Today’s edition of quick hits.
* Unresolved questions about weapons inspectors: “Iran said on Tuesday that there’s been no visit scheduled for inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to see nuclear sites earlier bombed by the United States. Esmail Baghaei made the comment to journalists at a news conference in Tehran, Iran’s capital.”
* One of the judges involved in this stunning group of sentences is U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, whose name might sound familiar: “Federal judges in Texas on Tuesday gave eight members of an alleged ‘antifa cell’ prison sentences as long as 100 years for their roles last summer in a protest that turned violent outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.”
* Bill Pulte’s handiwork: “Workforce cuts at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence began Monday, a senior White House official told MS NOW, following plans by the office’s acting director to reduce staffing across the agency.”
* Conservative justices love religious freedom, except when they don’t: “A divided Supreme Court ruled against a Rastafarian man who wanted to sue Louisiana prison officials for monetary damages after they cut his dreadlocks. Justice Neil Gorsuch authored the majority opinion for the court’s six Republican appointees, writing that a 2000 law called the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act does not permit plaintiffs to sue non-consenting state employees in their private capacities for damages.”
* The majority in this case comprised Trump-appointed judges: “An appeals court sided with the Trump administration on Tuesday to allow the government to resume expedited deportations nationwide. A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 2-1 that President Donald Trump could resume his expansion of ‘expedited removal’ procedures nationwide for any undocumented immigrant who is in the country illegally and cannot prove they were in the country continuously for at least two years.”
* When the United States chooses not to lead on civil rights: “The Trump administration is quietly reversing U.S. policy toward antigay laws being passed across Africa. When Uganda enacted one of the world’s strictest antigay laws in 2023, the Biden administration imposed visa restrictions on its top officials and moved to cut off the country’s goods from U.S. markets. The Trump administration, in contrast, was silent last month when Ghana’s Parliament passed sweeping antigay legislation.”
* The latest setback for the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, or SAVE: “A federal judge on Monday barred the Trump administration from letting states query a centralized national database of citizens built for checking immigration status to screen their voter rolls, finding that the repurposing of the federal data to monitor voting violated at least three laws.”