Sean “Diddy” Combs got a standing ovation from fellow inmates when the music mogul returned to jail after winning acquittals on potential life-in-prison charges, providing what his lawyer says might have been the best thing he could do for incarcerated Black men in America.
“They all said: ‘We never get to see anyone who beats the government,’” attorney Marc Agnifilo told The Associated Press in a weekend interview days after a jury acquitted Combs of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges.
Combs, 55, remains jailed at a federal lockup in Brooklyn after his conviction Wednesday on prostitution-related charges, which could put him in prison for several more years. Any sentence will include credit for time already served. So far that’s almost 10 months.
After federal agents raided Combs’ homes in Los Angeles and the Miami area in March 2024, Agnifilo said he told the “I’ll Be Missing You” singer to expect to be arrested on sex trafficking charges.
“I said: ‘Maybe it’s your fate in life to be the guy who wins,’” he recalled during a telephone interview briefly interrupted by a jailhouse call from Combs. “They need to see that someone can win. I think he took that to heart.”
Blunt trial strategy works
The verdict in Manhattan federal court came after a veteran team of eight defense lawyers led by Agnifilo executed a trial strategy that resonated with jurors. Combs passed lawyers notes during effective cross-examinations of nearly three dozen witnesses over two months, including Combs’ ex-employees.
The lawyers told jurors Combs was a jealous domestic abuser with a drug problem who participated in the swinger lifestyle through threesomes involving Combs, his girlfriends and another man.
“You may think to yourself, wow, he is a really bad boyfriend,” Combs’ lawyer Teny Geragos told jurors in her May opening statement. But that, she said, “is simply not sex trafficking.”
Agnifilo said the blunt talk was a “no brainer.”
“The violence was so clear and up front and we knew the government was going to try to confuse the jury into thinking it was part of a sex trafficking effort. So we had to tell the jury what it was so they wouldn’t think it was something it wasn’t,” he said.
Combs and his lawyers seemed deflated Tuesday when jurors said they were deadlocked on the racketeering count but had reached a verdict on sex trafficking and lesser prostitution-related charges. A judge ordered them back to deliberate Wednesday.
“I wake up at three in the morning and I text Teny and say: ”We have to get a bail application together,” he recalled. “It’s going to be a good verdict for us but I think he went down on the prostitution counts so let’s try to get him out.”
He said he “kind of whipped everybody into feeling better” after concluding jurors would have convicted him of racketeering if they had convicted him of sex trafficking because trafficking was an alleged component of racketeering.
Agnifilo met with Combs before court and Combs entered the courtroom rejuvenated. Smiling, the onetime Catholic schoolboy prayed with family. In less than an hour, the jury matched Agnifilo’s prediction.
The seemingly chastened Combs mouthed “thank you” to jurors and smiled as family and supporters applauded. After he was escorted from the room, spectators cheered the defense team, a few chanting: “Dream Team! Dream Team!” Several lawyers, including Geragos, cried.
“This was a major victory for the defense and a major loss for the prosecution,” said Mitchell Epner, a lawyer who worked with Agnifilo as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey over two decades ago. He credited “a dream team of defense lawyers” against prosecutors who almost always win.
Agnifilo showcased what would become his trial strategy — belittling the charges and mocking the investigation that led to them — last September in arguing unsuccessfully for bail. The case against Combs was what happens when the “federal government comes into our bedrooms,” he said.
During an eight-week trial, Combs’ lawyers picked apart the prosecution case with mostly gentle but firm cross-examinations. Combs never testified and his lawyers called no witnesses.
Sarah Krissoff, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan from 2008 to 2021, said Combs’ defense team “had a narrative from the beginning and they did all of it without putting on any witnesses. That’s masterful.”
Ironically, Agnifilo expanded the use of racketeering laws as a federal prosecutor on an organized crime task force in New Jersey two decades ago, using them often to indict street gangs in violence-torn cities.
For Combs, Agnifilo sees a long road ahead once he is freed and resumes work on personal demons, likely reentering a program for domestic batterers that he had just started before his arrest.
“He’s doing OK,” said Agnifilo, who speaks with him four or five times daily.
He said Combs genuinely desires improvement and “realizes he has flaws like everyone else that he never worked on.”
“He burns hot in all matters. I think what he has come to see is that he has these flaws and there’s no amount of fame and no amount of fortune” that can erase them,” he said. “You can’t cover them up.”
For Agnifilo, a final surprise awaited him after Combs’ bail was rejected when a man collapsed into violent seizures at the elevators outside the courtroom.
Despite a federal judge briefly halting deportations of eight immigrants to war-torn South Sudan, he and a second judge eventually cleared the way for the Trump administration to relocate the immigrants the day after the Supreme Court greenlighted their removal.
The unusually-busy Fourth of July court schedule began with District Judge Randolph Moss in Washington, D.C., putting a temporary hold on the deportations while he evaluated a last-ditch appeal by the immigrants’ lawyers. In an afternoon hearing, he decided he was powerless to halt their removals and that the person best positioned to rule on the request was Brian Murphy, the federal judge in Boston whose rulings led to the initial halt of the administration’s effort to begin deportations to the eastern African country.
But on Friday evening, Murphy issued a brief ruling concluding that the Supreme Court had tied his hands. “This Court interprets these Supreme Court orders as binding on this new petition, as Petitioners are now raising substantially similar claims, and therefore Petitioners motion is denied,” Murphy wrote.
The administration had earlier said it intended Friday to move the immigrants from the U.S. naval base in Djibouti, where they and their guards have lingered for weeks as their case has ricocheted through the courts, to South Sudan.
The administration has been trying to deport the immigrants for weeks. None are from South Sudan, which is enmeshed in civil war and where the U.S. government has advised against travel. The government flew them to Djibouti but couldn’t move them further because Murphy had ruled no immigrant could be sent to a new country without a chance to have a court hearing.
The Supreme Court vacated that decision last month, then issued a new order Thursday night clarifying that it meant the immigrants could be moved to South Sudan. Lawyers for the immigrants, who hail from Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and other countries, filed the ultimately unsuccessful emergency request to halt their removal later that night.
The temporary stay was first reported by legal journalist Chris Geidner.
A mother and her two young children from Honduras who had filed what was believed to be the first lawsuit involving children challenging the Trump administration’s policy on immigrant arrests at courthouses have been released from detention, civil rights groups and attorneys for the family said Thursday.
The lawsuit filed on behalf of the mother identified as “Ms. Z,” her 6-year-old son and her 9-year-old daughter, said they were arrested outside the courtroom after an immigration court hearing in Los Angeles. They had been held for weeks in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas. Their identities have not been released because of concerns for their safety.
The lawsuit said that the family entered the U.S. legally using a Biden-era appointment app and that their arrest violated their Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizure and their Fifth Amendment right to due process.
The family’s lawyers said the boy had also recently undergone chemotherapy treatment for leukemia and his mother feared his health was declining while in detention.
The family was released late Wednesday while their lawsuit was still pending, and they went to a shelter in South Texas before they plan to return to their lives in the Los Angeles area, said Columbia Law School professor Elora Mukherjee, one of the lawyers representing the family.
“They will go back to their lives, to church, and school, and the family will continue to pursue their asylum case. And hopefully the little boy will get the medical attention he needs,” Mukherjee said. “They never should have been arrested and detained in the first place. We are grateful they have been released.”
Department of Homeland Security officials did not immediately respond to an email request for comment. Last week, the agency posted on social media that the boy “has been seen regularly by medical personnel since arriving at the Dilley facility.”
Starting in May, the country has seen large-scale arrests in which asylum-seekers appearing at routine hearings have been arrested outside courtrooms as part of the White House’s mass deportation effort. In many cases, a judge will grant a government lawyer’s request to dismiss deportation proceedings and then U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers will arrest the person and place them on “expedited removal,” a fast track to deportation.
Lawyers for the “Z” family said their lawsuit was the first one filed on behalf of children to challenge the ICE courthouse arrest policy.
There have been other similar lawsuits, including in New York, where a federal judge ruled last month that federal immigration authorities can’t make civil arrests at the state’s courthouses or arrest anyone going there for a proceeding.
“The Z family’s release demonstrates the power we have when we fight back against harmful, un-American policies,” said Kate Gibson Kumar, staff attorney for the Beyond Borders Program of the Texas Civil Rights Project.
The family’s lawyers have said that during their hearing before a judge, the mother said they wished to continue their cases for asylum. Homeland Security moved to dismiss their cases, and the judge immediately granted that motion.
When they stepped out of the courtroom, they found men in civilian clothing believed to be ICE agents who arrested the family, Mukherjee said. They spent about 11 hours at an immigrant processing center in Los Angeles and were each only given an apple, a small packet of cookies, a juice box and water.
At one point, an officer near the boy lifted his shirt, revealing his gun. The boy urinated on himself and was left in wet clothing until the next morning, Mukherjee said.
Republicans muscled President Donald Trump’s tax and spending cut bill through the House on Thursday, the final step necessary to get the bill to his desk by the GOP’s self-imposed deadline of July 4th.
At nearly 900 pages, the legislation is a sprawling collection of tax breaks, spending cuts and other Republican priorities, including new money for national defense and deportations.
Democrats united against the legislation, but were powerless to stop it as long as Republicans stayed united. The Senate passed the bill, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tiebreaking vote. The House passed an earlier iteration of the bill in May with just one vote to spare. It passed the final version 218-214.
Here’s the latest on what’s in the bill and when some of its provisions go into effect.
GOP bill includes reductions for businesses and new tax breaks
Republicans say the bill is crucial because there would be a massive tax increase after December when tax breaks from Trump’s first term expire. The legislation contains about $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.
The existing tax rates and brackets would become permanent under the bill, solidifying the tax cuts approved in Trump’s first term.
It temporarily would add new tax deductions on tip, overtime and auto loans. There’s also a $6,000 deduction for older adults who earn no more than $75,000 a year, a nod to his pledge to end taxes on Social Security benefits.
It would boost the $2,000 child tax credit to $2,200. Millions of families at lower income levels would not get the full credit.
A cap on state and local deductions, called SALT, would quadruple to $40,000 for five years. It’s a provision important to New York and other high tax states, though the House wanted it to last for 10 years.
There are scores of business-related tax cuts, including allowing businesses to immediately write off 100% of the cost of equipment and research. Proponents say this will boost economic growth.
The wealthiest households would see a $12,000 increase from the legislation, and the bill would cost the poorest people $1,600 a year, mainly due to reductions in Medicaid and food aid, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office analysis of the House’s version.
GOP bill funds the border wall, deportations and a missile shield
The bill would provide some $350 billion for Trump’s border and national security agenda, including for the U.S.-Mexico border wall and for 100,000 migrant detention facility beds, as he aims to fulfill his promise of the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history.
Money would go for hiring 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, with $10,000 signing bonuses and a surge of Border Patrol officers, as well. The goal is to deport some 1 million people per year.
To help pay for it, immigrants would face various new fees, including when seeking asylum protections.
For the Pentagon, the bill would provide billions for ship building, munitions systems, and quality of life measures for servicemen and women, as well as $25 billion for the development of the Golden Dome missile defense system. The Defense Department would have $1 billion for border security.
Medicaid, SNAP face deep cuts to fund bill’s tax breaks and spending
To help partly offset the lost tax revenue and new spending, Republicans aim to cut back on Medicaid and food assistance for people below the poverty line.
Republicans argue they are trying to rightsize the safety net programs for the population they were initially designed to serve, mainly pregnant women, the disabled and children, and root out what they describe as waste, fraud and abuse.
The package includes new 80-hour-a-month work requirements for many adults receiving Medicaid and food stamps, including older people up to age 65. Parents of children 14 and older would have to meet the program’s work requirements.
There’s also a proposed new $35 co-payment that can be charged to patients using Medicaid services.
More than 71 million people rely on Medicaid, which expanded under Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and 40 million use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Most already work, according to analysts.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034 if the bill became law and 3 million more would not qualify for food stamps, also known as SNAP benefits.
Republicans are looking to have states pick up some of the cost for SNAP benefits. Currently, the federal government funds all benefit costs. Under the bill, states beginning in 2028 will be required to contribute a set percentage of those costs if their payment error rate exceeds 6%. Payment errors include both underpayments and overpayments.
But the Senate bill temporarily delays the start date of that cost-sharing for states with the highest SNAP error rates. Alaska has the highest error rate in the nation at nearly 25%, according to Department of Agriculture data. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, had fought for the exception. She was a decisive vote in getting the bill through the Senate.
Final price tag: GOP bill could add $3.3 trillion to deficit
Altogether, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the bill would increase federal deficits over the next 10 years by nearly $3.3 trillion from 2025 to 2034.
Or not, depending on how one does the math.
Senate Republicans are proposing a unique strategy of not counting the existing tax breaks as a new cost because those breaks are already “current policy.” Republican senators say the Senate Budget Committee chairman has the authority to set the baseline for the preferred approach.
Under the alternative Senate GOP view, the bill would reduce deficits by almost half a trillion dollars over the coming decade, the CBO said.
Democrats say this is “magic math” that obscures the true costs of the tax breaks. Some nonpartisan groups worried about the country’s fiscal trajectory are siding with Democrats in that regard. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget says Senate Republicans were employing an “accounting gimmick that would make Enron executives blush.”
The jury in the Sean “Diddy” Combs sex trafficking trial convicted him of prostitution-related crime but cleared him of sex trafficking and racketeering charges.
Here’s what we know about the potential sentence:
Will Combs spend years in prison?
The three-time Grammy award winner was convicted of flying people around the country, including his girlfriends and paid male sex workers, to engage in sexual encounters, a violation of a 115-year-old federal law called the Mann Act, named for James Mann, an Illinois congressman.
The law originally prohibited the interstate transport of a woman or girl for “prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” It was later updated to be gender-neutral and for any sexual activity “for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense.”
In a court filing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey estimated that Combs’ sentencing guidelines, which take into account many technical factors, will likely qualify him for a prison term of more than four years. He’ll get credit for his time in custody since his arrest in September.
Combs’ defense team believes the guidelines will be much lower, around two years. The maximum possible sentence is 10 years in prison, though U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian will have much discretion. He proposed an Oct. 3 sentencing date.
The government said Combs coerced women into abusive sex parties involving hired male sex workers, ensured their compliance with drugs like cocaine and threats to their careers, and silenced victims through blackmail and violence that included kidnapping, arson and beatings.
The jury, however, acquitted Combs of the most serious charges — racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking — which could have carried a sentence of up to life in prison.
What is racketeering conspiracy?
Combs defeated the racketeering charge. Authorities had accused him of running a criminal enterprise that relied on bodyguards, household staff, personal assistants and others in his orbit to facilitate and cover up crimes.
It’s commonly used to tackle organized crime, with prosecutors using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, or RICO, to take on the Mafia in the 1970s.
To prove the charge, prosecutors had to show that an enterprise existed and was involved in a pattern of racketeering activity. In this case, the alleged activity included kidnapping, arson, bribery and sex trafficking.
Combs’ lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, portrayed the Bad Boys Records founder as the victim of overzealous prosecutors who exaggerated elements of his lifestyle and recreational drug use to bring charges that resulted in what he called a “fake trial.” He said the women were willing participants.
How long did the jury work?
Deliberations began Monday in late morning.
The panel of eight men and four women sent a note that it had reached a verdict at 9:52 a.m. Wednesday, a day after telling the judge that it was stuck on one of the five charges, racketeering. The judge said Tuesday it was too soon to give up and ordered the jury to return Wednesday to try to reach a unanimous verdict.
Combs pumped his right fist after hearing that he was acquitted of the most serious charges.
What’s next?
The judge denied Combs’ request to be released on bond while he awaits his sentence, noting that evidence at trial pointed to Combs exhibiting a “yearslong pattern of violence.”
Subramanian set a July 8 hearing to discuss the sentencing process.
The Trump administration on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to remove three Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC), who were fired by President Donald Trump and then reinstated by a federal judge.
Trump has the power to fire independent agency board members, the Justice Department argued in its filing to the high court, pointing to a May ruling by the Supreme Court that endorsed a robust view of presidential power.
The administration asked the court for an immediate order to allow the firings to go forward, over the objections of lawyers for the commissioners.
The commission helps protect consumers from dangerous products by issuing recalls, suing errant companies and more. Trump fired the three Democrats on the five-member commission in May. They were serving seven-year terms after being nominated by President Joe Biden.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Maddox in Baltimore ruled in June that the dismissals were unlawful. Maddox sought to distinguish the commission’s role from those of other agencies where the Supreme Court has allowed firings to go forward.
A month earlier, the high court’s conservative majority declined to reinstate members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board finding that the Constitution appears to give the president the authority to fire the board members “without cause.” The three liberal justices dissented.
The administration has argued that all the agencies are under Trump’s control as the head of the executive branch.
Maddox, a Biden nominee, noted that it can be difficult to characterize the product safety commission’s functions as purely executive.
The fight over the president’s power to fire could prompt the court to consider overturning a 90-year-old Supreme Court decision known as Humphrey’s Executor. In that case from 1935, the court unanimously held that presidents cannot fire independent board members without cause.
The decision ushered in an era of powerful independent federal agencies charged with regulating labor relations, employment discrimination, the airwaves and much else. But it has long rankled conservative legal theorists who argue the modern administrative state gets the Constitution all wrong because such agencies should answer to the president.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission was created in 1972. Its five members must maintain a partisan split, with no more than three representing the president’s party. They serve staggered terms.
That structure ensures that each president has “the opportunity to influence, but not control,” the commission, attorneys for the fired commissioners wrote in court filings. They argued the recent terminations could jeopardize the commission’s independence.
Senate Republicans hauled President Donald Trump’s big tax breaks and spending cuts bill to passage Tuesday by the narrowest of margins, pushing past opposition from Democrats and their own GOP ranks after a turbulent overnight session.
The outcome capped an unusually tense weekend of work at the Capitol, the president’s signature legislative priority teetering on the edge of approval or collapse. In the end that tally was 50-50, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.
Three Republican senators — Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky — joined all Democrats in voting against it.
“In the end we got the job done,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota said afterward.
The difficulty for Republicans, who have the majority in Congress, to wrestle the bill to this point is not expected to let up. The package now goes back to the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana had warned senators not to overhaul what his chamber had already approved. But the Senate did make changes, particularly to Medicaid, risking more problems ahead. House GOP leaders scheduled a Wednesday vote and vowed to put it on Trump’s desk by his July Fourth deadline, which is Friday.
It’s a pivotal moment for the president and his party, as they have been consumed by the now 887-page “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which was its formal title before Democrats filed an amendment to strip out the name. Republicans are investing their political capital in delivering on their sweep of power in Washington.
Trump acknowledged it’s “very complicated stuff” as he departed the White House for Florida.
“I don’t want to go too crazy with cuts,” he said. “I don’t like cuts.”
What started as a routine but laborious day of amendment voting, in a process called vote-a-rama, spiraled into an all-night slog as Republican leaders bought time to shore up support.
The droning roll calls in the chamber belied the frenzied action to steady the bill. Grim-faced scenes played out on and off the Senate floor, amid exhaustion.
Thune worked around the clock, desperately reaching for last-minute agreements between those in his party worried the bill’s reductions to Medicaid will leave millions more people without care and his most conservative flank, which wanted even steeper cuts to hold down deficits ballooning with the tax cuts.
The GOP leaders had no room to spare. Thune could lose no more than three Republican senators, and two — Tillis, who warned that millions of people will lose access to Medicaid health care, and Paul, who opposes raising the debt limit by $5 trillion — had already indicated opposition.
Attention quickly turned to two other key senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Collins, who also raised concerns about health care cuts, as well as a loose coalition of four conservative GOP senators pushing for even steeper reductions.
Murkowski in particular became the subject of GOP leaders’ attention, as they sat beside her for talks. Then all eyes were on Paul after he returned from a visit to Thune’s office.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Republicans “are in shambles because they know the bill is so unpopular.”
An analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034 if the bill became law. The CBO said the package would increase the deficit by nearly $3.3 trillion over the decade.
Pressure built from all sides. Billionaire Elon Musk said anyone who voted for the package should “hang their head in shame” and warned he would campaign against them. But Trump had also lashed out against the GOP holdouts, including Tillis, who abruptly announced his own decision over the weekend not to seek reelection.
Few Republicans appeared fully satisfied as the final package emerged, in either the House or the Senate.
Collins fought to include $50 billion for a new rural hospital fund, among the GOP senators worried that the bill’s Medicaid provider cuts would be devastating and force them to close.
While her amendment for the fund was rejected, the provision was inserted into the final bill. Still she voted no.
The Maine senator said she’s happy the bolstered funding was added, but “my difficulties with the bill go far beyond that.”
And Murkowski called the decision-making process “agonizing.”
She secured provisions to temporarily spare Alaska and other states from some food stamp cuts, but her efforts to bolster Medicaid reimbursements fell short. She voted yes.
All told, the Senate bill includes $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, according to the latest CBO analysis, making permanent Trump’s 2017 rates, which would expire at the end of the year if Congress fails to act, while adding the new ones he campaigned on, including no taxes on tips.
The Senate package would roll back billions of dollars in green energy tax credits, which Democrats warn will wipe out wind and solar investments nationwide. It would impose $1.2 trillion in cuts, largely to Medicaid and food stamps, by imposing work requirements on able-bodied people, including some parents and older Americans, making sign-up eligibility more stringent and changing federal reimbursements to states.
Additionally, the bill would provide a $350 billion infusion for border and national security, including for deportations, some of it paid for with new fees charged to immigrants.
Costa Rica’s Supreme Court on Tuesday asked the country’s legislature to strip President Rodrigo Chaves of his legal immunity so he can stand trial on corruption charges.
Chaves, accused of awarding lucrative consulting contracts to a close associate, has denied wrongdoing. His office did not immediately comment on the ruling, which justices decided in a 15-to-7 vote.
Costa Rica’s top court has never before accepted a request to revoke a president’s immunity. The case now goes to Congress, which is dominated by opposition lawmakers and has the final say.
Prosecutors accuse Chaves of abusing his authority in diverting part of a $32,000 contract financed by a multilateral bank — the Central American Bank for Economic Integration — to his adviser and campaign strategist, Federico “Choreco” Cruz.
On Tuesday, the top court also asked Chaves’ minister of culture and former chief of staff, Jorge Rodríguez, to stand trial in the same case. The case first emerged in 2023 when local media released leaked audio recordings that purported to show Chaves discussing Cruz’s involvement in the contracts.
Chaves and his allies have other cases pending against them.
Costa Rica’s attorney general’s office filed a separate indictment last week accusing the president of illicit financing the 2022 election campaign that brought him to power.
Chaves also denies those charges.
The Supreme Court on Monday threw out appellate rulings in favor of transgender people in four states following the justices’ recent decision upholding a Tennessee ban on certain medical treatment for transgender youths.
But the justices took no action in cases from Arizona, Idaho and West Virginia involving the participation of transgender students on school sports teams. The court could say as soon as Thursday whether it will take up the issue in its next term.
The high court ordered appellate judges to reexamine cases from Idaho, North Carolina, Oklahoma and West Virginia involving access to medical care and birth certificates.
The action was unsurprising because the court had set the cases aside until after it decided the Tennessee case, as typically happens when the same legal issue is being considered.
The rulings all included findings that the restrictions on transgender people imposed by the states violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause. In the Tennessee case, the Supreme Court ruled that there was no constitutional violation in a state law prohibiting puberty blockers and hormone therapy to treat gender dysphoria in people younger than 18.
The justices ordered the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, to review its decision that West Virginia’s and North Carolina’s refusal to cover certain health care for transgender people with government-sponsored insurance is discriminatory.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will get back a case from Idaho stemming from the state’s ban on certain surgical procedures for Medicaid recipients.
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver will review its ruling blocking an Oklahoma ban on people changing their gender on birth certificates.
In one other case, from Kentucky, the justices rejected the appeal of transgender minors and their families challenging that state’s ban on gender-affirming care.
A former Venezuelan spymaster who was close to the country’s late President Hugo Chávez pleaded guilty Wednesday to drug trafficking charges a week before his trial was set to begin in a Manhattan federal court.
Retired Maj. Gen. Hugo Carvajal was extradited from Spain in 2023 after more than a decade on the run from U.S. law enforcement, including a botched arrest in Aruba while he was serving as a diplomat representing current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government.
Carvajal pleaded guilty in court to all four criminal counts, including narco-terrorism, in an indictment accusing him of leading a cartel made up of senior Venezuelan military officers that attempted to “flood” the U.S. with cocaine in cahoots with leftist guerrillas from neighboring Colombia.
In a letter this week to defense counsel, prosecutors said they believe federal sentencing guidelines call for the 65-year-old Carvajal to serve a mandatory minimum of 50 years in prison.
Nicknamed “El Pollo,” Spanish for “the chicken,” Carvajal advised Chávez for more than a decade. He later broke with Maduro, Chávez’s handpicked successor, and threw his support behind the U.S.-backed political opposition — in dramatic fashion.
In a recording made from an undisclosed location, Carvajal called on his former military cohorts to rebel a month into mass protests seeking to replace Maduro with lawmaker Juan Guaidó, whom the first Trump administration recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate leader as head of the democratically elected National Assembly.
The hoped-for barracks revolt never materialized, and Carvajal fled to Spain. In 2021 he was captured hiding out in a Madrid apartment after he defied a Spanish extradition order and disappeared.
Carvajal’s straight-up guilty plea, without any promise of leniency, could be part of a gamble to win credit down the line for cooperating with U.S. efforts against a top foreign adversary that sits atop the world’s largest petroleum reserves.
Although Carvajal has been out of power for years, his backers say he can provide potentially valuable insights on the inner workings of the spread of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua into the U.S. and spying activities of the Maduro-allied governments of Cuba, Russia, China and Iran.
He may also be angling for Trump’s attention with information about voting technology company Smartmatic. One of Carvajal’s deputies was a major player in Venezuela’s electoral authority when the company was getting off the ground.
Florida-based Smartmatic says its global business was decimated when Fox News aired false claims by Trump allies that it helped rig the 2020 U.S. election. One of the company’s Venezuelan founders was later charged in the U.S. in a bribery case involving its work in the Philippines.
Gary Berntsen, a former CIA officer in Latin America who oversaw commandos that hunted al-Qaida, sent a public letter this week to Trump urging the Justice Department to delay the start of Carvajal’s trial so officials can debrief the former spymaster.
“He’s no angel, he’s a very bad man,” Berntsen said in an interview. “But we need to defend democracy.”
Carvajal’s attorney, Robert Feitel, said prosecutors announced in court this month that they never extended a plea offer to his client or sought to meet with him.
“I think that was an enormous mistake,” Feitel told The Associated Press while declining further comment. “He has information that is extraordinarily important to our national security and law enforcement.”
In 2011, prosecutors alleged that Carvajal used his office to coordinate the smuggling of approximately 5,600 kilograms (12,300 pounds) of cocaine aboard a jet from Venezuela to Mexico in 2006. In exchange he accepted millions of dollars from drug traffickers, prosecutors said.
He allegedly arranged the shipment as one of the leaders of the so-called Cartel of the Suns — a nod to the sun insignias affixed to the uniforms of senior Venezuelan military officers. The cocaine was sourced by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization and which for years took refuge in Venezuela as it sought to overthrow Colombia’s government.
Forest fires fanned by high winds and hot, dry weather damaged some holiday homes in Turkey as a lingering heat wave that has cooked much of Europe led authorities to raise warnings and tourists to find ways to beat the heat on Monday.
A heat dome hovered over an arc from France, Portugal and Spain to Turkey, while data from European forecasters suggested other countries were set to broil further in coming days. New highs are expected on Wednesday before rain is forecast to bring respite to some areas later this week.
“Extreme heat is no longer a rare event — it has become the new normal,” tweeted U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres from Seville, Spain, where temperatures were expected to hit 42 Celsius (nearly 108 Fahrenheit) on Monday afternoon.
Reiterating his frequent calls for action to fight climate change, Guterres added: “The planet is getting hotter & more dangerous — no country is immune.”
In Portugal — his home country — one reading on Sunday turned up a suspected record-high June temperature of 46.6 C (115.9F) in Mora, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Lisbon. Weather officials were working to confirm whether that marked a new record.
Portuguese authorities issued a red heat warning Monday for seven of 18 districts as temperatures were forecast to hit 43 degrees Celsius (more than 109F).
The first heatwave of the year has gripped Spain since the weekend and no relief is expected until Thursday, Spain’s national weather service said Monday. The country appeared to hit a new high for June on Saturday when 46 degrees C (114 F) was tallied in the southern province of Huelva.
In France, which was almost entirely sweltering in the heatwave on Monday and where air conditioning remains relatively rare, local and national authorities were taking extra effort to care for homeless and elderly people and people working outside.
Some tourists were putting off plans for some rigorous outdoor activities.
“We were going to do a bike tour today actually, but we decided because it was gonna be so warm not to do the bike tour,” said Andrea Tyson, 46, who was visiting Paris from New Philadelphia, Ohio, on Sunday. Misting stations doused passers-by along the Seine in the French capital.
France’s first significant forest fires of the season consumed 400 hectares (988 acres) of woods Sunday and Monday in the Aude region in the south. Water-dumping planes and some 300 firefighters were mobilized, the regional emergency service said. Tourists were evacuated from one campground in the area.
In Turkey, forest fires fanned by strong winds damaged some holiday homes in Izmir’s Doganbey region and forced the temporary closure of the airport in Izmir, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported. Authorities evacuated four villages as a precaution, the Forestry Ministry said.
In Italy, the Health Ministry put 21 cities under its level three “red” alert, which indicates “emergency conditions with possible negative effects” on healthy, active people as well as at-risk old people, children and chronically ill people.
Regional governments in northwestern Liguria and southern Sicily in Italy put restrictions on outdoor work, such as construction and agricultural labor, during the peak heat hours.
The mercury was rising farther north, too.
Britain’s national weather service, the Met Office, said the Wimbledon Championships were facing what could be their hottest start on record — with temperatures of just under 30 degrees Celsius (about 85 Fahrenheit) recorded at the nearby Kew Gardens.
Tennis enthusiasts fanned themselves or sought shade from the blazing sun as the first day of matches got underway at the All England Club on Monday. Tournament rules allow players to take a 10-minute break when the heat hits 30.1 degrees Celsius or more in mid-match.
The Supreme Court has been very good to President Donald Trump lately.
Even before he won a new term in the White House, the court eliminated any doubt about whether Trump could appear on presidential ballots, then effectively spared him from having to stand trial before the 2024 election on criminal charges he tried to overturn the 2020 election. That same ruling spelled out a robust view of presidential power that may well have emboldened Trump’s aggressive approach in his second term.
In the five months since Trump’s inauguration, the court has been largely deferential to presidential actions, culminating in Friday’s decision to limit the authority of federal judges who have sought to block Trump initiatives through nationwide court orders.
The decisions from a court that includes three justices Trump appointed during his first term have provoked a series of scathing dissents from liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. They accuse the conservative supermajority of kowtowing to the president and putting the American system of government “in grave jeopardy,” as Jackson wrote Friday.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, author of the opinion limiting nationwide injunctions, responded to Jackson’s “startling line of attack” by noting that she “decries an imperial executive while embracing an imperial judiciary.”
To be sure, the court has not ruled uniformly for Trump, including by indefinitely stopping deportations to a notorious prison in El Salvador without giving people a reasonable chance to object.
That’s where the court deals with cases that are still in their early stages, most often intervening to say whether a judge’s order should be in effect while the case proceeds through the courts.
While preliminary, the justices’ decisions can signal where they eventually will come out in the end, months or years from now. Emergency orders are generally overshadowed by decisions the justices issued in the cases they heard arguments between last fall and the spring.
Almost since the beginning of Trump’s second term, the court’s emergency docket has been packed with appeals from his administration. For a while, the justices were being asked to weigh in almost once a week as Trump pushed to lift lower court orders slowing his ambitious conservative agenda.
Trump scored a series of wins on issues ranging from the revocation of temporary legal protections for immigrants to Elon Musk’s dramatic cost cutting at the Department of Government Efficiency.
And that was before Friday’s decision on nationwide injunctions, court orders that prevent a policy from taking effect anywhere.
Many of the recent orders are in line with the conservatives’ robust view of executive power.
The three liberal justices dissented from each of three cases involving transgender rights or LGBTQ issues more generally.
Trump has moved aggressively to roll back the rights of transgender people and the court has rebuffed attempts to stop him.
In another emergency appeal, the court’s conservatives allowed a ban to take effect on transgender members of the military, even after lower courts had found the policy unconstitutional.
In mid-June, Roberts wrote the opinion for a conservative majority that upheld Tennessee’s ban on certain medical treatment for transgender youth, rejecting arguments that it amounted to unconstitutional discrimination. The decision probably will affect a range of other pending court cases on transgender issues, including those involving access to health care, participation on sports teams and gender markers on birth certificates.
On the final day of decisions, the justices ruled in favor of Maryland parents with religious objections who don’t want their children exposed to public school lessons using LGBTQ storybooks. The case was about religious freedom, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the decision “threatens the very essence of public education.”
People in the News - POSTED: 2025/07/07 13:13
