Film director Agnieszka Holland demanded an apology from Poland’s justice minister after he compared her latest film, which explores the migration crisis at the Poland-Belarus border, to Nazi propaganda.

Holland said Wednesday that she planned to bring defamation charges against Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro unless she receives an apology within seven days. She also demanded that he make a charitable donation of 50,000 Polish zlotys ($11,600) to an association that helps Holocaust survivors.

Holland’s feature film, “Green Border,” explores a migration crisis that has played out along Poland’s border with Belarus over the past two years. It takes a sympathetic approach toward the migrants from the Middle East and Africa who got caught up as pawns in a geopolitical standoff.

It also looks critically at the way Poland’s security services pushed back migrants who were lured to the border by Belarus, an ally of Russia.

Ziobro slammed the film earlier this week, saying: “In the Third Reich, the Germans produced propaganda films showing Poles as bandits and murderers. Today, they have Agnieszka Holland for that.”

He made his comment on the social platform X, formerly Twitter, on Monday, a day before the film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

Holland noted in a statement that Ziobro, who serves as prosecutor general as well as justice minster, commented on her film without having seen it and that she believed his words amounted to defamation, calling them “despicable.”

“I cannot remain indifferent to such an open and brutal attack by a person who holds the very important constitutional position of minister of justice and prosecutor general in Poland,” she wrote in a statement from Venice dated Wednesday but published in Poland on Thursday.

Trump White House official Peter Navarro was found guilty Thursday of contempt of Congress charges for refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The verdict came after a short trial for Navarro, who served as a White House trade adviser under President Donald Trump and later promoted the Republican’s baseless claims of mass voter fraud in the 2020 election he lost.

Navarro was the second Trump aide to face contempt of Congress charges after former White House adviser Steve Bannon. Bannon was convicted of two counts and was sentenced to four months behind bars, though he has been free pending appeal.

Navarro vowed to appeal the verdict, saying the “die was cast” after a judge ruled that he couldn’t fight the charges by arguing he couldn’t cooperate with the committee because Trump had invoked executive privilege.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta found that Navarro didn’t have enough evidence to show Trump had invoked it.

“This is a landmark case that’s bound for the Supreme Court,” Navarro said. Defense attorney John Rowley echoed that, saying “this case is not over by a long shot.”

Mehta scheduled Navarro’s sentencing for Jan. 12. Navarro was convicted in Washington’s federal courthouse of two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress, both punishable by up to a year behind bars.

The verdict came after a four-hour jury deliberation. After it was read, defense attorney Stanley Woodward moved for a mistrial, saying that the jurors had taken an outdoor break near where protesters and media regularly gather outside the courthouse and came back with a verdict shortly after. Mehta did not immediately rule, but said he would consider written arguments on the issue.

Prosecutors argued at trial that Navarro acted as if he were “above the law” when he defied a subpoena for documents and a deposition from the House Jan. 6 committee.

A defense attorney countered that Navarro didn’t purposely ignore the House Jan. 6 Committee. Navarro instead told staffers to contact Trump about what might be protected by executive privilege, something that didn’t happen, Woodward said.

Prosecutors, though, argued that even if Trump had invoked executive privilege, Navarro should have handed over what material he could and flagged any questions or documents believed to be protected. They said much of the material the committee sought was already publicly available.

The Supreme Court is being asked to reverse an appellate ruling that would cut off mail-order access to a drug used in the most common method of abortion in the United States.

The case would be the first major abortion dispute decided by the Supreme Court since it overturned Roe v. Wade last year. That ruling has led to bans on abortion at all stages of pregnancy in 15 states, with some exceptions, and once cardiac activity can be detected, which is around six weeks, in two others.

In appeals filed Friday, the Biden administration and New York-based Danco Laboratories, the manufacturer of mifepristone, argued that federal judges should not second-guess the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the drug or the conditions under which it is dispensed.

A federal appeals court ruling in August would revoke approval for sending the drug through the mail and would shorten, from the current 10 weeks to seven weeks, the time during which mifepristone can be used in pregnancy.

The justices previously intervened in the case in April to assure the availability of mifepristone while a challenge proceeds in the federal courts. The Supreme Court is widely expected to agree to hear the case and have the final word, probably by early summer 2024 and in the middle of presidential and congressional campaigns.

In urging the justices to reverse the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, lawyers for Danco wrote, “For the women and teenage girls, health care providers, and States that depend on FDA’s actions to ensure safe and effective reproductive health care is available, this case matters tremendously.”

The Justice Department said the appeals court ignored a scientific judgment about mifepristone’s safety and effectivness since its approval in 2000.

“To the government’s knowledge, the decisions below mark the first time any court has restricted access to an FDA-approved drug based on disagreement with FDA’s expert judgment about the conditions required to assure that drug’s safe use — much less done so after those conditions had been in effect for years,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, wrote.

Abortion opponents filed their challenge to mifepristone in November and initially won a sweeping ruling in April revoking the drug’s approval entirely. The appeals court left intact the FDA’s initial approval of mifepristone. But it would reverse changes regulators made in 2016 and 2021 that eased some conditions for administering the drug.

When the high court voted in April to block any changes until a final decision, Justices Samuel Alito, the author of last year’s decision overturning Roe, and Clarence Thomas said they would have allowed some restrictions to take effect while appeals played out.

Women seeking to end their pregnancies in the first 10 weeks without more invasive surgical abortion can take mifepristone, along with a second drug, misoprostol. The pills are now used in more than half of all abortions in the U.S.

Misoprostol also is used to treat other medical conditions. Health care providers have said they could switch to misoprostol if mifepristone is no longer available or is too hard to obtain. Misoprostol is somewhat less effective in ending pregnancies.

The FDA has eased the terms of mifepristone’s use over the years, including allowing it to be sent through the mail in states that allow access and reducing the dosage that is needed to end a pregnancy.

Texas must move a large floating barrier that Gov. Greg Abbott placed on the river between the U.S. and Mexico this summer as part of the Republican’s escalating attempts to stop migrants from crossing America’s southern border, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge David Ezra stopped short of ordering Texas to dismantle the wrecking-ball sized buoys on the Rio Grande but called them a threat to safety and relationships between the neighboring countries. His preliminary injunction instructs Texas, for now, to move the barrier out of the water and onto the riverbank by Sept. 15.

Ezra also cast doubt on Texas’ rationale for the barrier, writing that the state produced no “credible evidence that the buoy barrier as installed has significantly curtailed illegal immigration.”

The lawsuit was brought by the Justice Department in a rare instance of President Joe Biden’s administration going to court to challenge Texas’ border policies.

Texas officials said they would appeal.

“Today’s court decision merely prolongs President Biden’s willful refusal to acknowledge that Texas is rightfully stepping up to do the job that he should have been doing all along,” Abbott said.

Abbott invoked “invasion” powers to deploy aggressive new tactics starting last year. Texas’ use of dozens of bright orange buoys to create a barrier longer than a soccer field on a stretch of river where migrants often try crossing from Mexico is just one piece of his multibillion-dollar border mission known as Operation Lone Star. The state has also installed razor-wire fencing along the river and allowed troopers to arrest migrants on trespassing charges, among other things.

Online gig work is growing globally, particularly in the developing world, creating an important source of employment for women and young people in poorer countries where jobs are scarce, according to a World Bank report released Thursday.

The report estimates the number of global online gig workers at as many as 435 million people and says demand for gig work increased 41% between 2016 and the first quarter of 2023. That boost is generating concern, though, among worker rights advocates about the lack of strong job protections in the gig economy, where people work job to job with little security and few employment rights.

While location-based gig services such as Uber, Lyft and TaskRabbit require labor like moving and delivery, online gig assignments can be largely done at home. Tasks include image tagging, data entry, website design and software development.

For women in the developing world, “there aren’t enough opportunities and they really struggle to get good quality jobs because of constraints and household responsibilities,” said Namita Datta, lead author of the World Bank report.

She said online gig work provides women and underprivileged youth “a very interesting opportunity to participate in the labor market.” Roughly 90% of low-income countries’ workforce is in the informal sector, according to the report.

Worker advocates stress the precariousness of gig work and the lack of job security, accountability from management and other social protections to workers’ health and retirement.

“The economic conditions in developing countries are different from the U.S., but one thing that is universal is the importance of developing and prioritizing good jobs — with a basic minimum wage and basic labor standards,” said Sharon Block, executive director of Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy. ”There might be different pathways and timelines of getting there, but that’s a universal value.”

The report outlines how social insurance coverage is low among gig workers globally. Roughly half of the surveyed gig workers did not have a retirement plan and as much as 73% of Venezuelan gig workers and 75% of Nigerians did not have any savings for retirement.

Lindsey Cameron, a management professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said “because there are so few options available to workers in these developing nations,” online gigs — with or without social protections — were better than no job options for many workers.

After a visit to a warehouse where Hawaiian Electric Company is housing power poles and electrical equipment that may be key to the investigation of last month’s devastating fires on Maui, lawyers for Lahaina residents and business owners told a court Tuesday that cable TV and telephone companies share responsibility for the disaster because they allegedly overloaded and destabilized some of the poles.

The lawyers said the cables were attached in a way that put too much tension on the poles, causing them to lean and break in the winds on Aug. 8 when flames burned down much of Lahaina, killing at least 115 people and destroying more than 2,000 structures.

LippSmith LLP has filed a proposed class action against Hawaii’s electric utility and Maui County in state court in Hawaii. Attorney Graham LippSmith is now asking the court to add multiple telecommunications companies and public and private landowners to the original suit.

“In a disaster of this magnitude, it takes some time for all the potentially responsible parties to come into focus and be brought into court. Our investigation thus far shows a constellation of many serious failures that together led to this horrible tragedy,” MaryBeth LippSmith, co-founder of the Hawaii- and California-based firm, said in an interview Tuesday.

Pacific Gas & Electric in California filed for bankruptcy in 2019 due to a succession of harrowing wildfires ignited by its long-neglected electrical grid in Northern California.

But LippSmith rejected the suggestion the firm is seeking extra defendants in the event that Hawaiian Electric declares bankruptcy. Rather it’s trying to get at the root of multiple failures in order to prevent this kind of tragedy in the future, she said. The lawsuit seeks damages and injunctive relief, including a court order to force the defendants to address fire risk.