babysandpiper

The Supreme Court on June 27 upheld a Texas law requiring pornographic websites verify users are at least 18, in a case that pitted concerns about protecting minors against worries about violating the First Amendment rights of adults.

The court split 6-3 along ideologically grounds with the three liberal justices dissenting.

Eighteen other, largely conservative states have enacted similar laws in recent years as access toa growing cache of online pornography has exploded and the material has become more graphic.

The Trump administration wants to end automatic birthright citizenship as enshrined in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to take steps to implement its proposal to end automatic birthright citizenship, handing a major win to the government.

The court granted a request by the Trump administration to narrow the scope of nationwide injunctions imposed by judges so that they apply only to states, groups and individuals that sued. That means the birthright citizenship proposal can likely move forward at least in part in the states that challenged it as well as those that did not.

The court was divided on ideological lines, with conservatives in the majority and liberals in dissent.

Madonna ‘Donna’ Kashanian, 64, was taken by plainclothes officers from her home in New Orleans

A 64-year-old Iranian woman, who has lived in the US for 47 years, was detained by immigration agents on Sunday morning while gardening outside her home in New Orleans.

According to a witness, plainclothes officers in unmarked vehicles handcuffed Madonna “Donna” Kashanian and transported her to a Mississippi jail before transferring her to the South Louisiana Ice processing center in Basile, reports Nola.

Kashanian arrived in the US in 1978 on a student visa and later applied for asylum, citing fears of persecution due to her father’s ties to the US-backed Shah of Iran. Her asylum request was ultimately denied, but she was granted a stay of removal on the condition she comply with immigration requirements, a condition her family says she always met.

Gavin Newsom is taking a page right out of Donald Trump’s media playbook.

The California governor accused Fox News of defamation in a lawsuit Friday morning, alleging the network should fork over $787 million after host Jesse Watters claimed Newsom lied about his phone calls with Trump, who ordered National Guard troops to Los Angeles this month. Newsom’s lawyers argue Watters’ program misleadingly edited a video of Trump to support the claim.

The Democratic likely presidential hopeful’s request for damages is nearly identical to the $787.5 million sum Fox News paid Dominion Voting Systems in 2023 to settle another defamation case over election falsehoods. And it comes amid a spate of lawsuits from Trump against major media and other companies that resulted in multi-million dollar settlements.

A bill by Sen. Tom Cotton would cut the Office of the Director of National Intelligence by 60%. The move comes as Gabbard appears to have fallen out of favor in the Trump administration.

A top Republican senator is proposing a sweeping overhaul of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, slashing the workforce of an organization that has expanded since it was created in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Under a bill by Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the Republican chair of the Intelligence Committee, the ODNI’s staff of about 1,600 would be capped at 650, according to a senior Senate aide familiar with the proposed legislation.

ODNI’s workforce was about 2,000 in January, but National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard has already overseen a reduction of about 20% as part of the Trump administration’s drive to shrink the federal workforce. The reduction in the staff Gabbard oversees could weaken her role in the intelligence bureaucracy at a time when she appears to have fallen out of favor with the White House.

As many as 35,000 Ukrainian children are still missing and thought to be held in Russia or Russian-occupied territories, according to an American team of experts, with families saying they are being forced to take desperate and risky measures to try to rescue them.

As Russian forces began their invasion in February 2022, children were abducted from care homes, from the battlefield after the death of their parents, or under coercion directly from their families.

Russia has rejected demands for the children to be returned, with an official accusing Ukraine of “staging a show on the topic of lost children” during ceasefire talks in Turkey this month.

Donald Trump’s justice department has sued the federal judiciary in Maryland over an order that bars the government from deporting undocumented immigrants for at least one day after they file a legal challenge to their detention.

The move to sue an entire bench of federal judges in a single district illustrates pressure coming from the Trump administration on the judiciary to fall in line with the administration’s policies.

“After blatantly violating judicial orders, and directing personal attacks on individual judges, the White House is turning our Constitution on its head by suing judges themselves,” the governor of Maryland said in a statement. “Make no mistake: this unprecedented action is a transparent effort to intimidate judges and usurp the power of the courts.”

Canada's parliament has passed a landmark bill giving Prime Minister Mark Carney's government new powers to fast-track major national projects.

The One Canadian Economy Act was passed by the Senate on Thursday, and allows the cabinet to streamline approvals processes and bypass certain provisions of federal laws for projects that could boost the economy.

Supporters have argued the legislation is a critical step in reducing Canada's dependence on the United States, amid trade tensions sparked by President Donald Trump's tariffs.

Iranian authorities have carried out a wave of arrests and multiple executions of people suspected of links to Israeli intelligence agencies, in the wake of the recent war between the two countries.

It comes after what officials describe as an unprecedented infiltration of Iranian security services by Israeli agents.

Authorities suspect information fed to Israel played a part in a series of high-profile assassinations during the conflict. This included the targeted killings of senior commanders from the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and nuclear scientists, which Iran attributes to operatives of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency working inside the country.

A government-appointed commission announced that Germany would raise its minimum wage twice over the next two years. The move would give Germans the second-highest minimum wage in the EU, after Luxembourg.

Environmental groups, immigration advocates and Native Americans decry idea to set up the outdoor detention camp

Environmental groups, immigration rights activists and a Native American tribe have decried the construction of a harsh outdoor migrant detention camp in the Florida Everglades billed by state officials as “Alligator Alcatraz”.

Crews began preparing the facility at a remote, largely disused training airfield this week in support of the Trump administration’s aggressive goal of arresting and incarcerating 3,000 undocumented migrants every day.

It is among a number of controversial new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) jails appearing around the country as the number of detentions by the agency surges dramatically.