rejects

For the second time in less than a week, a United States appeals court has rejected a petition from the administration of President Donald Trump to set aside 20,000 ballots in California over concerns about non-citizen voting.

The decision came down on Friday, with less than four days until the November 3 midterm elections.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Trump’s request would violate the US Constitution and risk disenfranchising eligible voters.

“The consequence of the United States’s request is not merely ballot segregation, but ultimately both the cancellation of the ballot and the removal of voters from the voting rolls,” the majority wrote in its ruling.

Judges Mark Bennett and Gabriel Sanchez – appointed by Trump and his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, respectively – formed the majority.

A third judge, Trump appointee Patrick Bumatay, issued a dissent, saying the administration’s petition was a “reasonable request”.

The Trump administration has claimed that nearly 20,000 “likely non-citizens” received mail-in ballots to vote in California’s midterm elections on November 3. It sued the state on October 15 to prevent those ballots from being counted.

But the accuracy of the Trump administration’s list has been called into doubt, as have its claims of widespread non-citizen voting.

Election fraud in the US is extremely rare. So is non-citizen voting, despite Trump’s assertion earlier this year that as many as 278,000 foreign nationals across the country were registered to vote.

Like California, states such as Nevada and Washington have also received lists of alleged non-citizen voters, but officials there have found the documents largely inaccurate.

In Nevada, for instance, state authorities issued a statement in September saying the Trump administration had erroneously identified citizens as non-citizens on its list. Not a single name was correct, according to the statement.

California, a Democratic stronghold, will elect 52 members of the House of Representatives, one of Congress’s two chambers, on November 3.

The state has long been Trump’s target for criticism, with the president accusing its Democratic leadership of “cheating” in elections.

But California officials, including Governor Gavin Newsom, have countered that the Trump administration is seeking to meddle in the state’s elections to sow voter distrust and undermine the results.

“This is a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters,” Newsom said in a news release after the October 15 lawsuit.

Non-citizen voting in federal elections is against the law in all 50 US states, including California.

The Constitution’s Elections Clause also grants states exclusive authority to administer elections, though it does allow for Congress to pass regulations concerning voting procedures.

The Trump administration initially sent California its list of 20,000 “likely non-citizens” on October 12, barely three weeks before the midterm election.

California officials refused the administration’s demand to set aside the 20,000 ballots, requesting proof that the names on the list were indeed foreign nationals. According to the California government, no such evidence has been provided.

The Trump administration last week charged 28 foreign nationals in California with election-related infractions, but some of the accused told the Los Angeles Times they had never registered to vote.

The newspaper’s reporting suggested some of the non-citizen defendants shared the same name as eligible voters.

As the October 15 lawsuit navigated the court system earlier this month, the Trump administration sought an emergency ruling from the 9th Circuit Court to suspend the 20,000 ballots.

But the appeals court rejected the petition on Monday, saying the Trump administration had not given lower courts adequate time to weigh the matter.

A lower court ultimately ruled against the Trump administration on Wednesday, and the administration again appealed to the 9th Circuit Court.

In its majority decision, the appeals court framed the Trump administration’s lawsuit as an attempt to violate the Constitution’s Elections Clause.

“We decline the United States’s invitation to contravene the Elections Clause by undermining the Constitution’s plain text,” the majority wrote.

The majority also wrote that it had “major concerns” that granting the Trump administration’s request would “harm the public interest by risking the disenfranchisement of eligible voters and putting the entire tabulation process in jeopardy”.

Court rules Patterson will spend the rest of her life behind bars after denying parole.

An Australian court has dismissed an appeal by “mushroom murderer” Erin Patterson against her conviction and ruled that she should spend the rest of her life behind bars.

A three-judge panel at the Supreme Court of Victoria delivered its ruling on Friday. The justices said that Patterson, who was convicted last year of murdering three of her estranged husband’s ⁠relatives with a meal ⁠laced with deadly mushrooms, should not have the chance of parole.

“This offending was extraordinarily cold and calculated, and stands to be ⁠denounced in the strongest terms,” Justice Stephen McLeish, speaking on behalf ⁠of the panel, told the Melbourne court.

“In all the circumstances, after anxious consideration, we have concluded that the case involved such shocking criminality that it is inappropriate ⁠to fix a non-parole period.”

Patterson, then 51, was ⁠convicted for the murder of her mother-in-law and father-in-law, Gail and Donald Patterson, and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, by serving them a lunch of beef wellington laced with death cap mushrooms.

She was also convicted of the attempted ‌murder of Ian Wilkinson, Heather’s husband, who survived the meal.

Her crimes involved an “elaborate series of deceptions” including falsely claiming a cancer diagnosis to explain the absence of her two children from the lunch, the judge noted.

The survivor testified that Patterson had told her guests she wanted their advice about what to tell the children about her diagnosis.

Patterson was sentenced to ⁠life in prison with a 33-year non-parole period, among the longest terms ever handed to a woman in Australia. She has always denied wrongdoing, saying the deaths were accidental.

Her lawyers had argued that certain evidence should have been kept from the trial, that her cross-examination ‌was unfair, and that placing the jury in the same hotel as other parties to the case compromised the result. Judges found these grounds for an appeal to be insufficient.

She can apply to Australia’s High Court to overturn the verdicts on her sentence and her convictions. The High Court is her last appeal option.

Patterson is only the second woman in Australia to be imprisoned for life without possibility of parole. The first is meatworker Katherine Knight, who was sentenced in New South Wales state in 2001 for the murder a year earlier of her partner John Price, whom she’d stabbed at least 37 times.

Trump administration issues more than 100 subpoenas across 13 states as search for alleged noncitizen voters ramps up.

A United States judge has rejected a Department of Justice request to temporarily halt California from counting mail ballots from a list of 20,000 alleged noncitizens just six days before the country’s midterm elections.

US District Judge David Carter’s ruling on Wednesday came as US President Donald Trump expands efforts to search for alleged noncitizen voters, with subpoenas issued in at least 13 states.

“Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” Carter wrote on Wednesday.

The judge, a 1998 appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, said the Justice Department’s last-minute request to exclude more than 20,000 ballots ran afoul of “longstanding constitutional principles mandating that states have control over their elections”.

The Justice Department swiftly appealed the decision to the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals and did not immediately respond to requests for comment by the Reuters news agency.

The Justice Department filed the lawsuit on October 15, a rare intervention in the voting process weeks before Tuesday’s election, when voters will choose which party controls Congress as well as their state and local representatives.

Escalating efforts from Trump

The decision marks the latest setback in Trump’s effort to expand the federal government’s role in elections ahead of the legislative midterms, as his Republican Party fights to retain control of both houses of Congress.

The Trump administration issued more than 100 subpoenas demanding records on tens of thousands of voters in at least 13 states, both Republican- and Democratic-leaning.

Most of the subpoenas Reuters documented were issued to state and local election officials in the past three months, though some date to the start of the year. Many were previously unreported, revealing a federal effort to identify potential noncitizen voters that is broader than publicly known.

It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in US federal elections. Legal experts say the records could be used to contest close midterm results, despite scant evidence that noncitizen voting is widespread.

‘Deeply flawed process’

Also on Wednesday, Democracy Docket, a US media platform that tracks election litigation, reported that the Department of Justice list of alleged noncitizen voters “appears to have been created using a deeply flawed process” that could disenfranchise US citizen voters beyond California.

In a court filing, a government whistleblower revealed that voters were being scrutinised nationwide, not just in California, as part of the federal government’s “Unlawful Voter Initiative” investigation, the group reported. The whistleblower warned that “the current process is knowingly sweeping known US citizens in as potentially ‘unlawful voters’”.

California has said the state’s safeguards against noncitizen voting are robust. It said the Justice Department’s assertions relied on “suspect data” and that complying with its demands would risk disenfranchising eligible voters. Democracy Docket reported that in Los Angeles County, one in four voters on the “noncitizen” list were born in the US.

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court on Wednesday turned down an appeal from President Trump and rejected his order to end hormone treatments and other gender-affirming care for transgender inmates in federal prisons.

The justices denied Trump’s appeal without comment, over dissents by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito.

The order leaves in a place a decision by a senior judge appointed by President Reagan who had blocked Trump’s new prison policy from taking effect.

The decision is a rare win for trans rights at the Supreme Court.

In June, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, said he would “not wade into the culture war being waged against transgender individuals” and ruled the Trump administration did not have evidence or good reasons for changing the long-standing policy for these inmates.

He cited the Administrative Procedure Act, which forbids abrupt and “arbitrary” changes in federal regulations.

Lamberth said the Bureau of Prisons’ new regulation would “arbitrarily deprive inmates of medications and other lifestyle accommodations that its own medical staff have deemed to be medically appropriate.” The evidence showed that “gender affirming care is the only effective treatment for gender dysphoria and severe harm flows from the cessation of such care,’’ he wrote.

Last month, the D.C. Circuit upheld his decision on a 2-1 vote, prompting the administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which sued on behalf of three inmates, said the court should not “overturn a three decades-long status quo.” Since 1992, the Bureau of Prisons has “treated people with gender dysphoria with hormone therapy,” their lawyers told the court.

In response to Trump’s order, the “BOP overrode its own medical providers’ clinical judgment and mandated the cessation of treatment for almost 1,000 people in its custody,” they said.

At issue in this latest legal dispute over trans rights was whether the government had evidence to justify a sharp change in its prison regulations.

In the past, the court has often deferred to prison officials on their handling and treatment of inmates.

“If deference to prison administrators means anything, it means that courts cannot second-guess their eminently reasonable choice to treat the mental-health condition of gender dysphoria with psychotherapy rather than physical, sex-rejecting interventions,” Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer said in his appeal.

Voters in Alberta have chosen to remain part of Canada in a first-ever independence referendum.

Canadian state broadcaster CBC News called the results of Monday’s vote late on the same day after 48 percent of the ballots counted showed overwhelming support for the “remain” side, with 76 percent opting to stay with Canada.

The result marks a major win for Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is facing a trade and political war with the United States amid US President Donald Trump’s higher tariffs and repeated suggestions of annexing the country.

On his way into a cabinet meeting on Tuesday morning, Carney called it a “great day.”

“I’m thrilled that Albertans have chosen unity. They’ve chosen to build together. They’ve chosen to continue to take care of each other, to move forward together with purpose,” he said.

But the result also comes as a disappointment for those Albertans seeking independence for the resource-rich region following years of grievances laid at Ottawa’s door. Here’s what we know:

What was the referendum about?

The nonbinding referendum was first announced in May following a campaign and petition by a group of Albertans who want to be an independent country.

While only about one-third of Albertans were found to be pro-independence in polls, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith argued in her announcement that a referendum was necessary to respect the 300,000 Albertans who had petitioned officials for it.

In the referendum, voters answered 10 questions, including whether the government should begin a binding process to seek independence from Canada. They also answered questions on immigration, access to provincial services like education, social care and healthcare, and voter identification requirements.

Prime Minister Carney had campaigned for Albertans to vote “remain”, saying last week at a rally in Calgary that separation would be “ a dangerous bluff that will lead to years of deep division”.

“There are some outside our borders who are working to break us so they can own us,” he said.

Researchers have pointed to possible online influence campaigns by both Russian and US entities that helped amplify the call for separation and allegedly shared misleading information. Alberta PM Smith told media in August that the online activity was under observation.

What have the reactions been?

Prime Minister Carney, who grew up in the region, said “Albertans made a clear choice” in a statement he made early on Tuesday.

“They chose unity, to build together, and to take care of each other,” he said, adding that “Canadians will move forward together with renewed purpose and high ambition.”

Alberta’s Premier Smith said she was pleased to see the results and that “Albertans have voted for a stronger Alberta in a united Canada.”

Separatist leaders from the groups Let Alberta Decide, the Alberta Prosperity Project and the Pathway to Independence said they will wait for all votes to be counted before conceding.

First Nations groups turned out in strong numbers to vote to remain with Canada, with one southern Alberta polling station in an area home to the Siksika Nation temporarily running out of ballots, local media reported.

Why is Alberta important, and why are there calls for independence?

Many Albertans have long complained that their critical natural resources are funding the government in Ottawa and the commercial hubs of Toronto and Montreal, but that the province does not receive proportionate benefits.

The province, with a population of 5.1 million, holds massive oil deposits. It also holds reserves of critical and rare-earth metals including lithium, titanium and zircon, which are essential for manufacturing many tech items, from smartphones to fighter jets.

Separatist movements, some of which even support Alberta joining the US, go back to the 1940s, following the discovery of oil reserves. Some of Alberta’s premiers have had spats with Ottawa over wealth distribution.

US President Trump has made remarks about Canada becoming a US state in recent months.

Last week, he told a political rally in the US state of Arizona that Canada will “end up being the 51st state, because it’s the only way it works”.

The two countries have been embroiled in a trade war since talks fell apart in August this year and they slapped each other with tit-for-tat tariffs.

Earlier this month, tech billionaire Elon Musk called for Alberta, Saskatchewan and Quebec to separate from Canada, saying “they’d be better off”.

But the matter of Alberta’s independence gained intense scrutiny last year after pro-separatists launched a petition to pressure the government.

Alberta, alongside other western provinces of British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, have all complained about “western alienation” by the government in the centre.

Is it over for Alberta’s independence bid?

With separatism agitations running so far back, experts say the referendum will likely not end the movement altogether.

Ahead of the vote, some separatist leaders said they would pursue another referendum if necessary, arguing that the referendum shows that independence is legally possible.

“Regardless of what happens on Monday, we’ve already won,” Keith Wilson, co-leader of Let Alberta Decide, said at a rally last week.

Tehran summons envoy in tit-for-tat move after Berlin summoned ambassador to Iran.

Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has summoned Germany’s ambassador after a court in Hamburg found two men guilty of plotting to kill two leaders of Jewish organisations at Tehran’s behest, accusing Berlin of leveling “baseless political allegations”.

The decision to summon envoy Axel Dittmann came after Germany summoned the Iranian ambassador, Majid Nili Ahmadabadi, on Monday over allegations that Tehran was behind the plot to assassinate the two pro-Israel public figures.

“Levelling security-related accusations against Iran has long been a tactic employed by the Zionist regime and certain Western nations,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement broadcast by official news agency IRNA.

“Attempting to provide a judicial face to baseless political claims not only fails to lend any credibility to such allegations but also undermines the standing of the German judiciary itself,” the statement added.

Hamburg conviction

Berlin’s allegations stem from a court case involving two men, a Danish national and an Afghan national, who were convicted in a Hamburg court on Thursday for planning to target the president of Germany’s main group representing the Jewish community and the head of the German-Israeli society.

The German Foreign Ministry said on X that the Iranian ambassador had been summoned, adding Tehran would not be allowed to “threaten our free society”.

“The malicious assassination attempts against Josef Schuster and Volker Beck will have legal consequences,” it added.

“We do not tolerate attacks on Jewish life and on those who defend it anywhere, and certainly not in Germany.”

The Dane, partially identified as Ali Hassan S, was jailed for eight-and-a-half years. The Afghan, who was recruited as his accomplice, was sentenced to four-and-a-half years.

Iran’s intelligence service steered the two men, the court said. The pair were arrested in Denmark last year and extradited.

In sentencing the men, the judge said they were guilty of “terrorist activities orchestrated by Iran”.

At the time they were charged, the Iranian embassy in Berlin released a statement rejecting what it called “unfounded allegations made at the behest of Iran’s enemies”.

WASHINGTON — Federal immigration officials need to ensure that body cameras worn by officers are uniformly activated when needed, a government report released Wednesday said, following a series of contentious shootings and aggressive arrests by ICE officers.

The agency rejected the recommendation, saying that using cameras that automatically activate when an officer pulls their weapon or activates a car siren could risk privacy concerns.

ICE has come under intense scrutiny after numerous incidents where officers have opened fire during enforcement operations and the agency has claimed they were under threat but officers weren’t wearing body cameras. Critics say the cameras could help hold officers accountable and promote transparency at a time when the agency is operating at a high tempo across the country and increasingly accused of excessive use of force. The report by the Government Accountability Office covers the period from February 2025 until September of this year. The report, conducted at the request of Democratic members of Congress, delves into policies governing the use of body-worn cameras by ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection and details improvements both agencies can make to improve their programs. But it did not go into any of the high-profile ICE-involved shootings that have focused attention on the agency’s body-worn camera usage, such as the shooting deaths of Renee Good in Minneapolis or Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston.

A fatal shooting exposed gaps in ICE’s camera rollout

Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced in February that every Homeland Security officer on the ground in Minneapolis would be issued body-worn cameras. Noem, who was later fired by Trump, said officers across the country would receive them as funds became available.

The department later received $20 million from Congress to finish the ICE body-camera rollout plan. But then came a shooting in July of Salgado Araujo, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers shot and killed the Mexican man who lived in the U.S. for more than 35 years. Those officers were not wearing body cameras, raising questions about why the agency still hadn’t gotten the cameras out to officers in the field. Homeland Security said after Salgado Araujo’s death that body cameras had been deployed to more than half of ICE field offices and that the remainder would get them in the next 60 days. In the GAO report, DHS said all ICE offices had received the body-worn cameras as of Aug. 5 and that officers were being trained on their use.

In a statement Wednesday, DHS said that while they’d purchased devices for all ICE officers across the country, the required training was still ongoing and that they expected to be finished “soon.”

DHS rejects automatic recording, citing privacy concerns

The report recommended ICE take additional steps such as “automated camera activation” that it said would be particularly helpful in situations where “unexpected and unplanned incidents, unrelated to sensitive operations, result in use of force by or against personnel.” The report said this would improve transparency and public trust. But DHS disagreed, saying that cameras that automatically activate could result in “the unauthorized recording of sensitive interactions with informants or victims.” The agency said the body-worn cameras are required to be turned on at the beginning of pre-planned enforcement activities.

Confusion over camera rules kept one ICE office from using them

The report also said some of the officers they talked to at both ICE and CBP were confused as to when they should activate the cameras. For example, some officers told the GAO they didn’t know whether to activate the cameras during vehicle searches or when transporting detainees. The report noted that at one ICE office, staff was so uncertain about when they were supposed to use the cameras that they hadn’t begun using them even after they’d been trained.

The report also found that neither agency had updated the plans that oversee their body-worn camera programs even as their staff had grown significantly.

Santana writes for the Associated Press.