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Religious colleges that require students to sign a statement of faith cannot be excluded from a popular Minnesota program that lets high school students take college courses for credit, a federal judge has ruled, tossing a state law that she called an unconstitutional violation of religious freedom.

The ruling late Friday from U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel was a victory for two conservative Christian colleges in the state: Crown College in St. Bonifacius and the University of Northwestern in Roseville. Those two institutions require their students to pledge to follow the school’s values and conduct rules, effectively barring students who aren’t Christian or who are LGBTQ+ from campus activities.

The 2023 law was sought by the state Department of Education and advocates for LGBTQ+ rights. In defending the change at a hearing in December, the state argued that it rightly protected high school students who are not Christian, straight, and cisgender — those whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.

Religious colleges that require students to sign a statement of faith cannot be excluded from a popular Minnesota program that lets high school students take college courses for credit, a federal judge has ruled, tossing a state law that she called an unconstitutional violation of religious freedom.

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A so-called “missing minute” of CCTV footage, a key ingredient of conspiracy theories surrounding the prison death of the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has been found, contradicting the assertion of Pam Bondi, the attorney general, that it was recorded over.

The video was in a cache of material, including 33,000 pages of records relating to the disgraced financier and former Donald Trump associate, released late on Tuesday by the US House oversight committee. The panel has been looking into Epstein’s August 2019 death at Manhattan’s Metropolitan correctional center.

In July, the same month as a government review confirmed Epstein died by suicide, the FBI released hours of surveillance footage taken from outside Epstein’s jail cell on the night he died. Observers quickly realized from time stamps that a block of one minute, from 11.59pm to midnight on 10 August, was not there.

Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell at 6.30am.

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A federal judge in Boston on Wednesday ordered the reversal of the Trump administration’s cuts to more than $2.6 billion in funding for research grants for Harvard University.

U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs sided with the Ivy League school, ruling the cuts amounted to illegal retaliation for Harvard’s rejection of White House demands for changes to its governance and policies.

The ruling delivers a significant victory to Harvard in its battle with the Trump administration, which also has sought to prevent the school from hosting foreign students and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status.

The government had tied the freezes at Harvard to delays in dealing with antisemitism on its campus, but the judge said the federally funded research had little connection to antisemitism. “A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities,” Burroughs wrote.

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Nongovernmental groups are now barred from registering new voters at naturalization ceremonies, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced.

The policy, which was issued Friday, says "that only state and local election officials will be permitted to offer voter registration services at the end of administrative naturalization ceremonies."

Groups like the League of Women Voters criticized the decision. They often partner with local and state election officials or supplement their work to administer registration services — and that includes during naturalization ceremonies.

Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, said in a statement that this new policy "is an attempt to keep new citizens from accessing their full rights."

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A divided US appeals court on Tuesday allowed US Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, a Democrat, to resume her role at the agency, as Donald Trump tries to remove her from office.

In a 2-1 decision, the District of Columbia circuit court of appeals allowed a lower court decision in favor of Slaughter to take effect, rejecting the Trump administration’s request to delay the ruling during its appeal.

The court said that FTC commissioners may not be fired by a president without cause, saying that the law on this point has been clear for nearly a century.

“The government is not likely to succeed on appeal because any ruling in its favor from this court would have to defy binding, on-point, and repeatedly preserved supreme court precedent,” two judges wrote in the majority opinion.

A third judge, Trump appointee Neomi Rao, dissented, saying that federal courts likely have no authority “to order the reinstatement of an officer removed by the president”.

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The mayor of Chicago has signed an executive order outlining how the city will attempt to resist Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Brandon Johnson pushed back on Saturday against what he called the “out-of-control” Trump administration’s plan to deploy large numbers of federal officers into the country’s third-largest city, which could take place within days.

The Chicago police department will be barred from helping federal authorities with civil immigration enforcement or any related patrols, traffic stops and checkpoints during the surge, according to the executive order Johnson signed.

The mayor directed all city departments to guard the constitutional rights of Chicago residents “amidst the possibility of imminent militarized immigration or national guard deployment by the federal government”.

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