Using the power of the US taxpayer for Elon Musk’s sake, the US State Department demands that Starlink be given access to markets across Africa if those nations want to receive aid.
After an appeals court declined to remove an injunction aimed at barring Donald Trump’s administration from deporting noncitizens to “third-party countries” – a country that is not their country of origin – without due process, and without giving them chance to raise concerns of persecution, torture, and death, the government allegedly violated that court order days later.
Two men, who are originally from Myanmar and Vietnam and were being held in U.S. immigration custody, were deported to war-torn South Sudan, according their lawyers, Politico reported. Their lawyers said they received the a notice of the deportation plan on Monday evening and that by Tuesday morning, they were on a plane with 10 other deportees.
Earlier this month, as Rolling Stone reported, the Trump administration was preparing to use a military plane to fly immigrants to Libya before Judge Brian Murphy clarified that doing so would violate his court order. Lawyers with the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, and Human Rights warned that “Laotian, Vietnamese, and Philippine” immigrants, who are being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Texas, were “being prepared for removal to Libya, a county notorious for its human rights violations, especially with respect to migrant residents.”
Lawyers for the Burmese man, per Politico, said he was originally scheduled to be on a flight to Libya, before the plan was abandoned amid media and legal scrutiny. The attorneys also said that the man, identified as N.M. in court papers, received notification about the deportation to South Sudan only in English, violating Judge Murphy’s previous order due to N.M.’s limited English proficiency.
Federal immigration authorities apprehended several individuals at the Phoenix immigration court on Tuesday.
During the incident, one attorney described the scene as “mayhem,” adding that people who believed their cases had been dismissed were taken into custody, the Tucson Sentinel reported.
…
Isaac Ortega, an immigration attorney in Phoenix, reported that agents arrested his client shortly after a court hearing on Tuesday morning.
According to Ortega, the officials wore masks and did not disclose which agency they represented, identifying themselves only as federal officers.
https://www.newsweek.com/ice-arrests-migrant-arizona-court-mayhem-2075134
Just when the stock market had clawed back all the losses sparked by the panic over President Donald Trump’s tariff plans, investors face another round of debt-related angst as markets slid Sunday after Moody’s Ratings stripped the U.S. government of its last triple-A credit rating.
Strategists warned the move, announced after the market close on Friday, could spark some near-term selling in stocks and Treasurys.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures fell more than 250 points, or 0.6%, by Sunday evening. S&P 500 futures also dropped 0.6% while Nasdaq-100 futures sank 0.7%. The ICE U.S. Dollar Index, a gauge of the dollar’s value relative to major rivals like the euro, was down 0.4%.
A federal appeals court on Friday lifted a block on an executive order from President Donald Trump that seeks to strip union rights from federal workers at dozens of agencies and offices.
Trump in March issued an executive order that said that parts of the United States Code that protect federal workers’ rights to organize and collectively bargain would no longer apply to agencies including most or all of the Departments of Treasury, Defense, Veterans Affairs, State and Justice. The executive order covers about two-thirds of the federal workforce, according to the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which filed a lawsuit challenging it.
It had been blocked by a federal judge last month as part of the NTEU lawsuit, but that block was lifted Friday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In its order canceling the injunction, the appeals court’s 2-1 majority said the union had not proved it would suffer “irreparable harm” if the executive order was executed while the lawsuit challenging it was ongoing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/17/trump-executive-order-unions-block-lifted
https://www.newsweek.com/moodys-us-credit-rating-negative-2073510
Tim Parlatore is a personal attorney and top adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. At the same time, he’s suing the Navy and defending private clients against the U.S. government.
Parlatore, who represented Donald Trump in a criminal case two years ago and rejoined the Navy Reserve in March to aid Hegseth, was recently tapped to coordinate the leak investigation that led to chaos at the Pentagon. The probe was publicly tied to the firings of top advisers and preceded further revelations that Hegseth was careless with classified information. Parlatore was also reportedly in the Signal group with Hegseth’s wife and brother in which the Defense secretary shared details of a strike on Yemen.
