fully

A federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the Trump administration Thursday to find the money to fully fund SNAP benefits for November.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. gave President Trump’s administration until Friday to make the payments through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, though it’s unlikely the 42 million Americans — about 1 in 8, most of them in poverty — will see the money on the debit cards they use for groceries nearly that quickly.

The order was in response to a challenge from cities and nonprofits complaining that the administration was only offering to cover 65% of the maximum benefit, a decision that would have left some recipients getting nothing for this month.

“The defendants failed to consider the practical consequences associated with this decision to only partially fund SNAP,” McConnell said in a ruling from the bench after a brief hearing. “They knew that there would be a long delay in paying partial SNAP payments and failed to consider the harms individuals who rely on those benefits would suffer.”

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

McConnell was one of two judges who ruled last week that the administration could not skip November’s benefits entirely because of the federal shutdown.

The Trump administration chose partial payments this week

Last month, the administration said that it would halt SNAP payments for November if the government shutdown wasn’t resolved.

A coalition of cities and nonprofits sued in federal court in Rhode Island and Democratic state officials from across the country did so in Massachusetts.

The judges in both cases ordered the government to use one emergency reserve fund containing more than $4.6 billion to pay for SNAP for November but gave it leeway to tap other money to make the full payments, which cost between $8.5 billion and $9 billion each month.

On Monday, the administration said it would not use additional money, saying it was up to Congress to appropriate the funds for the program and that the other money was needed to shore up other child hunger programs.

The partial funding brought on complications

McConnell harshly criticized the Trump administration for making that choice.

“Without SNAP funding for the month of November, 16 million children are immediately at risk of going hungry,” he said. “This should never happen in America. In fact, it’s likely that SNAP recipients are hungry as we sit here.”

Tyler Becker, the attorney for the government, unsuccessfully argued that the Trump administration had followed the court’s order in issuing the partial payments. “This all comes down to Congress not having appropriated funds because of the government shutdown,” he said.

Kristin Bateman, a lawyer for the coalition of cities and nonprofit organizations, told the judge the administration had other reasons for not fully funding the benefits.

“What defendants are really trying to do is to leverage people’s hunger to gain partisan political advantage in the shutdown fight,” Bateman told the court.

McConnell said last week’s order required that those payments be made “expeditiously” and “efficiently” — and by Wednesday — or a full payment would be required. “Nothing was done consistent with the court’s order to clear the way to expeditiously resolve it,” McConnell said.

There were other twists and turns this week

The administration said in a court filing on Monday that it could take weeks or even months for some states to make calculations and system changes to load the debit cards used in the SNAP program. At the time, it said it would fund 50% of the maximum benefits.

The next day, Trump appeared to threaten not to pay the benefits at all unless Democrats in Congress agreed to reopen the government. His press secretary later said that the partial benefits were being paid for November — and that it is future payments that are at risk if the shutdown continues.

And Wednesday night, it recalculated, telling states that there was enough money to pay for 65% of the maximum benefits.

Under a decades-old formula in federal regulations, everyone who received less than the maximum benefit would get a larger percentage reduction. Some families would have received nothing and some single people and two-person households could have gotten as little as $16.

Carmel Scaife, a former day care owner in Milwaukee who hasn’t been able to work since receiving multiple severe injuries in a car accident seven years ago, said she normally receives $130 a month from SNAP. She said that despite bargain hunting, that is not nearly enough for a month’s worth of groceries.

Scaife, 56, said that any cuts to her benefit will mean she will need to further tap her Social Security income for groceries. “That’ll take away from the bills that I pay,” she said. “But that’s the only way I can survive.”

The next legal step is unclear

This type of order is usually not subject to an appeal, but the Trump administration has challenged other rulings like it before.

An organization whose lawyers filed the challenge signaled it would continue the battle if needed.

“We shouldn’t have to force the President to care for his citizens,” Democracy Forward President and CEO Skye Perryman said in a statement, “but we will do whatever is necessary to protect people and communities.”

It often takes SNAP benefits a week or more to be loaded onto debit cards once states initiate the process.

Mulvihill and Casey write for the Associated Press. AP writers Sara Cline in Baton Rouge, La.; Susan Haigh in Hartford, Conn.; and Gary Robertson in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report.

Husamettin Dogan is the only defendant to appeal his conviction for assaulting Pelicot, a French woman whose case drew international attention.

Witnesses have testified that defendant Husamettin Dogan was “fully aware” that Gisele Pelicot was asleep while he was assaulting her, as his appeal unfolds in a French court in the southern city of Nimes.

Dogan, a 44-year-old construction worker, was one of 50 men convicted of sexually abusing Pelicot in a landmark case last December.

But he has since sought to overturn his conviction, claiming he was not a “rapist” and insisting he thought he was participating in a consensual sexual activity.

He is the only defendant from that case to appeal. He has been sentenced to nine years in prison, lower than the 12 years initially sought by prosecutors.

Tuesday marked the second day of his appeal, and prosecutors presented evidence to contradict his claims.

Witnesses included Pelicot’s ex-husband Dominique Pelicot, who previously received a prison term of 20 years, the maximum sentence, for orchestrating the assaults in the former couple’s home in Mazan.

During trial last year, Dominique Pelicot admitted that, for more than a decade, he drugged his then-wife of 50 years so that he and strangers he recruited online could abuse her. He also filmed the assaults, which included at least 50 men.

In Tuesday’s hearing, he denied ever coercing or misleading Dogan. “I never forced anyone,” he said. “They never needed me.”

He also refuted Dogan’s assertion that his invitation was to participate in a sexual game. “I never said that,” he said.

“I have no interest in speaking ill of anyone, except to tell the truth,” Dominique Pelicot added.

Dogan visited the couple’s home on June 28, 2019, where he is accused of assaulting Gisele Pelicot for more than three hours. Dogan, however, has said he only realised that something was wrong when he heard the woman snoring.

Investigator Jeremie Bosse-Platiere also testified on Tuesday. He cited video footage of Gisele Pelicot’s assault to assert that Dogan was fully aware Gisele had not consented.

“Anyone who sees the videos understands this immediately,” Bosse-Platiere said.

The police commissioner described a video in which Gisele Pelicot was seen moving slightly, causing Dogan to immediately withdraw.

“We understand that he is worried that his victim might wake up and freezes in a waiting position,” said Bosse-Platiere.

“After 30 seconds, seeing that it was a reflex caused by pain or discomfort, he reintroduces his penis into her vagina.”

Investigators found a total of 107 photos and 14 videos from the night Dogan visited the couple’s home in the southern town of Mazan.

Gisele Pelicot herself is set to take the stand on Wednesday morning, with the verdict expected later that day or Thursday.

Her decision to waive her right to anonymity during the initial trial was celebrated as a bold move for transparency, raising awareness about the prevalence of sexual assault and domestic violence in France and around the world.

She also attended the proceedings in person and faced her abusers in court. She was named a knight of the Legion of Honour, France’s top civic honour, in July.

Her case has resulted in greater momentum to reform France’s laws about rape and sexual assault.

Lawmakers in France’s National Assembly and Senate have pushed for an update to the definition of rape under the country’s penal code, in order to include a clear reference to the need for consent. A final bill is expected to pass in the coming months.

The Emmy Awards bring together the best and brightest in television each year, and as such, it’s always a tightly secured event. This year will be no exception.

The security measures for Sunday’s awards ceremony, which will be held at the Peacock Theater at L.A. Live in the heart of downtown, was reviewed with close eyes this week in light of Wednesday’s fatal shooting of political commentator Charlie Kirk in Utah.

With any large event, law enforcement officials and organizers take caution with security measures, but the recent spate recent of political violence targeting elected officials and those in the public eye have brought increased attention to how these large and highly publicized events are secured.

Though LAPD did not offer specifics about the security measures it was taking, an official for the department said they are ready for the event. “For security reasons, the Department does not discuss protective measures for special events or any public gatherings. What I can assure you is that we are appropriately staffed and fully prepared,” said Jennifer Forkish, LAPD communications director.

For several years, the LAPD has had a SWAT team at the scene, and numerous Metro officers and counter snipers have been visibly stationed on rooftops. Law enforcement officials also design a vehicle approach with barriers that prevents car bombings and vehicle attacks.

Since the attacks on 9/11, the 24th anniversary of which were recognized this week, the department has applied an extensive layer of security to the biggest awards ceremonies with large red carpets. The Peacock Theater also has security personnel who use metal-detector screening, visual inspection and bag inspection to keep guests safe.

The Television Academy revisited its security system for the weekend in light of Kirk’s shooting death at a speaking event on a college campus.

“We’re absolutely relooking at all of our security plans, but we always have a very robust security plan in place,” Television Academy president and chief executive Maury McIntyre told Variety on Thursday. “I know that basically once things happened yesterday, our security personnel all gathered together to just recheck things like that. Sitting with the LA Police Department, sitting with our department of transportation, just to make sure that we felt buttoned up. We are confident in the plans we’ve got in place.”

Stand-up comedian Nate Bargatze is hosting the 77th Emmy Awards, which begin at 5 p.m. PDT Sunday and will be broadcast live on CBS and available to stream live and on-demand on Paramount+.

Times staff writer Richard Winton contributed to this report.

Looks like whoever called the cops on Lil Nas X last week wasn’t exaggerating when they reported the Grammy winner as a “nude man walking in the street.”

Initial video posted last week by TMZ showed the performer wearing only tighty-whities and white cowboy boots, strolling and posing on an L.A. street just before sunrise — and just before his arrest on suspicion of charging at a police officer. But it turns out that’s not the exact condition he was in when law enforcement took him in.

In new video TMZ posted over the weekend, the “Old Town Road” singer can be seen walking down the middle of a street fully naked, having shed the boots and underpants that had barely covered his modesty. (That he disrobed explains how a concerned citizen-slash-amateur videographer was able to snatch his boots up from off the street and list them for sale on EBay, seeking $10,000 — or best offer.)

In the new footage, Lil Nas X recites some Nicki Minaj lyrics from the Kanye West tune “Monster” as he struts runway-style toward the person shooting the video, who appears to be in the driver’s seat of a car.

“And if I’m fake, I ain’t notice ‘cause my money ain’t / So let me get this straight, wait, I’m the rookie? / But my features and my shows 10 times your pay? / 50K for a verse, no album out,” Lil Nas X says in the video.

An LAPD spokesperson told The Times last week that the 26-year-old, who was arrested around 6 a.m. Thursday, initially was taken to a hospital for a possible overdose. Lil Nas X was booked a little over five hours later and ultimately spent the weekend in a Van Nuys jail pending a court date Monday to set bail.

Both the LAPD and Los Angeles Fire Department responded to the scene on Thursday. LAFD did not give The Times additional information about the singer’s condition.

The performer, whose real name is Montero Lamar Hill, was arrested on suspicion of battery on a police officer after he allegedly charged at officers who responded to the call. Although TMZ reported that he was being held on a misdemeanor, online arrest records list him as being held on a felony count.

Representatives for Lil Nas X did not respond immediately to The Times’ request for comment Monday.

His arrest came soon after he apparently wiped his Instagram grid of old photos and posted a couple dozen new ones, including a selfie posted Tuesday of himself wearing a fur coat, bright red lipstick and both a cowboy hat and crown. “OH NO sHES GONE MAD! CRAZY I TELL U!,” he captioned the post.

In another photo, Lil Nas X posed in front of a backlit mirror in a gold gown, white cowboy boots and a tiara.

“And just like that she’s back,” he wrote in that caption. “We’ve all waited so long. When dreamworld needed her the most.”

Times staff writers Alexandra Del Rosario, Christopher Buchanan and Richard Winton contributed to this report.

“So, Yoane won’t be involved. But as far as I’m concerned, there’s been no movement in any way and fully expect Yoane to be here come next Tuesday.”

Andrews felt the decision not to involve Wissa against the Cherries was “best for the group”.

The Brentford boss, appointed in June after Thomas Frank’s departure to Tottenham, said he always knew Wissa – who has scored 49 goals in 149 appearances for the Bees – would be a transfer target this summer.

“I knew there was, or would be, interest,” added Andrews. “Naturally, when you score that amount of Premier League goals and play as well as he did last season in particular.

“He’s built his career at this football club over the last four years where he’s grown in stature, presence. I’m not surprised by it.”

Israel’s security cabinet is meeting on Thursday to decide on whether to order a complete military takeover of the Gaza Strip – a move the UN says would risk “catastrophic consequences”.

Israeli media say Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees this as the only way to destroy Hamas and free hostages still held by the group following the breakdown of ceasefire talks.

Reports, though, say the head of the military and some ministers disagree, amid warnings such a move could be disastrous for the hostages and Palestinian civilians.

Top UN official Miroslav Jenča told the UN Security Council earlier this week that it would be against international law and was a “deeply alarming” prospect.

The Israeli military currently controls about three-quarters of Gaza. The vast majority of Gaza’s population has already been displaced by the war and many more would be uprooted if the army takes over remaining areas.

The security cabinet of top government ministers is scheduled to meet at 18:00 local time (15:00 GMT) on Thursday.

According to Israeli media, tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers would need to be sent to Gaza to carry out the takeover.

Reports say the plan initially focuses on taking full control of Gaza City, relocating its one million residents further south. Forces would also take control of refugee camps in central Gaza and areas where hostages are thought to be held.

Reports say a second offensive would follow weeks later in parallel with a boost in humanitarian aid.

US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee told Fox News there would be a significant scaling up of distribution sites operated by the Israel- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

The GHF has been strongly criticised by the UN and aid agencies, who have accused it of being chaotic and forcing hungry Palestinians to travel long distances in perilous conditions to try to get food.

Hundreds have been shot dead in or around the four sites run by GHF since it began operating in May. The Hamas-run health ministry and witnesses have accused Israeli forces of being responsible. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has denied targeting civilians, saying soldiers have fired warning shots to keep crowds back or in response to threats.

The war has created a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, most of which UN-backed experts say is at the point of famine in terms of food consumption. The territory is also experiencing mass deprivation as a result of heavy restrictions imposed by Israel on what is allowed in – something it says is aimed at weakening Hamas.

Netanyahu is reported to have decided in recent days on the conquest of Gaza, raising tensions with military chiefs.

In a meeting with Netanyahu on Tuesday, the IDF Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, is said to have warned that controlling Gaza could entrap troops and further endanger the hostages. He is reported to have presented an alternative plan involving encircling remaining Hamas strongholds rather than full occupation.

Israeli media say that, despite some misgivings, the security cabinet is expected to approve Netanyahu’s plan.

The families of hostages have reacted with alarm, fearing such a move could push their captives into killing them.

US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that taking over Gaza was “really up to Israel”. The US has been mediating in indirect ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas for months, but negotiations broke down two weeks ago.

The war began after Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 back to Gaza as hostages. Israel launched a massive military offensive in response, which has killed at least 61,158 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

In March, the Trump administration deported 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador, allegedly for membership in the criminal organization Tren de Aragua. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, these men were “terrorists” and “heinous monsters.” President Trump echoed her, calling them “monsters” on his social media platform, Truth Social. In May, ProPublica reported that the White House knew that most of the men had no criminal convictions in the U.S., and earlier reporting indicated that more than 50 of them had entered the U.S. legally and had not violated immigration law.

“Monster” conjures a threat distinct from “foreign,” “different,” “other” or even “alien.” Here it implies that the deportees are different from “normal” people (read “white, Anglo, native-born Americans”) in ways that go beyond merely committing a garden-variety crime. Their transgression of the social contract seemingly even exceeds the violent crimes of which they are accused, because U.S. citizens suspected of being “rapists, murders, kidnappers” — the administration’s allegations about these “monsters” — don’t get trafficked to gulags overseas.

Monstrifying these people was part of a strategy to justify deporting them by invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 without proof of any crime or gang membership. By doing so the administration threatens to normalize not just the deportation of a handful of individuals but also depriving all residents (legal and undocumented) and U.S. citizens of the right to challenge the legality of their detention or imprisonment. Because one cannot prove legal residence or citizenship without due process, deporting people without legal proceedings is to deny rights that must be extended to all if they are to exist for anyone — a violation all the greater when individuals are sent to a prison from which, in the words of the Salvadoran president, “the only way out is in a coffin.”

Monstrifying individuals and groups is nothing new. The 11th-century chronicler Gerald of Wales, descended from Norman conquerers and Welsh nobility, dismissed the English as “the most worthless of all peoples under heaven … the most abject slaves” and Ireland as an island inhabited by werewolves, ox-humans and other human-animal hybrids. In 1625, an English Puritan travel editor published a claim (without having set foot in North America) that the Algonquians had “little of humanitie but shape … more brutish than the beasts they hunt.”

In 1558, the Scottish Protestant and firebrand preacher John Knox published a pamphlet against the rule of Mary I of England, arguing that a woman who ruled in her own right was “a monster of monsters,” her country a monstrous body politic, unlikely to survive for long. In the age of Atlantic slavery, legal instruments known as “black codes” invented Black Africans transported to the colonies as a new category: the chattel slave who served for life and had fewer rights than white Christian servants.

The current president’s history of monstrifying people extends to U.S. citizens. In August 2016, Trump called Hillary Clinton “a monster”: supposedly “weak,” “unhinged,” “unbalanced,” someone who would be “a disaster” as president and who allegedly threatened “the destruction of this country from within.” In October 2020, Trump twice called Kamala Harris “this monster.”

The distinctions drawn by people in power trying to divide a population are often unworkable. How do you tell a law-abiding person from a terrorist gang member? From their tattoos, according to this administration. Neither citizenship nor immigration status is visible on a person’s body or audible in their voice, yet people of color of every immigration and citizenship status have long faced racial profiling. Attempts to define visible signs of the monster are not new either; nor is the fact that monster-making sweeps up an immense number of people in its dragnet.

But monsters are never hermetically sealed from the group whose borders they were invented to define. This ham-fisted attempt at an evidence-based reason for trafficking people to El Salvador echoes earlier attempts to identify distinct groups in a population where human variety existed on a continuum. Notorious among these examples was the monstrification and mass slaughter, in Nazi Germany, of Jewish, Roma, Sinti, LGBTQ+, disabled and neurodiverse individuals as well as political dissidents.

In the U.S. today, to tolerate, permit or encourage the monstrification of any non-citizen and consequently deny them due process is to tolerate, permit and encourage this to happen to U.S. citizens.

The category of the human is shrinking as politicians, tech bros and right-wing pundits monstrify everyone who isn’t a cis-het white man. Today’s dehumanizing language extends beyond the Venezuelan deportees that this administration labeled as “monsters.” It extends to women, minorities and LGBTQ+ people by questioning their right to bodily autonomy, privacy and dignity. It extends to people who are unhoused, poor, disabled or elderly, as social services are cut.

These narratives hail back to a broader, centuries-long Western tradition of gazing at other people and framing them as monstrous: as beings who supposedly broke the category of “human” and could be legitimately denied of fundamental rights.

Monster-making campaigns always serve a purpose. For European colonizers, claiming that Indigenous people were less than human disguised European land grabs. Laws defining enslaved Black Africans as chattel property legalized their enslavement and broke the labor solidarity between white servants and enslaved Africans. And the Nazis claimed that Jews and other minorities had caused Germany to lose the First World War and were responsible for the nation’s economic collapse.

Again today, the goals of monstrification serve the myth of white supremacy, including the notion that the U.S. was meant to be a white ethnostate. Thus while the Trump administration terminated a program for refugees fleeing Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, it welcomed white Afrikaners from South Africa by calling them refugees.

Furthermore, by exploiting Jews’ proximity to whiteness, this administration is monstrifying Palestinians in order to justify the Israeli government’s human rights violations. By declaring that protesters, including those who are Jewish, calling for an end to the Gaza slaughter are antisemitic, and by withholding research funds from and interfering with universities by calling them hotbeds of antisemitism, the administration attempts to convince people that Palestinian civilians do not deserve food, homes, safety or even life — and that recognizing the humanity of Jews requires denying that Palestinians are human and have human rights. Yet the administration’s own antisemitism is clear: Trump has pardoned leaders of antisemitic and white supremacist organizations and hosted prominent antisemites as dinner guests.

This multi-pronged campaign of monstrification strengthens the personal loyalty of white supremacists and Christian nationalists towards Trump and sows discord and poisons solidarity among his targets and critics.

Monstrifying narratives have been undermining the possibility of a more inclusive body politic for millennia. But there’s an antidote to us-them messages of hate, fear and exclusion that claim that only a tiny minority of people are truly human. That antidote is to realize that by recognizing the humanity of others we don’t disavow our own humanity: We demonstrate it. It behooves us to demand that all people receive equal protection under the law, and to call out monstrifying narratives that, in the end, dehumanize us all.

Surekha Davies is a historian, speaker and monster consultant for TV, film and radio. She is the author of “Humans: A Monstrous History” and writes the newsletter “Strange and Wondrous: Notes From a Science Historian.”