over three decades, the trend has expanded as the GOP has won over more support from Hispanic and black voters.
The one-point edge Gallup discovered in January 2023 has grown to five points in a new Napolitan News survey of 9,300 registered voters.
In that survey shared with Secrets, 46% said that they considered themselves Republicans or leaned Republican, while 41% considered themselves Democrats or leaned Democrat.
In the Gallup survey of 10,000 adults, 45% identified as Republicans and 44% as Democrats.
Napolitan pollster Scott Rasmussen said that while the numbers appear to favor Republicans and even President Donald Trump, voters can be fickle and sometimes change their partisan identification.
“While it’s hard for people in the political world to accept, party ID is fluid. During a campaign season, people who think of themselves as independent tend to align with a party — or at least lean toward a party. That’s why the number of Republicans goes up with a Trump victory,” he said.
Trump has been pushing to turn every federal agency into an effective tool for catching and deporting illegal immigrants. And wouldn’t you know it, acting IRS Commissioner Melanie Krause couldn’t handle doing the right thing and resigned.
And guess who’s likely to take her place? Gary Shapley, the IRS whistleblower who blew the lid off the Hunter Biden tax probe. He testified under oath that he faced retaliation simply for doing his job and cooperating with congressional investigators looking into the shady business dealings of the president’s son. Now, according to the Associated Press, Shapley is expected to be promoted to acting commissioner of the IRS.
Shapley and fellow IRS investigator Joseph Ziegler were sidelined from the Hunter Biden probe in December 2022 after raising serious concerns with their superiors. According to their testimony, the Justice Department under then-U.S. Attorney David Weiss repeatedly “slow-walked investigative steps” and stalled enforcement actions in the critical months leading up to the 2020 election.
General Secretary Xi Jinping clearly wants to prepare China for a war over Taiwan. The measures he is taking to ready its people, economy, legal system, and especiallyitsmilitary are clear for everyone to see. The best way to dissuade him from actually rolling the iron dice is for Washington and Taipei to work together, because neither can stop Beijing on their own. It would be a fool’s errand for Taiwan to resist a Chinese military onslaught without its chief patron and protector. And the United States needs Taiwan to hold on and hold out long enough for the U.S. military to arrive in decisive force.
Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Many Taiwanese citizens question whether America will actually defend them. Washington’s long standing posture of strategic ambiguity is obviously one source of skepticism. But even strategic clarity toward Taipei will not solve the problem. The fact is that Washington and Taipei have a long and complicated relationship. Taiwanese voters know the United States has a long history of turning its back on them in their moment of need.
Thus, there is no question that the United States should take steps to address Taiwan’s understandable lack of faith in America’s commitment. A sensible first step is to address the backlog in arms deliveries to Taiwan, as two Kuomintang legislative staffers recently argued in these pages. And there are a range of other things Washington can do to demonstrate that it is serious about Taiwan.
The Communist Chinese have accomplished what many people believed was only a matter of time. Beijing has nearly destroyed the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong as the city’s Democratic Party, the largest opposition party, is disbanding.
Sheer brutality and the use of modern instruments of oppression accomplished what many activists in Hong Kong believed couldn’t be done. Perhaps they were naive in thinking that Beijing wanted a “two systems, one China” policy. Maybe they were crazy to think that Beijing meant to keep its promise to maintain Hong Kong’s autonomy for 50 years after Beijing regained control of the city in 1997.
Beijing was always playing the long game. China is an ancient country that is used to thinking in terms of centuries, not decades. It has a plan to reintegrate Hong Kong into the Chinese state, and nothing would happen that interfered with that plan. Using intimidation and draconian “security” laws, Beijing has successfully stymied the movement to maintain Hong Kong’s position as a quasi-independent city and will now complete the process of making Hong Kong just another city in China after the Democratic Party disbands.
It’s difficult to remember that when the British handed over Hong Kong to Beijing, there was hope that the Communists would keep their word and allow Hong Kong to maintain its civil liberties. For a while, Beijing kept its promise. But the noose gradually tightened, choking off any hope for freedom.
“We have not achieved what we set out to do,” Fred Li, a founding member of the party, said in an interview. “Without money or resources, we can’t even survive ourselves.”
The volunteers running the experiment were not completely hands-off. Submitted ideas were screened according to a moderation policy, and redundant ideas were not posted. Ford says that 51% of ideas were published, and 31% were deemed redundant. About 6% of ideas were not posted because they were either completely off-topic or contained a personal attack.
But some researchers who study the technologies that can make democracy more effective question whether soliciting input in this manner is a reliable way to understand what a community wants.
One problem is self-selection—for example, certain kinds of people tend to show up to in-person forums like town halls. Research shows that seniors, homeowners, and people with high levels of education are the most likely to attend, Fung says. It’s possible that similar dynamics are at play among the residents of Bowling Green who decided to participate in the project.
“Self-selection is not an adequate way to represent the opinions of a public,” says James Fishkin, a political scientist at Stanford who’s known for developing a process he calls deliberative polling, in which a representative sample of a population’s residents are brought together for a weekend, paid about $300 each for their participation, and asked to deliberate in small groups. Other methods, used in some European governments, use jury-style groups of residents to make public policy decisions.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared in federal court in Washington, D.C., for a second day on Tuesday, testifying about his intentions for acquiring Instagram in 2012.
In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission sued Facebook, which is now under the umbrella of parent company Meta, alleging it was in violation of antitrust laws by buying both Instagram and WhatsApp.
FTC lawyer Daniel Matheson pressed Zuckerberg on Tuesday over his internal message exchanges from 2012 with then-Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman regarding the $1 billion bid for Instagram.
Daniel Matheson, a lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission, departs following the first day of a historic antitrust trial about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s intentions in acquiring Instagram, at Barrett Prettyman U.S. Court House in Washington, Monday, April 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)
“[What] I’ve been thinking about recently is how much we should be willing to pay to acquire mobile app companies like Instagram and Path that are building networks that are competitive with our own,” Zuckerberg wrote to Ebersman, then agreeing with the chief financial officer when he said the purchase of Instagram would be a way to “neutralize a potential competitor.”
Extreme cosmic events such as colliding black holes or the explosions of stars can cause ripples in spacetime, so-called gravitational waves. Their discovery opened a new window into the universe. To observe them, ultra-precise detectors are required. Designing them remains a major scientific challenge for humans.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) have been working on how an artificial intelligence system could explore an unimaginably vast space of possible designs to find entirely new solutions. The results were recently published in the journal Physical Review X.
More than a century ago, Einstein theoretically predicted gravitational waves. They could only be directly detected in 2016 because the development of the necessary detectors was extremely complex. Dr. Mario Krenn, head of the research group ›Artificial Scientist Lab‹ at MPL, in collaboration with the team of LIGO (“Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory”), who built those detectors successfully, has designed an AI-based algorithm called ›Urania‹ to design novel interferometric gravitational wave detectors. Interferometry describes a measurement method which uses the interference of waves, i.e. their superposition when they meet. Detector design requires optimizing both layout and parameters. The scientists have converted this challenge into a continuous optimization problem and solved it using methods inspired by modern machine learning. They have found many new experimental designs which outperform the best known next-generation detectors. These results have the potential to improve the range of detectable signals by more than an order of magnitude.
According to a statement issued by the “Hawks” — a specialized police unit that investigates serious crimes — Sullivan, 45, was abducted at the Fellowship Baptist Church in Motherwell Township outside the coastal city of Gqeberha and was being held in a safehouse in that city.
The Hawks say numerous police agencies acting on tips went to the house Tuesday and saw a vehicle. Suspects in the vehicle tried to flee, opening fire on the officers as they did and “the officers responded with tactical precision, leading to a high-intensity shootout” in which the three suspects were killed.
Sullivan was found in the vehicle “miraculously unharmed,” the statement says, adding that he was “immediately assessed by medical personnel and is currently in an excellent condition.
At least 40 people were killed in a brutal attack on a Christian farming community in north-central Nigeria late Sunday night, according to President Bola Tinubu. The attackers, who were reported as being Muslim gunmen, struck on Palm Sunday in the Zike community, located in Bassa, Plateau State.
Open Doors reports this latest attack brings the death toll to around 113 people who have been killed in an ongoing spate of attacks in Plateau State since the end of March. The watchdog group reports Muslim Fulani militants have attacked at least eight communities, destroying more than 300 homes and displacing 3,000 people.
In the last few weeks, the militants killed 3 Christians who were in the middle of farming their land, 11 Christians who had gathered for a funeral – including a pregnant woman and a ten-year-old girl – and at least five Christian women who had gathered for fellowship.
In the Palm Sunday attack, Andy Yakubu, a resident of Zike, said homes were looted and set ablaze during the onslaught, and the death toll could exceed 50. At the last count, an Open Doors contact reported, “43 people were killed, several houses were burnt down with people inside.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi escalated the Trump administration’s war with Maine on Wednesday, announcing a lawsuit over the state’s decision to continue allowing boys to compete in girls sports.
Bondi said during a press conference flanked by young female athletes, including activist Riley Gaines, that the legal action was a result of the state defying President Donald Trump’s executive order that interpreted Title IX to prevent transgender athletes from competing in sports exclusive to their opposite sex. The Biden administration had reinterpreted it to include transgender identity in Title IX’s protections.
“They must not be reading the same Title IX we’re reading,” Bondi said.
The complaint alleges that the Maine Department of Education is “openly and defiantly flouting federal anti-discrimination law.”