pelespirit

Marie Ange Blaise had been detained since Feb. 12, when she was stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at Henry E. Rohlsen International Airport in Saint Croix while trying to board a flight to Charlotte, North Carolina, according to ICE.

Croix. Trump Mass Deportations ICE Photo by: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. By: Scripps News Group Posted 8:08 AM, Apr 30, 2025 and last updated 5 minutes ago

A 44-year-old woman from Haiti died in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Florida last Friday, the agency said.

The cause of her death is still under investigation.

Marie Ange Blaise had been detained since Feb. 12, when she was stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at Henry E. Rohlsen International Airport in Saint Croix while trying to board a flight to Charlotte, North Carolina, according to ICE.

She was then taken to ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) Miami’s staging facility in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Feb. 14, according to ICE.

A week later, Blaise was transferred to Richwood Correctional Center in Oakdale, Louisiana.

ICE said she was later transferred to the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, Florida, on April 5, where she later died.

It’s unclear why Blaise was transferred to various facilities.

According to ICE’s online records, this is the fourth person to die in custody since January.

Nitter link to video where they speak Portugese

The footage shows a female passenger dressed in business casual clothing at an open cockpit door before she’s wrestled to the ground by a crew member on the flight.

As the crew members work to gain control of the situation, a male passenger stands up from his seat and begins shouting in Portuguese.

The woman is seen loudly arguing with the crew, even reportedly yelling in Portuguese, “Aren’t you ashamed? I’ll kick you in the balls.” After they help her up, they begin escorting her back to her seat as she continues to protest.

As she was walked back to her seat, she reportedly began hurling insults at the cabin crew members, calling them a “son of a b—,” a f—t,” and adding that they were “going to get screwed.”

The male passenger continues standing and yelling furiously at her as she’s taken back to her seat, prompting another cabin crew member to approach him and try to calm him down.

Local reports say the woman tried to enter the cockpit to ask the pilots directly why the flight was taking off late, but her attempt and the man’s outburst delayed the flight even further.

Note: The original link didn't work for some reason. For clarity, this is from The Verge and this is one of their quotes in the article:

On March 17th, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency broke into the nonprofit, congressionally funded US Institute for Peace, according to court documents filed by the USIP’s board of directors. By allegedly threatening to “cancel every federal contract” of a private security firm that had worked with USIP until a day earlier, they convinced it to let them into the building — where, told by institute staff they were trespassing, the fired security firm headed for the USIP gun safe. That’s when the USIP called the cops. The DC police arrived to escort DOGE into the building. USIP head of security Colin O’Brien, along with two of USIP’s lawyers, was detained.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/656704/elon-musk-doge-100-days-recap-list

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Wednesday in a Catholic virtual charter school’s bid to become the nation’s first religious charter school. The Oklahoma charter school board that approved the Catholic school’s application tells the justices that a state supreme court ruling invalidating its contract with the school violates the Constitution and harms lower-income families. But the state’s attorney general counters that a ruling in favor of the Catholic school could upend the charter-school system nationwide.

The Oklahoma law governing charter schools requires them to be non-religious “in their programs, admissions policies, and other operations.” The dispute now before the court began when the archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the diocese of Tulsa applied to the state’s charter school board to establish a virtual Catholic charter school, St. Isidore of Seville. The purpose of the school – which was named after the patron saint of the internet and projected to have an initial enrollment of 500 students, approximately half of whom would come from lower-income families – is explicitly religious: It “fully embraces” the Catholic Church’s teachings, “fully incorporates” them “into every aspect of the” school, and intends to participate “in the evangelizing mission of the church.”

A new device renders 3-D graphics that users can grab, drag and rotate. Such interactive visuals — which can be seen without a VR headset — could help create new hands-on educational tools or museum exhibits. They might also be used to make 3-D artwork or video games.

Bouzbib and colleagues at the Public University of Navarre in Pamplona, Spain, replaced the flat screen with a row of elastic strips like the ones used in the waistbands of stretchy pants. Users could then reach down into the display, fingers slipping through the oscillating strips, to touch virtual objects. Cameras tracking the user’s hand allowed them to pinch, swipe, spin and otherwise manipulate the graphics.

You put out headlines with trump in the title to get the clicks. This is what you've been signing up for and now you're being replaced assholes.

This week, the White House sank to a new low on that front, holding a first-of-its-kind “New Media Press Briefing.” While inviting journalists from smaller, less established outlets to the White House is ostensibly a good idea, that’s not what the administration did. Indeed, instead of inviting actual journalists to the event, the White House populated it with a slew of friendly influencers who were all too happy to kiss the president’s ass and ask White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt the softest of softball questions. It was bullshit questions and bullshit answers all the way down.

Leavitt kicked the briefing off by bragging about the administration’s various “accomplishments” over the past 100 years, er sorry, I meant days. “As I promised at my first briefing as press secretary back in January, the Trump White House will speak to all media outlets and personalities—not just the legacy media who traditionally has covered this institution,” Leavitt said.___

A federal judge in Vermont ordered the release of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and student at Columbia University who was detained and ordered deported by the Trump administration on 14 April despite not being charged with a crime.

“The two weeks of detention so far demonstrate great harm to a person who has been charged with no crime,” said Geoffrey Crawford, a US district judge, at a hearing Wednesday, according to ABC News. “Mr Mahdawi, I will order you released.”

Crawford ordered that Mahdawi be released from prison on bail, pending the resolution of his case in federal court.

Mahdawi walked out of immigration detention on Wednesday morning, greeting supporters and thanking them for their support.

Gross domestic product (GDP), a key measure of overall growth in the US economy, fell by 0.3% in the first quarter of the year, down from 2.4% in the last quarter of 2024. The contraction – the first since the start of 2022 – puts the US on the brink of a technical recession, defined by two quarters of negative growth.

The drop in activity comes amid a huge fall in consumer sentiment, which in April dropped 32% to its lowest level since the 1990 recession.

US stocks dropped Wednesday morning, with the benchmark S&P 500 and technology-focused Nasdaq each falling by as much as 1.5%.

The Federal Communications Commission is urging two federal appeals courts to disregard a 5th Circuit ruling that guts the agency's ability to issue financial penalties.

On April 17, the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit granted an AT&T request to wipe out a $57 million fine for selling customer location data without consent. The conservative 5th Circuit court said the FCC "acted as prosecutor, jury, and judge," violating AT&T's Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.

The ruling wasn't a major surprise. The 5th Circuit said it was guided by the Supreme Court's June 2024 ruling in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, which held that "when the SEC seeks civil penalties against a defendant for securities fraud, the Seventh Amendment entitles the defendant to a jury trial." After the Supreme Court's Jarkesy ruling, FCC Republican Nathan Simington vowed to vote against any fine imposed by the commission until its legal powers are clear.

Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old Department of Government Efficiency aide, disclosed the investments earlier this year in his public financial report, which lists as much as $365,000 worth of shares in four companies that the CFPB can regulate. According to court records and government emails, he later helped oversee the layoffs of more than 1,400 employees at the bureau.

Ethics experts say this constitutes a conflict of interest and that Kliger’s actions are a potential violation of federal ethics laws.

Executive branch employees have long been subject to laws and rules that forbid them from working on matters that “will affect your own personal financial interest.” CFPB employees are also required to divest from dozens of additional, specific companies that engage in financial services and thus either are or could be subject to agency supervision, rulemaking, examination or enforcement.

Last year, an opaque group called the Fair Election Fund began promising to pay “whistleblowers” who cited election fraud “with payment from our $5 million fund.” That never panned out, but the same organization found more success with a claim that “60,000 people who were named as small-dollar donors in the Biden-Harris campaign’s July [Federal Election Commission] report did not recall making the contribution when contacted by the Fair Election Fund.”

As Mother Jones reported last year, the Fair Election Fund appears to have generated this finding by blasting out ominous-sounding texts and emails telling ActBlue donors that their donations had been “flagged,” then tallying people who responded—accurately or not—by checking a box saying they did not recall making the contribution.

The Fair Election Fund’s findings have nevertheless become part of an array of GOP efforts to attack ActBlue, which the White House’s fact sheet cited, vaguely, on Thursday. “Press reports and investigations by congressional committees have generated extremely troubling evidence that online fundraising platforms have been willing participants in schemes to launder excessive and prohibited contributions to political candidates and committees,” the fact sheet says.

Los Angeles County has confirmed it will pay a record $4bn (£3.4bn) to settle nearly 7,000 claims of "horrific" child sexual abuse related to their juvenile facilities and foster care homes over a period of decades.

Survivors say they were abused and mistreated by staff in institutions meant to protect them - with many of the claims linked to MacLaren Children's Center, a shelter that permanently closed in 2003.

"This was the fox guarding the hen house – they were raping boys and raping girls," Todd Becker, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told the BBC.

The allegations stretch back to 1959, with most incidents taking place in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

The unprecedented $4bn settlement was approved on Tuesday by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.