Nov. 28 (UPI) — Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky‘s chief of staff, resigned Friday after a raid on his home in a sweeping corruption scandal.
Yermak had led Ukraine‘s negotiating team in peace talks with the President Donald Trump administration. He was the most powerful political figure in Ukraine behind Zelensky.
“This is the perfect storm. There is a lot of uncertainty right now,” a Ukrainian official told Axios.
He was scheduled to travel to Miami on Saturday for talks with Trump’s team, but that meeting has been canceled.
On Friday, Hungarian President Viktor Orban met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in defiance of the rest of the European Union members. Orban said his visit was an attempt to secure Russian energy supplies for the winter for Hungary, Slovakia and Serbia.
Zelensky announced Yermak’s resignation and said he will appoint a new chief of staff soon.
No charges have been filed as of this writing.
“Russia really wants Ukraine to make mistakes. There will be no mistakes on our side,” Zelensky said in a video on X. “We do not have the right to ease the pressure. We do not have the right to retreat or to quarrel among ourselves. If we lose our unity, we risk losing everything.”
Investigators from Ukraine’s National Anti-corruption Bureau and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office did the searches Thursday morning targeting Yermak, the Kyiv Post reported.
“Today, NABU and SAPO are indeed conducting procedural actions at my home. There are no obstacles for the investigators,” he said.
Yermak said investigators were given full access to his apartment.
“My lawyers are on site, interacting with law enforcement officers. From my side, I am providing full assistance,” he added.
While officials have not confirmed why the searches were conducted, reporter Christopher Miller of the Financial Times said that his sources confirmed it was part of Operation Midas, an investigation into large-scale bribery in the energy sector in Ukraine.
NABU also confirmed the searches.
“NABU and SAPO are conducting investigative actions (searches) at the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine. The investigative actions are authorized and are being carried out within the framework of the investigation. Details to follow,” the agency said on Telegram.
Justice Minister Herman Halushchenko and Energy Minister Svitlana Hrynchuk resigned Nov. 12 after investigators uncovered that officials at the state nuclear energy company Energoatom had manipulated contracts to generate bribes and laundered about $100 million.
Video shows funeral processions in Syria’s Beit Jinn, after Israeli raids and missile strikes killed at least 13 people. Violent clashes erupted after Israel claimed it entered the village to arrest members of the Jama’a Islamiya militant group.
As the Liberty Van rolled into the Home Depot, its driver slowed, lowered the window and waved at day laborers standing around the parking lot.
It had rained all morning and the overcast clouds trapped a chill in the air. Still, on a recent Friday, day laborers milled around even as it began to drizzle again. A pastor, a Navy veteran, an immigration lawyer and cameraman got out of the Liberty Van — camioneta de la libertad in Spanish — and greeted the day laborers while offering them water and snacks.
Since June in Los Angeles, federal immigration agents have destabilized daily life by raiding neighborhoods, worksites and Home Depots — popular gathering spots for day laborers who often lack U.S. citizenship. In turn, several “rapid-response” organizations have surged into action to aid those targeted in the raids, and document their treatment.
One of these organizations is the Save America Movement, which runs the Liberty Vans and includes a bipartisan leadership that is far more politically connected than that of many grassroots organizations. The group was founded by Steve Schmidt, a former top aide to Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, and Mary Corcoran, a longtime public relations specialist, with a steering committee that includes law professors, pastors and strategists.
On this particular Friday, Fabian Núñez — a member of that steering committee who previously served as speaker of the California Assembly — was one of those who hopped out of the Liberty Van. He chatted with a day laborer who stopped by to grab a snack, and explained they were there to film any interactions with federal agents, as part of their national rapid-response effort.
The day laborer said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have previously detained other workers at the Panorama City Home Depot and have returned frequently. “Many times,” he said. “Five or six.”
Despite the repeated raids, the laborer said workers like himself have little choice but to keep showing up.
“They have to keep coming,” he said. “One has to pay the bills.”
The Save America Movement launched the vans first in L.A. and then in Chicago and Charlotte, N.C., where federal immigration agents were raiding heavily Latino areas. The motivation behind the project was to provide support and help people understand the impact of the daily immigration raids, Corcoran said in an interview. Outside California, she said, many people don’t get it.
“If they did, I believe there would be much more urgency around what’s happening,” she said.
The teams that run the vans document and record video, with the footage published online so the public can watch the enforcement actions and hear testimonies from affected local residents, she said.
Fabian Núñez, a Save America Movement steering committee member who previously served as speaker of the California Assembly, talks with a laborer who stopped by the Liberty Van for some snacks in the parking lot of a Panorama City Home Depot on Nov. 21, 2025.
City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez — whose district spans from Highland Park, Chinatown and south to Pico-Union — welcomed the group’s effort, which she described as a tool in a movement of resistance.
Alejandro Maciel, the L.A. bureau chief for the organization and a former Los Angeles Times journalist, takes the van out roughly five times a week, starting around 6 a.m. and wrapping up late into the afternoon. Maciel and volunteers drive to Home Depots across Southern California, going north to Ventura County, east to the Inland Empire and south to Orange County.
On Friday, the van ride included the Rev. Madison Jones McAleese, Navy veteran Brian Kelly and immigration lawyer Juan Jose Gutierrez, who can offer legal support to families or offer “know your right” basics to laborers. And to capture it all was cameraman René Miranda, who started covering raids when a large protest broke out in Paramount, where he lives.
For McAleese, she said she felt it was her duty to be part of the effort to stand against the raids because of what she views as unlawful actions being taken by ICE enforcement. McAleese carries holy water and offers to pray with any one who seeks prayer.
“I don’t feel like I have a choice,” she said. “God is reflected in the face of every immigrant, documented and undocumented.”
As they headed to the next location, Maciel pulled up on his phone StopIce.Net, a website on which people submit reports of ICE activity. Just the day before, there was a raid in Long Beach, later confirmed by local media reports, and nine people were detained by masked agents, an L.A. County official said.
The San Fernando Valley was quiet that Friday, but Maciel said it has been important to establish and maintain relationships with both workers and organizers who have created rapid response networks. When he drives the van to a site, he said, he greets such organizers and makes sure the laborers understand they are there to help.
Ernesto Ayala, the site coordinator at the Van Nuys Day Labor Center in the Home Depot parking lot, said ICE agents have been to the site several times, as recently as a few weeks ago. At the Van Nuys Home Depot, volunteers monitor each entry point of the parking lot and alert the center of any suspicious vehicles that could contain federal agents.
“It’s very traumatic,” Ayala said of the continuing raids. Ayala himself was detained and sprayed with an irritant by agents after they held him down and accused him of interfering. He was arrested but never charged with any crime, he said.
Organizations such as the Save America Movement help with videos and other documentation that could be used in potential litigation against ICE in the future, Ayala said. He said his arrest was recorded from a distance by a witness.
In October, the organization said video by a Save America Movement photojournalist in Chicago recorded federal agents deploying tear gas against protesters and pointing weapons at journalists, which at the time violated a federal court order. The organization made that footage available online with time stamps and annotations.
Along with documenting interactions, Núñez said, the group hopes to remind ICE agents of the human impact and make them question their actions, and to move viewers. Such footage, he said, could help Americans see “that these Gestapo-like tactics are happening and they’re being utilized with our tax dollars.”
“We think we can convince them to move, to think more compassionately about people and think: Is this the America I signed up for?”
Budget week is upon us and many of Monday’s papers focus on Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s upcoming statement on Wednesday. The Metro writes that repeated leaks in the build-up to the Budget have damaged the economy. It quotes Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane as saying there is “paralysis among businesses and consumers” due to a flurry of reports about its contents in recent weeks.
The Daily Express says pensioners will “lose £800 a year” if the Chancellor does not lift income tax thresholds. The paper reports that Reeves is expected to keep the tax-free allowance at its current level until 2030, extending a freeze first introduced by the previous Conservatives government and is due to expire in 2028. That would mean some people on state pensions being forecast to pay tax on part of their pension when the allowance increases as expected next year.
The Mirror leads with a poll suggesting some want Reeves to “hit the super-rich in her autumn budget”. The Labour-supporting paper reports on a poll conducted by centre-left campaign group 38 Degrees, which indicates that “64% of voters back tax hikes on wealth”.
The Chancellor is “set to target universities” in the Budget according to the i Newspaper. Plans to raise international student fees to fund “grants for poorer British students” have been floated ahead of the statement, the paper says.
The Daily Telegraph says £15bn in extra welfare spending will be included in the Budget, which leads with reports Reeves plans to scrap the two-child benefit cap and confirm increases to other benefits and pensions. The proposals will be “funded by a tax raid on the middle classes”, the paper reports, referring to an expected extensions to the thresholds freeze.
The Times reports that the chancellor plans to “hit more than 100,000 of Britain’s most expensive properties with a surcharge worth an average of £4,500”. The property tax was initially slated to apply to properties worth at least £1.5 million, but the Treasury is now looking at a £2 million threshold, according to the paper, due to concerns it could have impacted people who are “asset rich but cash poor”.
The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) says businesses face “death by a thousand taxes”, the Independent reports. It refers to comments made by the group’s director, Rain Newtown-Smith, who said the “UK risks a Groundhog Day scenario in which politics is more important than growth”.
Meanwhile, the Financial Times leads with the latest on US efforts to mediate a deal between Ukraine and Russia to end the war. It focuses on comments by Donald Trump, who said Kyiv had shown “zero gratitude” to Washington. However, the White House later said the Geneva talks had been a success and there had been progress.
The Guardians claims the BBC is planning to “overhaul the way it investigates editorial concerns”. It says the broadcaster will create a new deputy director general as part of its response to a row which saw two of its most senior leaders quit this month. The BBC has not commented on the Guardian’s story.
The Daily Mail leads on Lord David Cameron’s revelation that he was diagnosed with and successfully treated for prostate cancer in 2022. The paper says the former prime minister was initially encouraged by his wife Samantha Cameron to get a prostate test after listening to a BBC radio interview. Lord Cameron now supports “targeted screening”, the paper says.
Strictly Come Dancing’s Shirley Ballas “almost died” after choking on a fishbone moments before Saturday’s live show, the Sun reports. The paper says the 65-year-old “struggled to breathe for 20 minutes backstage in Blackpool”.
And finally, the Daily Star continues its campaign for viewers to get behind former model Kelly Brooks on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here.
WASHINGTON — No one seems to know what happened to Vicente Ventura Aguilar.
A witness told his brother and attorneys that the 44-year-old Mexican immigrant, who doesn’t have lawful immigration status, was taken into custody by immigration authorities on Oct. 7 in SouthLos Angeles and suffered a medical emergency.
But it’s been more than six weeks since then, and Ventura Aguilar’s family still hasn’t heard from him.
The Department of Homeland Security said 73 people from Mexico were arrested in the Los Angeles area between Oct. 7 and 8.
“None of them were Ventura Aguilar,” said Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant Homeland Security public affairs secretary.
“For the record, illegal aliens in detention have access to phones to contact family members and attorneys,” she added.
McLaughlin did not answer questions about what the agency did to determine whether Ventura Aguilar had ever been in its custody, such as checking for anyone with the same date of birth, variations of his name, or identifying detainees who received medical attention near the California border around Oct. 8.
Lindsay Toczylowski, co-founder of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center who is representing Ventura Aguilar’s family, said DHS never responded to her inquiries about him.
The family of Vicente Ventura Aguilar, 44, says he has been missing since Oct. 7 when a friend saw him arrested by federal immigration agents in Los Angeles. Homeland Security officials say he was never in their custody.
(Family of Vicente Ventura Aguilar)
“There’s only one agency that has answers,” she said. “Their refusal to provide this family with answers, their refusal to provide his attorneys with answers, says something about the lack of care and the cruelty of the moment right now for DHS.”
His family and lawyers checked with local hospitals and the Mexican consulate without success. They enlisted help from the office of Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles), whose staff called the Los Angeles and San Diego county medical examiner’s offices. Neither had someone matching his name or description.
The Los Angeles Police Department also told Kamlager-Dove’s office that he isn’t in their system. His brother, Felipe Aguilar, said the family filed a missing person’s report with LAPD on Nov. 7.
“We’re sad and worried,” Felipe Aguilar said. “He’s my brother and we miss him here at home. He’s a very good person. We only hope to God that he’s alive.”
Felipe Aguilar said his brother, who has lived in the U.S. for around 17 years, left home around 8:15 a.m. on Oct. 7 to catch the bus for an interview for a sanitation job when he ran into friends on the corner near a local liquor store. He had his phone but had left his wallet at home.
One of those friends told Felipe Aguilar and his lawyers that he and Ventura Aguilar were detained by immigration agents and then held at B-18, a temporary holding facility at the federal building in downtown Los Angeles.
The friend was deported the next day to Tijuana. He spoke to the family in a phone call from Mexico.
According to Felipe Aguilar and Toczylowski, the friend said Ventura Aguilar began to shake, went unconscious and fell to the ground while shackled on Oct. 8 at a facility near the border. The impact caused his face to bleed.
The friend said that facility staff called for an ambulance and moved the other detainees to a different room. Toczylowski said that was the last time anyone saw Ventura Aguilar.
She said the rapid timeline between when Ventura Aguilar was arrested to when he disappeared is emblematic of what she views as a broad lack of due process for people in government custody under the Trump administration and shows that “we don’t know who’s being deported from the United States.”
Felipe Aguilar said he called his brother’s cell phone after hearing about the arrests but it went straight to voicemail.
Felipe Aguilar said that while his brother is generally healthy, he saw a cardiologist a couple years ago about chest pain. He was on prescribed medication and his condition had improved.
His family and lawyers said Ventura Aguilar might have given immigration agents a fake name when he was arrested. Some detained people offer up a wrong name or alias, and that would explain why he never showed up in Homeland Security records. Toczylowski said federal agents sometimes misspell the name of the person they are booking into custody.
Vicente Ventura Aguilar, who has been missing since Oct. 7, had lived in the United States for 17 years, his family said.
(Family of Vicente Ventura Aguilar)
But she said the agency should make a significant attempt to search for him, such as by using biometric data or his photo.
“To me, that’s another symptom of the chaos of the immigration enforcement system as it’s happening right now,” she said of the issues with accurately identifying detainees. “And it’s what happens when you are indiscriminately, racially profiling people and picking them up off the street and holding them in conditions that are substandard, and then deporting people without due process. Mistakes get made. Right now, what we want to know is what mistakes were made here, and where is Vicente now?”
Surveillance footage from a nearby business reviewed by MS NOW shows Ventura Aguilar on the sidewalk five minutes before masked agents begin making arrests in South Los Angeles. The footage doesn’t show him being arrested, but two witnesses told the outlet that they saw agents handcuff Ventura Aguilar and place him in a van.
In a letter sent to DHS leaders Friday, Kamlager-Dove asked what steps DHS has taken to determine whether anyone matching Ventura Aguilar’s identifiers was detained last month and whether the agency has documented any medical events or hospital transports involving people taken into custody around Oct. 7-8.
“Given the length of time since Mr. Ventura Aguilar’s disappearance and the credible concern that he may have been misidentified, injured, or otherwise unaccounted for during the enforcement action, I urgently request that DHS and ICE conduct an immediate and comprehensive review” by Nov. 29, Kamlager-Dove wrote in her letter.
Kamlager-Dove said her most common immigration requests from constituents are for help with visas and passports.
“Never in all the years did I expect to get a call about someone who has completely disappeared off the face of the earth, and also never did I think that I would find myself not just calling ICE and Border Patrol but checking hospitals, checking with LAPD and checking morgues to find a constituent,” she said. “It’s horrifying and it’s completely dystopian.”
She said families across Los Angeles deserve answers and need to know whether something similar could happen to them.
TOPEKA, Kan. — A rural Kansas county has agreed to pay a little more than $3 million and apologize over a law enforcement raid on a small-town weekly newspaper in August 2023 that sparked an outcry over press freedom.
Marion County was among multiple defendants in five federal lawsuits filed by the Marion County Record’s parent company, the paper’s publisher, newspaper employees, a former Marion City Council member whose home also was raided, and the estate of the publisher’s 98-year-old mother, the paper’s co-owner, who died the day after the raid. An attorney for the newspaper, Bernie Rhodes, released a copy of the five-page signed agreement Tuesday.
Eric Meyer, the paper’s editor and publisher, told the Associated Press he is hoping the size of the payment is large enough to discourage similar actions against news organizations in the future. Legal claims against the city and city officials have not been settled, and Meyer said he believes they will face a larger judgment though he doesn’t expect those claims to be resolved for some time.
“The goal isn’t to get the money. The money is symbolic,” Meyer said. “The press has basically been under assault.”
The raid triggered a national debate about press freedom focused on Marion, a town of about 1,900 people set among rolling prairie hills about 150 miles southwest of Kansas City, Mo. Meyer’s 98-year-old mother, Joan, lived with him and died of a heart attack that he blamed on the stress of the raid.
Three days after the raid, the local prosecutor said there wasn’t enough evidence to justify it. Experts said Marion’s police chief at the time, Gideon Cody, was on legally shaky ground when he ordered the raid, and a former top federal prosecutor for Kansas suggested that it might have been a criminal violation of civil rights, saying: “I’d probably have the FBI starting to look.”
Two special prosecutors who reviewed the raid and its aftermath said nearly a year later that the Record had committed no crimes before Cody led the raid, that the warrants signed by a judge contained inaccurate information from an “inadequate investigation” and the searches were not legally justified. Cody resigned as police chief in October 2023.
Cody is scheduled to go to trial in February in Marion County on a felony charge of interfering with a judicial process, accused by the two special prosecutors of persuading a potential witness to withhold information from authorities when they later investigated his conduct. He had pleaded not guilty and did not respond to a text message Tuesday seeking comment about the county’s agreement.
Attorneys for the city and the county and the county administrator did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Sheriff Jeff Soyez issued an apology that mentioned the Meyers by name, along with former council member Ruth Herbel and her husband.
“The Sheriff’s Office wishes to express its sincere regrets to Eric and Joan Meyer and Ruth and Ronald Herbel for its participation in the drafting and execution of the Marion County Police Department’s search warrants on their homes and the Marion County Record,” the sheriff’s statement said.
The Marion County Commission approved the agreement Monday after discussing it in private for 15 minutes.
A search warrant tied the raid — which was led by Marion’s police chief — to a dispute between the newspaper and a local restaurant owner who had accused the Marion County Record of invading her privacy and illegally accessing information about her and her driving record.
Meyer has said that he believed the newspaper’s aggressive coverage of local politics and issues played a role and that his newsroom had been examining the police chief’s work history.
Hanna and Hollingsworth write for the Associated Press.
