Human rights investigators said the paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, encircled the city of El-Fasher in an attempt to starve its population.
A former judge was spared a prison sentence Wednesday after being convicted for helping an immigrant evade ICE agents in her Wisconsin courtroom.U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman only gave Hannah Dugan a $5,000 fine, saying, “I think this is a situation where an otherwise good person, upset by immigration policies in this country, made a bad decision in the moment.” Dugan faced up to five years in prison.“This is a few minutes of conduct for someone who has dedicated her life to public service,” Adelman said. “It’s a marked deviation from an otherwise law-abiding life.”Dugan was found guilty last December on two counts of federal obstruction, though jurors did not charge her with concealing an individual from arrest. The case followed an incident in which federal immigration agents entered the court in April 2025 to arrest Mexican immigrant Eduardo Flores-Ruiz. Dugan confronted the agents outside her courtroom and redirected them to the chief judge’s office on grounds that their warrant was insufficient. Flores-Ruiz was later arrested outside the court.In his ruling, Adelman noted that Dugan had decades of public service, no pattern of criminal behavior, and an otherwise clean record. He added that the consequences of Dugan having a criminal record and losing her judicial position were enough, and that Flores-Ruiz was ultimately detained and deported anyway.Before her sentencing, Dugan told the court that she meant to preserve “decorum and safety of the courtroom” by helping Flores-Ruiz.“I have been cast as both a scofflaw and a hero. I am neither. I am a public servant who’s just trying to do my job,” Dugan said.Six ICE agents showed up at Dugan’s Milwaukee courthouse in April last year, preparing to arrest and deport Flores-Ruiz, who was set to appear before Dugan in court over three misdemeanor counts of battery. According to prosecutors, Dugan led Flores-Ruiz out of a private door instead of the courtroom’s public exit, telling her court reporter she’d “get the heat” for her actions.The FBI subsequently arrested Dugan, sparking a backlash from Democrats and even some conservatives. She later resigned from the Milwaukee County Circuit bench after Wisconsin Republican legislators threatened to impeach her.
A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the release of the $5.8 million that President Trump owes E. Jean Carroll. After the Supreme Court declined last week to hear Trump’s appeal of Carroll’s successful defamation case against him, the president has made excuses and tried to get out of paying her. Trump has already provided the money through a fund set up during the appeals process. However, the interest has grown since then, raising the total sum past the initial $5 million verdict. Shortly after Judge Lewis Kaplan issued his ruling, Trump appealed the decision.In 2023, a jury found that Trump sexually abused Carroll in 1996 in a Manhattan department store, and defamed her after she went public with her story. The jury ordered $5 million in damages, and Trump put the sum, plus interest, in a court-controlled account shortly after losing the case. Still, Trump insisted that he didn’t know Carroll and accused her of political and financial motives, and continued to defame her by claiming she fabricated her story. That repeated defamation resulted in another lawsuit that Trump lost, with a jury awarding Carroll $88.3 million.Carroll is still awaiting payment from a man notorious for many years for not paying his bills. He’s pulling out all of the stops to avoid paying funds that he already deposited, and that are a tiny fraction of his net worth thanks to his successful efforts to use the presidency to enrich himself. Trump can’t admit when he’s lost, whether in court or at the ballot box, and he likes to hoard his ill-gotten gains. This story has been updated.
Donald Trump’s latest attempt to weasel his way out of paying E. Jean Carroll involved a bold-faced lie to a federal judge.In a legal filing submitted Tuesday, Trump’s attorneys asked Judge Lewis Kaplan not to release some of the funds he owes to the beleaguered columnist on the basis that the president’s petition for a new hearing was still pending before the Supreme Court. The only hiccup: The Supreme Court had rejected Trump’s petition filing.By Wednesday morning, the SCOTUS docket had been updated to reflect that the nation’s highest court was anticipating a corrected petition from the president’s team. Hours later, it appeared that Kaplan had gone ahead and ordered the release of the funds to Carroll despite Trump’s pending filing.Carroll has a long and grim history with the president. Trump was found liable by a jury in May 2023 for having sexually abused her in the mid-1990s, for which she was awarded $5 million in damages.Trump lost his defamation case against her the following January, when Kaplan ruled that Trump had continued to defame the advice columnist by denying the rape on the basis that she wasn’t his “type,” and by accusing her of making up the sexual assault allegations against him for the benefit of her book. A jury awarded Carroll $83.3 million in that case.But Carroll hasn’t yet seen a dime from either of her legal victories. In May, a federal appeals court allowed Trump to continue staving off his payments until the Supreme Court decided whether to pick up the case. The high court did so last week, rejecting Trump’s challenge and allowing the verdict to stand.Late last month, Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan asked a judge to implement an expedited payment schedule for the sum that Trump owes Carroll (Kaplan is not related to the New York–based judge of the same name). She referred to a June 2023 filing in which both parties agreed that Carroll could collect if the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.Kaplan added that, by this point, the $5 million sum had accrued an additional $779,783 in interest, raising Trump’s debt in the initial case to nearly $5.8 million.“This is the end of the line,” Kaplan wrote in a June 30 filing. “It is time for him to pay Carroll.”This story has been updated.