The US justice department abruptly reversed course on Tuesday and decided it would defend executive orders made by Donald Trump to try to penalize law firms that represented clients or causes the president did not like.
On Monday, the department announced in a court filing that it was dropping its appeal against a ruling by a district court judge that blocked Trump’s retaliatory executive actions against four companies that refused to make a deal with him.
Trump’s “capitulation” was celebrated by at least two of the the companies that welcomed the DoJ’s voluntary withdrawal from the legal proceedings.
On Tuesday, however, the government filed a new, single-paragraph request to the US court of appeals for the Columbia circuit, announcing it had changed its mind, and wished “to pursue this appeal”.
It gave no reason for its sudden about-face, and quoted attorneys for the four companies who unanimously opposed “the government’s unexplained request to withdraw yesterday’s voluntary dismissal, to which all parties had agreed”.
Special Interest Glance
The FBI’s joint terrorism taskforce has been called in to help investigate a deadly mass shooting in downtown Austin, Texas, on Sunday morning in which a gunman opened fire in front of a bar popular with university students, killing two people and injuring 14 others before being fatally shot by police.
Transgender Kansas residents have begun receiving letters from the state’s department of motor vehicles notifying them that their driver’s licenses will be invalid beginning Thursday, as a new law goes into effect that demands that forms of identification must now reflect the credential holder’s “sex at birth”.
Newly released records show a US citizen was shot and killed in Texas by a federal immigration agent last year during a late-night traffic encounter that was not publicly disclosed by the Department of Homeland Security.
Venezuela's acting president on Thursday signed into law an amnesty bill that could lead to the release of politicians, activists, lawyers and many others, effectively acknowledging that the government has held hundreds of people in prison for political motivations.
Chris Tackett started tracking extremism in Texas politics about a decade ago, whenever his schedule as a Little League coach and school board member would allow. At the time, he lived in Granbury, 40 minutes west of Fort Worth. He’d noticed that a local member of the state legislature, Mike Lang, had become a vocal advocate for using public money for private schools – despite the fact that Lang campaigned as a supporter of public education.





























