It’s the day after Mother’s Day, the first one Elizabeth Soto has spent apart from her three children. Sitting in jail in Wichita Falls, Texas, her face is washed out by the overhead fluorescent lighting, and her dingy jumpsuit blends into the cinder block walls surrounding her.
Speaking through a glass separator, she tells me she celebrated the holiday with her children over the jail’s video-call system while they had dinner at their grandmother’s. “I’ve been a full-time mother all of their lives,” she said. “I’ve never been away from them.”
Soto’s children have not visited her in jail, which lies on Texas’s northern border near Oklahoma, hours from their home in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Elizabeth Soto has only seen her husband, Ines Soto, once over the past year, the longest they’ve spent apart since they first started dating more than 20 years ago. He is being held in a federal prison more than 100 miles away.
On Tuesday, Elizabeth was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison; Ines’s sentencing is set for 1 July. All because, as she put it: “They didn’t like my book club.” Her laugh doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
Last year on the Fourth of July, a small group from Dallas-Fort Worth held a night-time noise demonstration, setting off fireworks outside the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility south of the cities, in solidarity with the detainees. A few protesters broke away and spray-painted graffiti on employees’ cars and a security post, slashed the tires on a government van, and broke a security camera. The facility’s guards ordered the protesters to disperse, and most of them did. When a police officer arrived at the scene, drawing his gun, an armed protester shot her rifle, hitting the officer in the shoulder. The officer survived.
‘This is injustice’: how leftist zines were used to sentence anti-ICE protesters to decades in prison
Inside the Oxford Union debate where Tommy Robinson lost to a Palestinian student from Gaza
On Wednesday night Britain's most notorious anti-Islam activist was hosted at the Oxford Union by a Palestinian student from Gaza who said she was upholding his right to free speech, before roundly defeating him in a debate on Islam.
Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, arrived at the debating society to speak in support of the motion "This House believes the West is right to be suspicious of Islam". It failed to pass.
The union is a globally famous institution. Many of its debates have gone down in history.
There is little doubt that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will watch this debate online when it is published later this year.
But the audience inside the chamber on Wednesday night was extraordinarily small, owing to a crowd of hundreds of protestors who had prevented people - including speakers - from entering and delayed the event by hours.
Yosemite visitor dies after being swept over nearly 600ft waterfall
A 22-year-old visitor to Yosemite national park in California died after he was swept over a 594ft-high waterfall on Saturday, officials confirmed this week.
A fellow parkgoer, Freesia Gaul, was capturing a photo when she noticed the man, reportedly identified by local authorities as Josue Baires Alfaro, in the Merced River.
He did not appear to be a “strong swimmer”, Gaul told SFGate. A former volunteer lifeguard, Gaul jumped into the water in hopes of rescuing him.
“People see calm water, but they don’t realize that under that there’s a huge undercurrent,” she said.
“When you see someone like that, when you make direct eye contact with someone who you know is going to go over, you can’t turn around.”
In turbulent waters, Gaul could not reach Alfaro and struggled herself to stay afloat, SFGate reported. She thought her survival odds were bleak, until a bystander put forth a walking stick that she clung on to to avoid going over Nevada Fall.
Bill Gates says Epstein sought to blackmail him over extramarital affairs
The Microsoft founder Bill Gates told US members of Congress that the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had sought to “blackmail” him over his extramarital affairs, according to a transcript of the testimony.
The tech pioneer testified behind closed doors before the House oversight committee on 10 June regarding his friendship with Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 as he awaited trial for sex crimes.
According to the transcript released by the committee on Tuesday, Gates spoke of “veiled” threats and said Epstein had considered exploiting his own knowledge of Gates’s extramarital affairs to force him to remain in Epstein’s orbit, even as Gates was distancing himself from Epstein.
“I was not blackmailed, but you know, as you look at these emails, you know, it looks like Mr Epstein’s brainstorming was going in that direction,” Gates added, referring to documents from the Epstein case released in January by the US Department of Justice.
France records its hottest day ever as Europe withers in early heat wave
France recorded its hottest day ever Tuesday as an early heat wave gripped Europe, prompting the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre museum to restrict visiting hours and disrupting school and transportation schedules in multiple countries.
Punishing temperatures extended to the United Kingdom and Spain, where weather agencies issued red alerts — like France — about the risks of extreme heat for tens of millions of people.
The record of 29.8 C (85.6 F) for France's national thermal indicator — an average of temperatures measured at 30 weather stations — was only the latest in a series of never-before-registered highs heaped on Europe's largest country. The conditions were likely to persist at least until the weekend.
"Further record-breaking temperatures are expected, including some that could surpass all previous records, regardless of the time of year," the Meteo France weather service said.
Appeals court rules Michigan doesn’t have to hand over sensitive voter data
Michigan is not obligated to hand over sensitive voter data to the Trump administration, a federal appeals court decided on Wednesday.
A divided three-judge panel for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Title III of the 1960 Civil Rights Act does not authorize the Justice Department to compel the state to provide its unredacted voter roll, which contains the dates of birth, partial social security numbers and driver’s license numbers of every registered voter in the state.
Judge Andre Mathis, a Biden appointee, authored the majority opinion. He was joined by Senior Judge R. Guy Cole Jr., a Clinton appointee.
Judge John Nalbandian, who was nominated by President Trump in his first term, dissented.
The Justice Department has filed lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia in an attempt to force compliance with its demand, but those efforts have been repeatedly rejected at the district court level. Its cases against California, Oregon, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Wisconsin, Maine and Maryland have also been dismissed.
Federal judge bars Trump from implementing proof of citizenship requirement to vote
A federal judge on Wednesday permanently barred President Donald Trump's administration from implementing most of his first executive order on elections, part of which sought to require people to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote.
The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston effectively converts a preliminary injunction she issued a year ago, in which she temporarily blocked many of Trump's efforts to overhaul elections, into a permanent ban.
Casper rejected the administration's argument that the lawsuit to block the changes brought by Democratic state attorneys general was premature because the rules had yet to be implemented. Instead, she agreed that the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to regulate elections, and that Trump's requirements violated the separation of powers.
The Constitution "does not grant the President any specific powers over elections," she wrote.
Earthquake rattles northern California, magnitude measured at 5.6
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President Donald Trump abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for landmark housing affordability legislation Wednesday, saying he wanted Republicans in Congress to pass a major election reform bill first.
A couple hours later, Trump arrived at Capital Hill for a previously scheduled lunch with Republican senators.
Addressing whether the SAVE America Act, a bill that affects voter registration laws, is more important than the housing bill, he said: “Every election is important. They want a lot of communists to come in.”
The housing bill, which passed the Senate and House of Representatives by large, bipartisan margins this week, was a significant – and rare – victory on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers and experts called it a sweeping "first step" in tackling the nation's housing crunch.
If Congress remains in session, the housing bill can become law without the president's signature 10 days after it was presented to him.
Dropsitenews: Internal Documents Show Trump’s “Board of Peace“ Moving to Crush Palestinian Self-Determination
Soon after President Donald Trump’s self-congratulatory tour for “ending” the Gaza war last October, replete with ceremonies in which various kings, emirs, and presidents praised him, Israel made clear it had no intention of respecting the terms of the deal. It continued to kill Palestinians on a near daily basis and began limiting the entry of the agreed upon life essentials to the Strip stipulated in the ceasefire agreement.
Nonetheless, Trump pulled off a coup the following month when he got the UN Security Council to endorse his Gaza plan. In an unprecedented move, the council endorsed the deployment of an international force that would not operate under the banner of the UN, but would instead be commanded and controlled by Trump and his private “Board of Peace”—to which states could buy in for $1 billion and receive permanent membership. In the big picture, Trump could wrap the future edicts of his board in the veneer of UN legitimacy.
As Israel steadily expanded its military attacks on Gaza and pushed its occupation forces deeper into the enclave instead of withdrawing and repositioning them as agreed, Hamas officials told Drop Site that they heard nothing from the Board of Peace until March.
Since then, the negotiations over Gaza’s future have been stuck in a diplomatic netherworld. Despite the pomp and circumstance manufactured by the White House after the signing of the deal and Trump’s promise to guarantee it, the U.S. has refused to hold Israel to any of its obligations. While Hamas fulfilled its part of the deal and handed over all of its captives to Israel, both alive and dead, Israel has repeatedly violated nearly every term of the agreement and has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians since the signing of the deal in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.
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