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A Tufts University student who was detained by US immigration authorities this week, in an arrest that caused widespread outrage, cannot be deported without a court order, a US judge ordered on Friday.

Rümeysa Öztürk, 30, was detained by masked, plainclothes officers as she walked in a Boston-area suburb on Tuesday, an incident that was captured on surveillance footage that has since gone viral. Öztürk, who is being threatened with deportation to Turkey, is a Fulbright scholar and doctoral student in the US with a visa.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said Öztürk’s visa was terminated, accusing her of engaging in activities in support of Hamas, but providing no evidence to substantiate that claim. Her attorneys, which include lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, have said the arrest appeared to be retaliation for an opinion piece that she and three other students co-wrote for the student newspaper last year, advocating that the university “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and “divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel”.

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Georgia’s Republican-dominated state Senate is going forward with an investigation of Stacey Abrams, a move that comes as President Donald Trump has made a target of the two-time Democratic nominee for Georgia governor.

Republican State Sen. Bill Cowsert of Athens said Thursday that he and other Republicans want to further examine recent ethics findings that voter participation group New Georgia Project improperly coordinated with Abrams’ 2018 campaign for governor.

“We have developed somewhat of a problem these days with dark money in politics, with secret money being used to fund campaigns,” Cowsert said. “The whole purpose of our campaign finance laws is to put sunshine on the issues.”

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A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from effectively dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an early target of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson barred the administration from stopping work and firing employees at the CFPB and ordered the reinstatement of previously terminated workers. She also blocked the destruction of any CFPB records and ordered the recission of any “wholesale” contract cancellations issued on or after Feb. 11.

Jackson opened her decision quoting Musk’s post to the social platform X spelling doom for the agency: “RIP CFPB.”

Lithuania's president said Friday that he hoped for "a miracle" as he visited the site of a rescue operation to recover four missing U.S. Army soldiers from their submerged vehicle. The four soldiers, assigned to the Army's 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, went missing early Tuesday morning during a maintenance mission to recover another U.S. Army vehicle in the Pabrade training area, near Lithuania's border with Belarus, during a scheduled training missing, the Army has said.

Search and rescue teams were at the scene on Friday using heavy military equipment and excavators to remove silt from the body of water where the vehicle was found on Wednesday.

"I am still hoping for a miracle," Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda told reporters in Pabrade. "Although many sceptics would probably say that there is nothing to hope for in these circumstances, I want to believe."

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Federal agents have been sweeping up Venezuelan migrants and sending them to a Salvadoran prison based in large part on tattoos depicting stopwatches, Michael Jordan logos and other ink art they claim betrays an allegiance to the Tren de Aragua street gang.

But internal U.S. Department of Homeland Security and FBI documents obtained by USA TODAY reveal federal authorities for years have questioned the effectiveness of using tattoos to identify members of Tren de Aragua, also known as TdA.

“Gang Unit collections determined that the Chicago Bulls attire, clocks, and rose tattoos are typically related to the Venezuelan culture and not a definite (indicator) of being a member or associate of the (TdA),” reads a 2023 "Situational Awareness" bulletin on the criminal gang written by the U.S. Custom and Border Protection’s El Paso Sector Intelligence Unit.

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A federal judge on Friday blocked U.S. President Donald Trump's administration from deporting migrants to countries with which they had no existing relationship without giving them a chance to raise claims that they would face persecution or torture if sent there.

U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston issued a nationwide temporary restraining order designed to protect migrants subject to final orders of removal from being swiftly deported to countries other than those that had already been identified during immigration proceedings.

His decision came in a lawsuit filed on Sunday by a group of migrants represented by immigrant rights advocates challenging a policy U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently adopted that is aimed at fast-tracking the deportations of thousands of migrants who had been previously released from detention.

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On March 28, at around midday local time, tens of millions of people in Southeast Asia felt the earth below their feet violently rupture. A magnitude 7.7 earthquake, centered just 12 miles away from Mandalay, Myanmar, shook the region—causing streets to buckle, ancient pagodas to crumble, bridges to shatter and houses to collapse. Entire neighborhoods were devastated in a matter of seconds.

The earthquake’s energy release was comparable to that of several hundred nuclear weapon explosions. “The magnitude of this event was so high that it was felt in neighboring countries,” says Amilcar Carrera-Cevallos, an earthquake scientist at the Vicente Rocafuerte Secular University of Guayaquil in Ecuador. A 30-story skyscraper under construction in Bangkok—600 miles from the quake’s epicenter—disintegrated. According to estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey, there will be thousands, if not tens of thousands, of casualties, as well as tens of billions of dollars of economic damage.