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A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction preventing the Trump administration from carrying out mass layoffs within the Department of Education.

The injunction comes nearly two months after President Donald Trump directed Education Secretary Linda McMahon “to take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure (of) the Department of Education and return education authority to the States, while continuing to ensure the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”

Buma was arrested on 17 March 2025, just weeks after Trump’s new director of the FBI, Kash Patel, had been confirmed in his role. Buma said he was at Kennedy airport awaiting a flight to the UK, where he planned to have a meeting with the HarperCollins publisher Arabella Pike, when he was suddenly surrounded by agents. He was released on bail the next day.

The bail included a restriction that he refrain from excessive use of alcohol. This restriction appears to arise from an October 2023 text message reviewed by the FBI. Buma denies drinking excessively.

His meeting with Pike was canceled by the publisher after his arrest, according to a screenshot of a text message seen by the Guardian. Pike did not respond to a request for comment.

Buma was arraigned in Los Angeles weeks after his arrest, on 1 May, and charged with a single misdemeanor. US prosecutors have claimed Buma “knowingly published, divulged, disclosed, and made known” the identity and personal identifying information of an individual who was a confidential FBI source.

A deadlocked U.S. Supreme Court effectively blocked the creation of the nation's first religious charter school in Oklahoma, leaving in place a state Supreme Court ruling that declared the school violated the constitutional separation of church and state.

The vote was 4-4, and the order did not specify which justice voted which way. Justice Amy Coney Barrett had recused herself from the case.

At issue in the case were two Catholic dioceses in Oklahoma that tried to establish a publicly funded Catholic school, St. Isidore of Seville, as a charter school. That move challenged both the federal charter school law and similar state laws under which charter schools are public schools that are funded by the state, closely supervised by the state, and must be non-sectarian.

All of the trades came shortly before a significant government announcement or development that could influence stock prices. Some who sold individual stocks or broader market funds used their earnings to buy investments that are generally less risky, such as bonds or treasuries. Others appear to have kept their money in cash. In one case unrelated to tariffs, records show that a congressional aide bought stock in two mining companies shortly before a key Senate committee approved a bill written by his boss that would help the firms.

• Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media, the president’s social media company, on April 2.
• US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene bought between $21,000 and $315,000 of stock the day before and the day of the announcement.
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, sold shares in almost three dozen companies on Feb. 11, two days before Trump announced plans to institute wide-ranging “reciprocal” tariffs.
• Acting General Council for the White House Tobias Dorsey sold shares of an index fund and nine companies, including cleaning products manufacturer Clorox and engineering firm Emerson Electric the day before the tariffs were confirmed.
• The Trade Representative's, Director for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement Marshall Stallings, sold between $2,000 and $30,000 of stock in retail giant Target and mining company Freeport-McMoRan. The sales appear to have been an abrupt U-turn. He had purchased the shares less than a week earlier.
• A longtime State Department official, Stephanie Syptak-Ramnath, who until April was ambassador to Peru, sold between $255,000 and $650,000 in stocks, and bought between $265,000 and $650,000 in bond and treasury funds (along with $50,000 to $100,000 in stocks). She continued to play the market through the news.
• A second longtime State Department official, Gautam Rana, who is now ambassador to Slovakia, sold between $830,000 and $1.7 million worth of stock on March 19, a week before Trump declared new tariffs on cars and two weeks before his “Liberation Day” announcement.
• Michael Platt, a veteran Republican staffer who served in the Commerce Department during Trump’s first term and now works for the House committee that handles administrative matters for the chamber sold off between $96,000 and $390,000 in mostly American companies, and purchased at least $45,000 in foreign stocks and at least $15,000 in an American and Canadian energy index fund. He used an account under his wife's name.
• Stephanie Trifone, a Senate Judiciary Committee aide, sold stock in mid-March and bought at least $50,000 in treasuries.
• Kevin Wheeler, a staffer for the Senate Appropriations Committee, made a similar move. In late February, he and his spouse offloaded between $18,000 and $270,000 in funds composed almost entirely of stocks and bought between $50,000 and $225,000 in bonds.
• Another staffer, Ryan White, chief of staff to Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, bought shares worth between $2,000 and $30,000 in two precious metals mining companies two days before Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement. Also, a bill White’s boss introduced to make it easier for mining companies like Hecla and Coeur to operate on public lands was approved by a Senate committee, an important step in passing a bill. (White added to his Hecla shares earlier this month and sold his stake in Coeur.)

For the last 18 months, the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank responsible for Project 2025, has been organizing to quash pro-Palestine activism in the United States, the New York Times reported over the weekend.

The initiative is called Project Esther, and it recommends that government officials instruct college administrators to jettison pro-Palestine curricula or risk losing federal funding. It also called for foreign students who took part in anti-Israel demonstrations to be deported.

Overall, Project Esther says its goal is to “dismantle the infrastructure that sustains the [Hamas Support Network] and associated movements’ antisemitic violence inside the United States of America within 12 to 24 months.”

Additionally, the bill makes significant spending cuts, including to the Medicaid healthcare programme for lower-income Americans as well as Snap, a food assistance programme used by more than 42 million Americans.

These cuts were the subject of intense friction among Republicans, which was finally overcome after the President travelled to Capitol Hill on Tuesday. He privately told lawmakers to put aside their objections or face consequences.

Democrats also fiercely opposed the bill and warned that the cuts could have dire consequences for millions of lower-income Americans.

"Children will get hurt. Women will get hurt. Older Americans who rely on Medicaid for nursing home care and for home care will get hurt," Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat, said on the House floor.

The hearing took place as the deported men sat on a plane in South Sudan. The judge on Tuesday ordered that they not be discharged from U.S. custody without his permission.

Murphy said he would consider whether the administration’s conduct was “criminally contemptuous” but would save that determination for another day.

UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest healthcare conglomerate, has secretly paid nursing homes thousands in bonuses to help slash hospital transfers for ailing residents – part of a series of cost-cutting tactics that has saved the company millions, but at times risked residents’ health, a Guardian investigation has found.

Those secret bonuses have been paid out as part of a UnitedHealth program that stations the company’s own medical teams in nursing homes and pushes them to cut care expenses for residents covered by the insurance giant.

In several cases identified by the Guardian, nursing home residents who needed immediate hospital care under the program failed to receive it, after interventions from UnitedHealth staffers. At least one lived with permanent brain damage following his delayed transfer, according to a confidential nursing home incident log, recordings and photo evidence.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that the Republican legislation speeding through the U.S. House of Representatives would cut household resources for the bottom 10% of Americans while delivering gains to the wealthiest in the form of tax breaks.

The CBO also said Tuesday that the Republican reconciliation package, which Trump has championed, would trigger automatic cuts to Medicare spending—reductions that the nonpartisan body did not factor into its distributional analysis.

The CBO's analysis also did not include the impact of a tentative deal to boost the cap on state and local tax deductions (SALT), a change that would primarily benefit wealthy households.

A federal suit filed in Illinois in November by five Minto Money borrowers contends that McGraw has provided “tens of millions of dollars” in capital for the loans. CreditServe provides the infrastructure to market, underwrite and collect on them while “the Tribe is merely a front” and shares in only a small percentage of the revenue, according to the suit.

It called McGraw the “enterprise’s principal beneficiary,” asserting that he and CreditServe’s CEO, Eric Welch, have collected “hundreds of millions of dollars of payments made by consumers.”

The suit alleged that McGraw and the other defendants, including Minto Money, violated state usury laws and federal prohibitions against collecting unlawful debt. A confidential settlement resolved the lawsuit in early May but left open the possibility that other Minto Money customers could file similar suits in the future.

“This loan is outrageous with interest over 700%!” one person complained to the Better Business Bureau about having paid $4,167 on a $1,200 loan from Minto Money. “I am one step away from filing from bankruptcy.”

In March, Oyer was asked to make a recommendation to Attorney General Pam Bondi to reinstate actor Mel Gibson’s gun rights, which were rescinded after a domestic violence conviction in 2011. Oyer reviewed the case and refused. Within hours, she says she was terminated.

Last month, Oyer testified about her firing in front of Congress. She not only accused the Department of Justice of “ongoing corruption” and abuses of power, but she also said the administration tried to send armed US marshals to her home carrying a letter warning her against testifying. Oyer says it felt like “an attempt to display the power of the Department of Justice” and “make me afraid of telling the truth about the circumstances leading up to my termination.”