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DNC leaders challenge David Hogg’s efforts to unseat incumbents with public warning

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Democratic Party leaders are trying to figure out their next steps as Democratic National Committee Vice Chair David Hogg’s efforts to primary Democratic incumbents alarms party officials.

Internal debate among DNC leaders over the party’s neutrality policy broke out into the public Thursday when party Chair Ken Martin commented about Hogg’s plans to fund Democratic primary challenges during a press phone call about another topic. 

Martin, who was announcing a new state partnership initiative, said on the call with reporters, “No DNC officer should ever attempt to influence the outcome of a primary election — whether on behalf of an incumbent or a challenger.”

“I have great respect for David Hogg. I think he’s an amazing young leader who’s done so much already to help move our movement forward,” Martin continued. “If you want to challenge incumbents, you’re more than free to do that, but just not as an officer of the DNC, because our job is to be neutral arbiters.”

Hogg co-founded Leaders We Deserve in 2020, a grassroots organization that just launched a $20 million initiative to primary “out of touch” House Democrats who are “unable or unwilling to meet the moment.”

Also on Thursday, Martin published an opinion piece on TIME.com announcing his intent to introduce reforms to Democratic Party rules that would require all party officers to remain neutral in Democratic primaries. “Our role is to serve as stewards of a fair, open, and trusted process—not to tilt the scales,” wrote Martin. 

In response, Hogg wrote on X, “They’re trying to change the rules because I’m not currently breaking them.” Hogg argued that the current moment requires the strongest opposition party possible, a real alternative to the Republican Party. “That will not change if we keep the status quo,” said Hogg. “We have no other option but to do the hard work of holding ourselves and our own party accountable.”

The president of the Association of State Democratic Chairs, Jane Kleeb, told CBS News she doesn’t think an official party neutrality policy should be controversial. 

“I thought this would be celebrated, and it is mostly celebrated in our party that we are finally writing into our bylaws that the DNC officers will remain neutral,” said Kleeb. “We want our best candidates to come out of the primary, and they shouldn’t have the backing of an officer in order to get out of a primary.”

Kleeb thinks Hogg should remain DNC vice chair and should continue to run Leaders We Deserve — but only if he removes himself from the organization’s effort to primary Democrats. 

She said she’s spoken with Hogg and added it’s ultimately up to him to decide whether to cease his efforts to primary incumbents. 

“That won’t be the party kicking him out,” said Kleeb. “That will be David choosing not to abide by a rule of the DNC when it passes in August.” 

Judge Blocks Trump From Defunding 16 Sanctuary Cities: ‘Here We Are Again’

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A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the government from enforcing part of one of President Trump’s executive orders that directs agencies to withhold funds from cities and counties that don’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

In a brief order, the judge, William H. Orrick of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California, found himself retreading old ground, intervening to stop a tactic he described as nearly identical to one Mr. Trump tried early in his first term.

“Here we are again,” he wrote.

As he did eight years ago, Judge Orrick prohibited the government from “taking any action to withhold, freeze, or condition federal funds” based on the president’s order or a related memo Attorney General Pam Bondi sent on Feb. 5 to outline ways agencies could suspend federal payments.

Mr. Trump’s directive inspired a legal challenge from 16 city and county governments. They argued that the order violated the Constitution’s spending clause, which vests in Congress the power to finance programs and sway state behavior through federal funding.

After Judge Orrick issued his ruling in 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit quickly upheld it, creating a straightforward precedent for him this time around.

As in many similar cases involving the freezing of federal funds, the Trump administration’s rapid-fire approach has left it on shaky footing in court. Decisions to abruptly terminate federal programs Mr. Trump has described as wasteful, or to withhold them as leverage to force local governments to fall in line with his political agenda, have repeatedly left the government vulnerable to lawsuits claiming that the sudden changes had been made without due process or otherwise infringed on Congress’s authority.

Judge Orrick wrote that the move threatened to disrupt local governance, harming residents in the process.

“The threat to withhold funding causes them irreparable injury in the form of budgetary uncertainty, deprivation of constitutional rights, and undermining trust between the cities and counties and the communities they serve,” he wrote.

The ruling was limited to the 16 cities and counties involved in the lawsuit. The plaintiffs are mostly in California, but they also include Minneapolis; Santa Fe, N.M.; and New Haven, Conn.

As with much of Mr. Trump’s second-term agenda, the immigration policies his administration has pursued have been notably bolder and more explicit this time around, which Judge Orrick noted in the order. Reflecting on the similarities between the current case and the one he considered in 2017, he wrote that the harms facing the cities and counties had grown only more concrete and serious as the Trump administration has ratcheted up its enforcement efforts.

But in granting the injunction, which will last through the duration of the lawsuit, he noted that as the retaliatory posture toward those cities and counties had crystallized, their case against the government had grown stronger in kind.

“Their well-founded fear of enforcement is even stronger than it was in 2017,” he wrote.

Leonard Zeskind, Researcher Who Foresaw Rise of White Nationalism, Dies at 75

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Leonard Zeskind, a dogged tracker of right-wing hate groups, who foresaw before almost anyone else that anti-immigrant ideologies would move to the mainstream of American politics, died on April 15 at his home in Kansas City, Mo. He was 75.

The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, Carol Smith, his wife, said.

Long before Donald J. Trump’s nativist rhetoric in 2023 accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the United States, Mr. Zeskind, a single-minded researcher, spent decades studying white nationalism, documenting how its leading voices had shifted their vitriol from Black Americans to nonwhite immigrants.

His 2009 book, “Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement From the Margins to the Mainstream,” resulted from years of following contemporary Klansmen, neo-Nazis, militia members and other right-wing groups. His investigations earned him a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1998.

“For a nice Jewish boy, I’ve gone to more Klan rallies, neo-Nazi events and Posse Comitatus things than anybody should ever have to,” Mr. Zeskind said in 2018.

Recently, “Blood and Politics” was one of 381 books removed from the U.S. Naval Academy library in a purge of titles about racism and diversity ordered by the Trump administration.

One of Mr. Zeskind’s central themes was that before the 1960s, white supremacists fought to maintain the status quo of segregation, especially in the South. But after the era of civil rights victories, he maintained, white nationalists began to see themselves as an oppressed group, victims who needed to mount an insurgency against the establishment.

Their principal adversaries were immigrants from the developing world who were tilting the demographics of the United States away from earlier waves of Northern Europeans.

Despite the subtitle of Mr. Zeskind’s book, asserting that white nationalists had moved “from the margins to the mainstream,” many reviewers in 2009 were skeptical, treating his work as a backward look at a fringe movement led by racist crackpots whose day was over. The United States had just elected its first Black president, and extremist movements such as Christian Identity, which preached that white Christians were entitled to dominate government and society, seemed antiquated.

The Los Angeles Times waved away those hate groups as questing after “an impossible future.” NPR noted that “while a handful of bigots” were still grumbling about the South’s defeat in the Civil War and spreading conspiracies about Jews, “some 70 million others have, in a testament to the overwhelming tolerance of contemporary American society, gone ahead and elected Barack Obama president.”

Mr. Zeskind insisted that white nationalists should not be underestimated, and he was especially concerned about their influence on Republican politics.

He identified those influences in the candidacies of David Duke, a former Klan leader who won a majority of white voters when he ran for statewide office in Louisiana in 1990, and in Pat Buchanan, who fared well in G.O.P. presidential primaries in the 1990s, running on a platform of reducing immigration, opposing multiculturalism and stoking the culture wars.

Mr. Buchanan’s issues offered a template for Mr. Trump, who leveraged similar ideas to wrest control of the Republican Party from its establishment.

Mr. Zeskind spoke about Mr. Trump in a 2018 town hall speech in Washington on the one-year anniversary of the march in Charlottesville, Va., by young white supremacists, whose zealotry the president had minimized. Mr. Zeskind said that Mr. Trump hadn’t created an upsurge in hatred of nonwhite people — he was a product of it.

“White supremacy and white privilege have been dominant elements of our society from the beginning,” he said. “It breeds a whole set of behaviors in people, and it should be deeply and widely discussed in every level of our society.”

Leonard Harold Zeskind was born on Nov. 14, 1949, in Baltimore, one of three sons of Stanley and Shirley (Berman) Zeskind. His parents, who ran a pension management business, moved the family to Miami when Leonard was 10. He graduated from Miami Senior High School, and then studied philosophy at the University of Florida and the University of Kansas, though he did not graduate.

Ms. Smith, his wife, said he was expelled from college in Kansas after taking part in a 1960s campus protest of the Reserve Officers Training Corps.

Mr. Zeskind earned a welding certificate from the Manual Career and Technical Center in Kansas City, and for 13 years worked as a welder and ironworker and on assembly lines. He was also a community organizer on Kansas City’s East Side, seeking to lower tensions between white working-class families and their Black neighbors.

He met Ms. Smith in 1979. She had grown up on a dairy farm in Kansas, and through her he became aware that during the farm crisis of the 1980s, a conspiracy movement known as Posse Comitatus had spread among economically ravaged farmers, who were convinced that they had been targeted by Jewish bankers and others because they were white Christians.

Mr. Zeskind was invited to speak about Posse Comitatus to a group of progressive farmers in Des Moines, and he mobilized Jewish groups nationally to counter the conspiracy movement.

From 1985 to 1994, he was the research director at the Center for Democratic Renewal (previously the National Anti-Klan Network). In 1983, he founded the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a study and watchdog group focused on hate groups.

Besides Ms. Smith, he is survived by a brother, Philip. His first marriage, to Elaine Cantrell, ended in divorce.

At the 2018 town hall meeting in Washington, Mr. Zeskind called on Democrats in Congress to vehemently oppose a little-noticed bill sponsored by Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, to end birthright citizenship, the post-Civil War guarantee that anyone born in the United States is a citizen. The cause had become a focus of anti-immigrant groups warning of threats to the “white race.”

“They want to smash up the 14th Amendment,” Mr. Zeskind said, addressing Democratic officials, “and I think you guys should scream about it.”

The following year, in an article in The New York Times about how Mr. King, a backbencher in his party, had anticipated many of Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant stances, the congressman said in an interview, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”

Republican leaders in the House stripped Mr. King of his committee assignments over the remark, and he lost re-election in 2020.

But the issue did not die. One of President Trump’s first moves in January was an executive order to end birthright citizenship.

Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments over Mr. Trump’s order.

Lawyers Seek Return of Migrants Deported Under Wartime Act

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Over the past two weeks, immigration lawyers, scrambling from courthouse to courthouse, have secured provisional orders in five states stopping the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law, to deport Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a terrorism prison in El Salvador.

Judges have been harsh in appraising how the White House has used the powerful statute. “Cows have better treatment now under the law,” a federal judge in Manhattan said on Tuesday.

But at least so far, the one thing the lawyers have not managed to do is protect another — and harder to reach — group of Venezuelan migrants: about 140 men who are already in El Salvador, having been deported there under the act more than a month ago.

Early Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union took another shot at seeking due process for those men. Lawyers for the group filed an updated version of a lawsuit they brought against President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act on March 15, the first that challenged his invocation of the law.

This time, the A.C.L.U. is asking a federal judge in Washington not to stop the men from being sent to El Salvador, but rather to help them return to U.S. soil.

When the A.C.L.U. filed its initial version of the suit, in Federal District Court in Washington, Judge James E. Boasberg issued an immediate order telling the administration to hold off sending any planes of Venezuelans to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act and to turn around any flights that were already in the air.

But that never happened. The administration’s inaction ultimately resulted in a threat by Judge Boasberg to begin a contempt investigation into whether Trump officials violated his original instructions — and now the updated lawsuit.

Altogether, the A.C.L.U. has filed at least seven lawsuits in seven federal courts across the country, challenging Mr. Trump’s proclamation on March 14 invoking the Alien Enemies Act as one of the central tools of his aggressive deportation agenda.

The suits have homed in on two different but related legal issues.

One is a significant procedural question: whether the Trump administration has provided migrants whom officials have asserted are subject to removal under the law with sufficient time and opportunity to challenge their deportations in court.

In a court filing unsealed on Thursday in an A.C.L.U. case in Texas, a top federal immigration official said that the administration had decided that “a reasonable amount of time” for migrants to express their desire to challenge deportations could be as little as 12 hours. The official said that migrants could have at least another day to file their challenges in court.

The other issue the A.C.L.U. has been exploring is more substantive: whether the White House should be allowed to use the act at all against the Venezuelan migrants. The act, which was passed in 1798, is supposed to be invoked only in times of declared war or military invasion against members of a hostile foreign nation.

Trump officials have repeatedly argued that the Venezuelans they are trying to deport are members of a criminal gang called Tren de Aragua and that their presence in the United States amounts to an invasion supported by the Venezuelan government. But that view has been rejected not only by some U.S. intelligence officials, but also by an increasing number of judges considering the A.C.L.U.’s lawsuits.

On Tuesday, for example, during a hearing in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein blasted Mr. Trump’s use of the statute, saying it was “contrary to law.”

Several times, Judge Hellerstein, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, said he believed that Mr. Trump was using the law in inappropriate ways. He noted in particular that the law did not authorize the government “to hire a jail in a foreign country where people could be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment not allowable in the United States jails.”

When Tiberius Davis, a lawyer for the Justice Department took issue with that view, Judge Hellerstein shot him down.

“Your Honor, respectfully, once they’ve already been removed, they’re not in United States custody,” Mr. Davis said. “That’s El Salvador. They’re a separate foreign sovereign.”

“That’s exactly the point,” Judge Hellerstein said.

Another judge, Charlotte N. Sweeney, issued a ruling this week in Federal District Court in Denver determining that Mr. Trump’s proclamation had improperly stretched the meaning of terms like “war” and “invasion” in a way that ran counter to the actual text of the Alien Enemies Act.

“Because the act’s ‘text and history’ use these terms ‘to refer to military actions indicative of an actual or impending war’ — not ‘mass illegal migration’ or ‘criminal activities’ — the act cannot sustain the proclamation,” she wrote.

While the Supreme Court has not weighed in yet on the broad issue of whether the White House is using the statute properly, the court has made a decision on the procedural question of whether Trump officials have given migrants subject to the law due process.

Deciding they had not, the justices ruled in an order on April 7 that the Venezuelan migrants must be warned in advance if the government intends to deport them under the Alien Enemies Act so they can challenge them in court, but only in the places where they were being detained. The justices have not yet laid out their vision of how much — or what type of — warning the migrants should receive.

Still, the A.C.L.U. is using that ruling in its updated lawsuit filed in Washington in tandem with a second Supreme Court decision handed down in a different deportation case. In that decision, the justices determined that the White House had to “facilitate” the release of a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from Salvadoran custody after officials wrongfully deported him last month in violation of an earlier court order that expressly barred him from being sent to the country.

Lawyers for the A.C.L.U. have sought in essence to merge both of these rulings into a single tool to demand not only that the Trump administration provide the nearly 140 Venezuelans in Salvadoran custody with some way of challenging their circumstances, but also that officials take active steps toward securing their release, since they were not previously given the opportunity to do so.

The lawyers have argued, moreover, that it is appropriate to challenge the deportations in front of Judge Boasberg in Washington even though that is not where the men are currently being held. They say that Washington is the proper venue for legal actions when prisoners are in custody overseas.

But even if this strategy is successful, it could be difficult to force the administration to actually take steps to get the men released from Salvadoran custody.

Mr. Abrego Garcia, for example, remains in El Salvador two weeks after the Supreme Court ordered the White House to help secure his freedom.

Jonah E. Bromwich and Mattathias Schwartz contributed reporting.

Biden expected to attend Pope Francis’ funeral, sources say

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Pope Francis as a model for the next leader



Will Catholic Church look to Pope Francis as a model for the next leader?

03:50

Former President Joe Biden, who maintained a close working and personal relationship with Pope Francis dating back to the late pontiff’s visit to the United States in 2015, is expected to attend the papal funeral on Saturday in Vatican City, according to multiple people with knowledge of his plans. 

Though final details are still not yet set, Biden does intend to attend, the people said.

Francis began his papacy in 2013 during the Obama administration, but former President Barack Obama is not planning to attend, according to a spokesman.

Pope Francis meets with President Joe Biden during the G7 Leaders Summit on day two of the 50th G7 summit at Borgo Egnazia on June 14, 2024 in Fasano, Italy. 

Divisione Produzione Fotografica / Getty Images


President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump are set to fly Friday morning to Rome for the Saturday funeral.

Pope Francis, who had battled health issues for months, died Monday at the age of 88 following a stroke.  

He has been lying in state at St. Peter’s Basilica since Wednesday, where tens of thousands of mourners have come to pay their final respects.

Among those heads of state attending the funeral will be Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Argentinian President Javier Milei. 

Ed O’Keefe

Ed O’Keefe is CBS News senior White House and political correspondent. He previously worked for The Washington Post covering presidential campaigns, Congress and federal agencies. His primary focus is on President Biden, Vice President Harris and political issues across the country.

Rob Holland, Aerobatic Pilot, Dies in Crash at Langley Air Force Base

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Rob Holland, a well-known aerobatic pilot, died on Thursday when his custom-built carbon fiber plane crashed at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, where he had been preparing to fly in an air show this weekend, according to a statement on his Facebook page.

The Federal Aviation Administration said that the plane, an MXS model built by the MX Aircraft Company, crashed while trying to land at Langley at around 11:50 a.m. The F.A.A. and the National Transportation Safety Board were investigating the cause of the accident.

The federal agencies did not identify the pilot, who was the only person in the plane. But the statement on Mr. Holland’s Facebook page confirmed that it was him.

A professional air show and aerobatic pilot for more than 20 years, Mr. Holland was a 13-time U.S. national aerobatic champion, a six-time world four-minute freestyle champion and the 2015 World Air Games freestyle gold medalist, according to his website.

Mr. Holland had been planning to fly this weekend in Air Power Over Hampton Roads, an air show at Langley, according to the event’s website. The show, which also features military jets such as the F-22 Raptor, attracts thousands of spectators.

Langley confirmed a crash had occurred but did not immediately release further information.

An N.T.S.B. investigator was expected to arrive at Langley on Friday morning, the agency said. The investigator will begin the process of documenting the scene and examining the aircraft. The plane will then be moved to a secure facility for further evaluation, the board said.

Mr. Holland’s website says that he flew an MXS-RH aircraft, which it described as “a one-of-a-kind, all-carbon-fiber masterpiece,” designed to his specifications by the MX Aircraft Company in North Carolina.

Weighing a relatively light 1,200 pounds and powered by a 380-horsepower engine, the single-seat plane was capable of “pulling 16 positive and negative G’s, and rolls at nearly 500 degrees per second,” the website says.

Mr. Holland had a custom harness to keep him secure in the plane, the website says, and wore a helmet and a custom-built parachute for emergencies.

Videos of Mr. Holland’s performances show him flying giant loops and tumbling and rolling in his plane, which appeared at times to stall in midair, all while releasing a trail of white smoke. The moves had names like Frisbee and double hammerhead.

“One of my goals is to take aerobatics to the next level,” he was quoted as saying on his website. “I want to push the limits of what can be done.”

John Cudahy, the president and chief executive of the International Council of Air Shows, said in an interview on Thursday that Mr. Holland was “very well known in the whole industry and very well respected in the whole industry.”

It was not clear, he said, what caused his plane to crash.

While he was known for daring flying maneuvers, Mr. Holland was an “advocate for air show safety and professionalism and doing things with practice — all the things you would expect of a professional pilot,” Mr. Cudahy said. “He was sort of a poster boy for that.”

Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur and private astronaut who has been chosen by President Trump to serve as the next NASA administrator, was among those mourning Mr. Holland.

“Deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Rob Holland — an airshow legend,” he wrote on social media.

Mr. Holland has said he fell in love with aerial tricks as a boy, when he saw a plane flying upside down at an air show. From then on, he said, all his model planes hung upside down in his bedroom.

He earned a pilot’s license as a teenager and began flying aerobatics almost immediately, while also working as a corporate pilot, commuter pilot, flight instructor and ferry pilot, and operating his own aerobatic flight school, his website says.

A 1997 graduate of Daniel Webster College in New Hampshire, where he studied aviation, he had logged more than 15,000 hours of flight time in more than 180 types of aircraft, according to his website.

“Rob was one of the most respected and inspiring aerobatic pilots in aviation history,” the statement on his Facebook page said. “Even with an absolutely impressive list of accomplishments, both in classical competition aerobatics and within the air show world, Rob was the most humble person with a singular goal to simply be better than he was yesterday.”

U.S. Says Deadly Blast in Yemen Was Caused by Houthi Missile

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A deadly blast on Sunday near a UNESCO world heritage site in Yemen’s capital was caused by a Houthi missile, not a U.S. airstrike, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command said on Thursday.

The health ministry of the Houthi-led government said earlier this week that an American airstrike had hit a densely populated neighborhood of Sana, the Yemeni capital, killing 12 people and injuring 30 others. The blast struck an area adjacent to Sana’s Old City, a UNESCO world heritage site filled with ancient towers.

Dave Eastburn, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, said in a statement that while the damage and casualties described by local health officials most “likely did occur,” they were not the result of an American attack. While the United States had conducted military operations over Sana that night, the closest American strike was more than three miles away, he added.

The Pentagon’s assessment that the damage was caused by a “Houthi Air Defense missile” was based in part on a review of “local reporting, including videos documenting Arabic writing on the missile’s fragments at the market,” Mr. Eastburn said. The Pentagon did not provide those videos or evidence of its claims in its statements.

An initial review by The New York Times of local reporting and open-source material in Yemen found a video showing a missile fragment with Arabic writing posted to social media, however it was from a different location from the market in Sana’s Old City.

Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a member of the Houthis’ Politburo, said in a phone interview that the American denial was an attempt to smear the Houthis. He reiterated that the group believed that the United States targeted the neighborhood on Sunday, “just as it previously targeted ports, cemeteries and citizens’ homes, resulting in the deaths of hundreds.”

The Trump administration has in recent weeks carried out an intense bombing campaign over areas of Yemen controlled by the Houthis, an Iran-backed militia that rules much of the country’s north with an iron fist. The militia has been firing rockets and drones at Israel and attacking ships in the nearby Red Sea, in a campaign that its leaders say is in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

Asked by The Times earlier this week about the Sunday strike, the U.S. Defense Department did not comment on the Houthis’ claims. Instead, it said in a statement that the United States was targeting “Iran-backed Houthi locations every day and night in Yemen” with the intention of restoring freedom of navigation and deterring the Houthis from further attacks.

The details of strikes have been challenging to verify for journalists on the ground. Houthi officials have stymied journalists and citizens from documenting airstrikes — including the site of the blast on Sunday — warning that such information could be exploited by foreign enemies. Asked about those restrictions, Mr. al-Bukhaiti said that “it is common for the targeted area to be cordoned off to facilitate rescue operations and to prevent civilians from gathering, in case of renewed strikes or the targeting of medics.”

For nearly a decade, Yemen has been at war. After the Houthis, a once-scrappy tribal militia, took over the Yemeni capital, the country was pummeled by a Saudi-led military coalition supplied with American bombs in an effort to defeat them.

That coalition expected swift victory. Instead, hundreds of thousands of people died from fighting, hunger and disease. And since the coalition pulled back several years ago, partly because of international pressure, the Houthis have deepened their grip on power, evolving into a de facto government in northern Yemen.

The Houthis began their latest attacks in late 2023, after Hamas stormed into southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking hundreds more captive into Gaza. Israel responded by bombarding the territory, killing more than 50,000 people, according to the Gazan health authorities, whose figures do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

The Houthis have described their attacks on ships as an attempt to pressure Israel and outside nations to increase the free flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza, where more than two million Palestinians have struggled to obtain food and water.

Because Houthi territory abuts a vital waterway that ships must pass to reach the Suez Canal, the attacks have disrupted global trade, pushing container ships to take a longer route around the southern tip of Africa. The Houthis say they are attacking ships with Israeli or American ties, although many of the targeted vessels have had no clear link to either country.

The United States and Britain began bombarding Houthi targets last year, saying they were attempting to halt the attacks on shipping and Israel.

The militia briefly stopped firing rockets at Israel during a two-month cease-fire between Israel and Hamas this year. But after a truce ended in mid-March, Israel renewed its offensive in Gaza and the Houthis resumed firing ballistic missiles at Israeli territory.

The Trump administration began its own campaign of airstrikes in March.

American strikes that hit a vital port in the region of Hudaydah this month killed at least 74 people, health officials under the Houthi-led government said.

U.S. Central Command said that it had targeted the port because shipments of fuel were still flowing into it in defiance of American sanctions, allowing funds to flow into the Houthis’ coffers. It did not provide its own assessment of how many people had been killed in the bombardment.

Secretary General António Guterres of the United Nations expressed “grave concern” over those strikes, saying in a statement that at least five humanitarian workers were said to be among the injured and urging all parties in the conflict to respect international law and protect civilian infrastructure.

So far, the American campaign has not appeared to have deterred the Houthis, who have continued to announce attacks on Israel and ships. Yemeni scholars who study the group warn that American airstrikes will simply play into the militia’s agenda.

Arijeta Lajka and Aric Toler contributed reporting.

Indicted ‘Bitcoin Jesus’ Pays Roger Stone $600,000 to Lobby for Him

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Roger J. Stone Jr., the longtime associate of President Trump’s, has been lobbying for a pioneering cryptocurrency investor known as “Bitcoin Jesus” who is facing federal fraud and criminal tax charges, according to congressional filings.

Mr. Stone filed paperwork last month indicating that he had been retained by Roger Ver, an early Bitcoin investor who was charged last year and accused of shielding his cryptocurrency holdings from $48 million in taxes.

Mr. Stone noted in a filing last week that he had been paid $600,000 by Mr. Ver since early February to help his client’s case, partly by trying to abolish the tax provisions at the heart of the charges.

Mr. Ver, a former California resident who renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2014, was arrested last year in Spain, according to the Justice Department, which announced plans at the time to extradite him.

Mr. Ver disputed the charges, claiming in a video posted on social media in January that he was being threatened with a possible sentence of more than 100 years in prison because of his political views and his role in promoting cryptocurrency.

In the video, which was framed as an appeal to Mr. Trump, Mr. Ver linked his case to the president’s grievances about the weaponization of the justice system.

As footage of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former Vice President Kamala Harris appeared on the screen, Mr. Ver said that “if there’s anybody that knows what it’s like to be the victim of lawfare for spreading American ideals, it’s Donald Trump.”

“They’re doing the exact same thing to me that they’ve done to you,” he added.

Mr. Ver did not respond to a request for comment.

His lobbying, public relations and legal campaign comes as Mr. Trump has embraced cryptocurrency and dialed back efforts to crack down on the industry, which donated millions of dollars to committees raising money for Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and inauguration.

Mr. Trump’s family is involved in several cryptocurrency-related ventures.

His administration has announced initiatives to stimulate the industry, and has backed away from enforcement against crypto companies. Mr. Trump pardoned a different Bitcoin pioneer who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for creating Silk Road, the world’s largest online drug marketplace.

Last month, he also granted pardons to three founders of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX who had pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating guidelines in the Bank Secrecy Act, a law that protects against money laundering.

Other figures in the crypto world have been angling for clemency, including Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the failed FTX crypto exchange who is serving a 25-year sentence for fraud.

Mr. Ver’s case has become something of a cause célèbre among cryptocurrency enthusiasts, who have called for a pardon.

In December, Mr. Stone’s website posted an essay by an activist titled “Why Roger Ver deserves a presidential pardon.”

In the final month of his first term, Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Stone’s conviction for obstructing a congressional investigation into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and its possible ties to Russia.

But Mr. Stone told The New York Times that he was not relying on his decades-long relationship with Mr. Trump to help Mr. Ver.

“I have not lobbied any official in the executive branch of government including the president regarding his case or a pardon,” Mr. Stone wrote in a text message. Instead, he indicated that he was hired primarily to advise Mr. Ver’s lawyer.

In court filings, Mr. Ver’s legal team has called the tax laws in question “inscrutably vague as to their application to digital assets of the kind that underlie the charges.” His lawyers have challenged the constitutionality of the so-called “exit tax” requiring Americans to settle tax obligations before renouncing their citizenship.

Prosecutors accused Mr. Ver of concealing the value of his Bitcoin holdings while preparing his expatriation tax filings.

Mr. Stone indicated in his lobbying filings that he had lobbied the House about “ending the exit tax and reform of cryptocurrency tax policy.”

Mr. Stone said in a text message that he had discussed Mr. Ver’s case with lawmakers, and had “at all times advocated reform of the current laws regarding taxes upon expatriation.”

B.C.’s Best Bird winner is announced for 2025

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By Annabel Bessem

Global News

Posted April 24, 2025 3:07 pm

1 min read

A new B.C. bird has been chosen for its sound many would recognize.

Competing against 31 birds, the winner of B.C.’s 2025 Best Bird competition was announced Tuesday.

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The Black-capped Chickadee took the crown winning by a mere 51 per cent, according to Wildlife Rescue Association of B.C.

The Chickadee is best known for its call to alert flock mates of food and predators.


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ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil without a warrant, Trump administration confirms

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The Trump administration conceded on Thursday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents did not have a warrant when they detained Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil in March, acknowledging it was a “warrantless arrest.”

Khalil’s attorneys are asking an immigration judge in Louisiana, where their client has been detained by ICE for weeks, to terminate his deportation case based on the fact that he was arrested without a warrant.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, admitted in a court filing that immigration agents typically need warrants before arresting individuals. But it argued that Khalil was arrested without a warrant due to “exigent circumstances,” alleging that agents believed the Columbia activist would “escape before they could obtain a warrant.” 

Khalil’s lawyers denied that he had any plans to flee, saying in their own court filing that their client “fully complied” with the ICE agents’ demands.

“Tellingly, no agent present at the scene has ever submitted sworn or unsworn testimony that Mr. Khalil attempted to flee or otherwise posed a flight risk,” Khalil’s lawyers wrote in a court document.

A vocal member of the protests at Columbia University last year over the war in Gaza, Khalil is a Syrian-born immigrant with legal U.S. permanent residency — also known as a green card. He was arrested in early March by ICE, outside of his New York City apartment, where he lived with his U.S. citizen wife, who was pregnant at the time. 

Khalil was not able to witness the birth of his son earlier this week, after ICE denied a request for him to be temporarily released.

One of several foreign-born students arrested by ICE in recent months, Khalil has become one of the most high-profile faces of the Trump administration’s efforts to go after those on college campuses who have participated in pro-Palestinian protests. 

The Trump administration has argued its efforts are designed to curb anti-semitism and pro-Hamas views at universities, but civil rights groups have accused the government of punishing students purely for their political beliefs, in violation of the First Amendment.

While it has not accused Khalil of any criminal wrongdoing, the Trump administration has cited two legal grounds to argue the Columbia University activist should nonetheless be deported from the U.S. 

The administration has accused Khalil of committing immigration fraud by withholding certain information on his green card application and argued he’s also deportable due to a determination by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that his presence and activities pose “adverse foreign policy consequences” for the U.S. Khalil’s lawyers have refuted both accusations.

Earlier this month, an immigration judge in Louisiana ruled the administration could continue its bid to deport Khalil, saying she could not second-guess Rubio’s determination, which cites a rarely used law. She held in abeyance the immigration fraud accusation.

This week, Khalil formally submitted an application in immigration court to request asylum and withholding of removal, another legal protection from deportation, according to his attorneys. 

That immigration court case in Louisiana is progressing alongside a lawsuit in federal district court in New Jersey challenging the legality of Khalil’s detention. Lawyers in that case have asked the federal judge overseeing it to order Khalil’s release, revoke Rubio’s determination and bar the government from targeting noncitizens “who engage in constitutionally protected expressive activity in the United States in support of Palestinian rights or critical of Israel.”

Camilo Montoya-Galvez

Camilo Montoya-Galvez is the immigration reporter at CBS News. Based in Washington, he covers immigration policy and politics.