Aurelia Butler

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    Federal Courts Buck Trump Deportation Schemes, Focusing on Due Process Rights

    The Trump administration’s aggressive push to deport migrants has run up against resistance from the judiciary.If there has been a common theme in the federal courts’ response to the fallout from President Trump’s aggressive deportation policies, it is that the White House cannot rush headlong into expelling people by sidestepping the fundamental principle of due process.In case after case, a legal bottom line is emerging: Immigrants should at least be given the opportunity to challenge their deportations, especially as Trump officials have claimed novel and extraordinary powers to remove them.The latest and clearest expression of that view came on Friday evening, when the Supreme Court chided the Trump administration for seeking to provide only a day’s warning to a group of Venezuelan immigrants in Texas it had been trying to deport under the expansive powers of an 18th-century wartime law.“Notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal,” the justices wrote, “surely does not pass muster.”While many questions remain to be answered about Mr. Trump’s deportation plans, many legal scholars have hailed courts’ support of due process. At the same time, they have also expressed concern that such support was needed in the first place.“It’s great that courts are standing up for one of the most basic principles that underlie our constitutional order — that ‘persons’ (not ‘citizens’) are entitled to due process before being deprived of life, liberty, or property,” Michael Klarman, a professor at Harvard Law School, wrote in an email. “It would be even better if the administration would simply cease violating such principles.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Administration Abandons Fight to Ban Powerful Gun Accessory

    The device, called a forced-reset trigger, allows semiautomatic weapons to fire hundreds of rounds. The Biden administration had sought to block them from being sold.The Trump administration has given up a legal fight to ban a device that makes semiautomatic weapons more powerful.The Justice Department said Friday that it had reached a settlement ending litigation filed by the Biden administration to block the sale of the device, called a forced-reset trigger.“This Department of Justice believes that the Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. “And we are glad to end a needless cycle of litigation with a settlement that will enhance public safety.”Forced-reset triggers allow gun owners to fire their semiautomatic weapons at great speed. Aided by the device, a shooter can fire hundreds of rounds in a minute with an extended squeeze, Biden administration officials had said.The accessory is similar to a bump stock, which President Trump banned during his first term after a gunman used one to massacre dozens of concertgoers in Las Vegas. Bump stocks, like forced-reset triggers, allow semiautomatic rifles to fire at speeds approaching those of machine guns.Last year, the Supreme Court struck down the bump stock ban. But the Biden administration had sought to maintain a ban on forced-reset triggers.A federal judge in Texas struck down the forced-reset trigger ban, but the Biden administration appealed the case.The Justice Department said the new settlement included gun-safety provisions and would prevent the sale of forced-reset triggers in pistols.Still, gun safety advocates decried the settlement, saying that it would allow gun owners to transform their firearms into virtual machine guns, making life in America more dangerous.“Machine guns have no place on our streets, and this move from the Trump administration will only lead to tragedy,” John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement. More

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    Biden’s Interview With Hur Confirms What Many Suspected

    The former president’s halting responses to questions by a special counsel show him exactly as a majority of Americans believed him to be — and as Democrats repeatedly insisted he was not.For much of his time in the White House, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. offered a quick rebuttal to those raising concerns about his age: “Watch me,” he said.Yet, in the end, it may be the sound of Mr. Biden’s own voice that proves what his aides worked furiously, and spent hundreds of millions of campaign dollars, to try to keep the public from seeing with its own eyes.The five-hour-and-10-minute audio recording of a special counsel’s interview with Mr. Biden on Oct. 8 and 9, 2023, shows a president struggling to recall dates and details, whose thoughts seem jumbled as he tries to recreate events that had occurred just a few years earlier.The information in the audio recording, which Axios published on Saturday, is not new. The 258-page transcript of the interview of Mr. Biden by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated his handling of classified documents, was released in March 2024. His report set off a political firestorm in the midst of the president’s re-election campaign.But the sound of Mr. Biden’s fragile voice and unsteady responses offers a revelation of its own. The Hur tapes reveal the president exactly as a majority of Americans believed him to be — and as Democrats repeatedly insisted he was not.In the days after Mr. Hur released his report, Democrats fanned out across the news media to vouch for the president, assuring the public of their eyewitness vantage point on his deep knowledge and sure-handed command of the nation and the world. He was “sharp” and at the “top of his game,” they said almost in unison. He was “focused, impressive, formidable and effective,” as Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, one of the youngest leading Democrats, put it memorably. Biden administration officials declined to release the audio recording of his interview, asserting executive privilege.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Yuval Raphael, Israel’s Eurovision Entrant, Survived the Hamas Attacks of Oct. 7

    Not long after the attacks, Yuval Raphael said, she resolved to follow her long-held dream of becoming a professional singer.When Hamas attacked the Nova music festival in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Yuval Raphael went from dancing with friends to hiding in a bomb shelter.After attackers broke into the shelter and started shooting partygoers, Raphael played dead, then lay beneath bodies for eight hours until she was rescued.That experience, Raphael told the Israel Hayom newspaper earlier this year, changed her outlook on life. “When I was there, I realized that everything could be over in a moment, and you don’t want your life to end without experiencing it,” she said. Not long after the attacks, Raphael said, she resolved to follow her long-held dream of becoming a professional singer.Now, Raphael, 24, is representing Israel at Eurovision with “New Day Will Rise,” a ballad in which she sings, over twinkling piano, “New day will rise / Life will go on / Everyone cries / Don’t cry alone.”As Israel’s retaliation to the Oct. 7 attacks grinds on, some Eurovision fans have called on the competition organizers to expel Israel from the contest over the country’s conduct in the war.At last year’s final, some audience members booed Israel’s singer as she performed, though others cheered her. Raphael told the BBC this week that she was expecting a hostile reception during her performance and that she had been rehearsing with distracting sounds playing in the background. Indeed, on Thursday in Basel, a small group of protesters blew whistles and waved flags to disrupt one of Raphael’s public rehearsals.But, she told the broadcaster, she was trying to avoid the furor and stay focused on winning. Eurovision’s slogan is “United by music,” she said, adding, “That’s what we are here for.” More

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    Estonia’s entry, ‘Espresso Macchiato,’ brewed trouble in Italy.

    When Tommy Cash, a rapper and singer from Estonia, won his country’s Eurovision selection with “Espresso Macchiato,” he barely had time to celebrate before a backlash began.In the song, Cash sings in a cheesy Italian accent that he is “sweating like a Mafioso” from working so hard, and just wants a coffee. “Me like mi coffee,” he says: “Very importante.”Cash’s riff on Italian clichés did not go down well in some parts of Italy. Gian Marco Centinaio, a lawmaker with Italy’s far-right League Party, posted on Instagram that Eurovision should ban the song. “Is this the idea of ​​European brotherhood that the organizers of the Eurovision Song Contest have in mind?” he wrote.The flap also made headlines because Codacons, an Italian consumer rights organization, complained that the song “conveys a message of a population tied to organized crime.”In a recent interview, Cash said that he found the reaction over the top. He hadn’t meant to insult Italians, he said: “I love Italy. I love the people. I’m drawn to them because they’re so passionate.”In earlier songs, he rapped in English with his own heavy Eastern European accent, he said, and he also made a track with a German-accented chorus. His comedic Italian voice in “Espresso Macchiato” was no different than those, he said.Cash — who has made several tracks with Charli XCX — has many fans in Europe who love his left-field vibe and provocative videos, but he’s never been close to a household name. But in Italy, at least, he is now a star. Cash said that he had performed on Italian TV many times since “Espresso Macchiato” blew up. On a recent trip to Milan, he added, fans chased him down the street.He had a simple message for anyone who still felt insulted. “Drink a coffee,” he said: “Chill!” More

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    Three Iranians Accused of Targeting People in Britain

    The charges against the men come as concerns have grown about Iranian operatives carrying out operations against British residents and citizens.Three Iranian men appeared in court on Saturday in London, accused of helping Iran’s intelligence service by targeting individuals in Britain.Mostafa Sepahvand, 39; Farhad Javadi Manesh, 44; and Shapoor Qalehali Khani Noori, 55, have been charged under Britain’s National Security Act with engaging in conduct likely to assist a foreign intelligence service between Aug. 14 last year and Feb. 16.They are also accused of carrying out surveillance and reconnaissance as part of a plan to commit serious violence against an individual, who was not identified.The arrests come amid growing concern about efforts by Iranian operatives to target British citizens and residents.The Metropolitan Police said in a statement that the men had been arrested and detained on May 3. “The foreign state to which the charges relate is Iran,” the statement added.The BBC reported that the three had been accused of targeting journalists working for Iran International, an independent, Persian-language broadcaster based in London that has been critical of the Iranian government.All three defendants, who live in London, had illegally entered Britain between 2016 and 2022, and two were among the thousands who have traveled to the country on small boats from France.“The charges that have been laid against these three individuals must now take their course through the criminal justice system, and nothing must be done to prejudice the outcome of those proceedings,” Yvette Cooper, Britain’s home secretary, said in a statement.“But we will also take separate action to address the very serious wider issues raised by this case,” Ms. Cooper added. “The police have confirmed that the foreign state to which these charges relate is Iran, and Iran must be held to account for its actions.”Thanking the police, Ms. Cooper said, “We will not tolerate growing state threats on our soil.”In a speech last year, Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, identified Iran as a country of growing concern to the counterterrorism police. He said that since January 2022, the security services had been investigating 20 Iranian-backed plots that posed potentially lethal threats to British citizens and residents. More

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    In Yemen, $7 Billion in Useless Bombing

    The Signal scandal drew howls of outrage for the way Trump administration officials insecurely exchanged texts about military strikes on Yemen. But dig a little deeper, and there’s an even larger scandal.This is a scandal about a failed policy that empowers an enemy of the United States, weakens our security and will cost thousands of lives. It’s one that also tarnishes President Joe Biden but reaches its apotheosis under President Trump.It all goes back to the brutal Hamas terrorist attack on Israel in October 2023, and Israel’s savage response leveling entire neighborhoods of Gaza. The repressive Houthi regime of Yemen sought to win regional support by attacking supposedly pro-Israeli ships passing nearby in the Red Sea. (In fact, it struck all kinds of ships.)There are more problems than solutions in international relations, and this was a classic example: An extremist regime in Yemen was impeding international trade, and there wasn’t an easy fix. Biden responded with a year of airstrikes on Yemen against the Houthis that consumed billions of dollars but didn’t accomplish anything obvious.After taking office, Trump ramped up pressure on Yemen. He slashed humanitarian aid worldwide, with Yemen particularly hard hit. I last visited Yemen in 2018, when some children were already starving to death, and now it’s worse: Half of Yemen’s children under 5 are malnourished — “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world,” UNICEF says — yet aid cuts recently forced more than 2,000 nutrition programs to close down, according to Tom Fletcher, the U.N. humanitarian chief. The United States canceled an order for lifesaving peanut paste that was meant to keep 500,000 Yemeni children alive.Girls will be particularly likely to die, because Yemeni culture favors boys. I once interviewed a girl, Nujood Ali, who was married against her will at age 10. Aid programs to empower Yemeni girls and reduce child marriage are now being cut off as well.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    At Least 8 Dead After Shooting in South Africa

    The police said they had started a manhunt and were investigating a possible motive.Eight people in one small house in a South African township were found shot dead, the police said on Saturday, the latest such mass shooting in a country battling a wave of gun violence and gang turf wars.Six men and two women, ages 22 to 40, were found “lying in a pool of blood with multiple gunshot wounds,” the police said in a statement. An unknown number of assailants had reportedly entered the home Friday night and opened fire, killing those inside, the statement said.It is unclear whether the victims were related. The police said they had started a manhunt and were investigating a possible motive.South Africa has long recorded high rates of violent crime, but more recently gunmen have started targeting taverns and family gatherings in assassination-style hits. Experts say the violence is often the result of turf wars and reprisals between criminal networks. The police say such shootings also highlight the role of family networks in criminal activity, as well as the targeting of relatives in revenge killings.“These tragic incidents underscore the urgent need to address deeply rooted familial conflicts and improve community engagement to prevent such violence,” Senzo Mchunu, the country’s police minister, said in November during a presentation of quarterly crime statistics.In September, 18 members of a multigenerational family were gunned down in a rural homestead in the Eastern Cape Province. Most of the victims were women who had gathered to prepare for a traditional ceremony, the police said. The police charged a 45-year-old man for the shooting.In January 2023, gunmen killed eight people at a birthday party in Gqeberha, a coastal city in the same province. In April of that year, gunmen stormed a house and killed 10 people at a homestead outside the city of Pietermaritzburg, which is in the east of the country. And in July 2022, at least 19 people were shot dead in multiple taverns, including in Johannesburg’s Soweto township.On Saturday, the premier of KwaZulu-Natal Province, Thamsanqa Ntuli, visited the latest crime scene, looking inside the house in an informal settlement in Umlazi, a township outside the eastern city of Durban, according to the South African Broadcasting Corporation and other local outlets. With a yearslong housing backlog, millions of South Africans live in crowded neighborhoods without proper running water, electricity or policing.In recent months, South African police officials began a campaign to crack down on crime, but said that the high number of illegal firearms in circulation had contributed to the gun violence. The latest crime figures available reported that 6,953 people were murdered in the country from October 2024 to December 2024, a slight decrease from the figures over that period a year earlier. More