A judge heard arguments last week on one accused man’s request to remove James but said he wouldn’t rule without knowing if the six other lawsuit defendants backed the effort. He gave the man’s lawyers until Thursday to try to get them to join.

Four agreed to join, including one whose lawyers had previously filed court papers seeking to have James removed. The two others didn’t have lawyers and did not respond, court filings said.

James’ office declined to comment.

James, a Democrat, posted about the case on X and Facebook on Sept. 28, linking to a news article about the lawsuit. “I’m holding her in my heart and in my prayers. To her, and to all survivors: you’re not alone. We stand with you.”

Saw this on Mastodon and had a laugh. Not sure if it's real, but it's funny.

An ICE-watch observer who witnessed the incident unfold on 21 October told the Guardian that masked ICE agents approached Zepeda from behind, pinned him face-down on the ground and put him in a car. The agents then drove the student around for a while before letting him out. With a black eye and his wrist in severe pain, Zepeda walked the remaining half mile to his school, where staff called an ambulance.

The observer, who volunteers with a local rapid response network to document ICE activity, asked not to be named due to fears of retaliation from federal officials. To independently verify the observer’s account, the Guardian reviewed dashcam and phone videos that the observer recorded of the incident.

Local activists and US lawmakers are calling the ordeal the latest example of ICE brutality.

“ICE’s assault and wrongful detainment of Erik Zepeda was grotesque and heartbreaking,” said Adam Schiff, a Democratic US senator from California, in a statement to the Guardian. “There must be accountability for what happened to Erik.”

North Korean cryptocurrency thieves tricked a Binance software engineer into downloading malware onto their work-issued computer during a fake job interview process before last week's record-breaking $6.3 billion heist.

In an incident report published on Tuesday, the cryptocurrency exchange said several techniques - including social engineering via fake job interviews, malware downloads, compromised internal AI tooling, endpoint takeover, and an “advanced transaction-authorization method” - led to the October 29 security breach.

“Our current investigation indicates that this was a sophisticated, multi-stage campaign,” the incident report said. “It was not a single isolated breach or a simple phishing incident.”

Over the weekend, the FBI attributed the theft to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking operation linked to Lazarus Group, known for combining espionage with massive cryptocurrency heists. The Pyongyang-backed crew is also highly adept at job market scams - both posing as IT workers, who are then hired by Western companies, and as potential employers to lure software engineers into downloading malware and infecting corporate devices.

Vice President Vance on Wednesday blamed the ongoing Iran war for the Republican Party’s abysmal results in the midterm elections, brushing off other issues that appeared to tank GOP candidates, including the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies.

“The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” Vance said in a lengthy social media post.

“If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that’s at least honest,” he continued.

“But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”

The former head of the FBI in Chicago has accused the Trump administration of pressuring him to investigate the president’s political opponents and making him a “scapegoat” after a major federal case against anti-ICE protesters fell apart.

Douglas DePodesta, who served as FBI special agent in charge from 2024 until July 2026, alleged in a federal lawsuit filed on Monday that the Department of Justice (DoJ) had engaged in “misconduct” and “malfeasance” in its pursuit of unjust prosecutions – and that he was wrongly blamed for the DoJ’s missteps and unlawfully forced out of his job.

The suit names Kash Patel, the FBI director; Todd Blanche, the attorney general; and Andrew Boutros, the US attorney who leads the DoJ’s Chicago office.

DePodesta’s complaint alleges that Boutros pursued “politically motivated prosecutions” of protesters that turned into an “unprecedented disaster” for the DoJ and accuses the US attorney of making “intentionally” false statements to a judge.

LOWVILLE, N.Y. (AP) — A child in rural northern New York has died after contracting measles, marking the state’s first death from the disease in 30 years, state officials announced Monday.

The child died in Lewis County, about 93 miles (150 kilometers) north of Syracuse, Gov. Kathy Hochul said.

The U.S. stopped the domestic spread of measles in 2000 by maintaining high vaccination rates, but they have fallen in recent years to below the 95% coverage needed to prevent outbreaks of the viral disease.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a push for California to set aside thousands of mail ballots from people President Trump’s administration claims are noncitizens, a decision that comes on the eve of the pivotal midterm elections.

The high court refused to intervene in a case involving 20,000 people the Republican administration flagged as likely noncitizens on the largely Democratic state’s voter rolls.

It was the latest in a flurry of election-related litigation the day before the midterm elections, which will decide control of Congress for the last two years of Trump’s second term.

**EDIT: Here's the video, and I gave you all a shout-out at the end.

Hello friends!

I am creating a gift guide and, while I have a pretty good list so far, I wanted to crowd source some additional ideas from your weird, wonderful brains.

What tech gifts would you get for your friends that are priced under $25? (Both functional and gag gift ideas welcome.)

DETROIT (AP) — Michigan Democrats are heading to church in Detroit on Sunday in an attempt to present a united front behind Abdul El-Sayed in a race that could decide control of the U.S. Senate. But one prominent Democrat is expected to be missing from the pews.

U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, who lost in the primary to El-Sayed, was initially set to join the nominee and U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina at a church event. Those plans unraveled after a dispute over Israel and an outside group’s campaign advertisement escalated into a public exchange of criticism between the rivals.

Debbie Dingell, the Michigan congresswoman who helped organize the planned joint appearance in hopes of bringing together Democrats in the final days before Tuesday’s vote, said she asked Stevens not to attend and that Stevens told her she would abide by that.