Right-wing media cheer DeSantis’ expansion of the death penalty and try to justify the extrajudicial homicide of Jordan Neely

José Antonio Potes and his childhood friend Manuel Castrillón travelled to El Salvador hoping to find the safe, prosperous, tech-friendly paradise that they had heard about in Colombian media. President Nayib Bukele’s draconian crackdown on gangs and ambitious plans to convert the country into a bitcoin-powered regional powerhouse have made him the most popular leader in Latin America – and El Salvador a destination for surfers and tech-bros alike. “We’d heard about this transformation: that there were no more gangs, that things had gotten really safe and that there was an infrastructure boom because of all the investment,” said Castrillón. “We thought we could thrive there.” Potes is a welder and Castrillon an expert in mechanised farming. The two, both 27, come from the tiny town of Riofrío in Valle del Cauca, Colombia. Together they set out to find work and send dollars home to their families. But instead of benefiting from Bukele’s war on gangs, the pair were arrested and locked up in squalid prisons for three months. “They went looking for paradise,” said Ruth Elonaro López, a lawyer at Cristosal, a Salvadoran human rights group. “Instead they found hell.” On 21 January, the day after Potes flew out to join Castrillón, the two men met for lunch in Soyapango, a satellite town just outside the Salvadoran capital. Shortly after they were detained by soldiers and asked for documents. Eight hours later they were taken to a jail, where they were questioned, strip-searched and photographed. They say the officials paid particular attention to their tattoos – a hallmark of the country’s gangs. It was when they were first thrown into a jail cell with 25 others that they began to realise it might be more than a mistake.

The company filed for bankruptcy ahead of an expected $225 million sale to its creditors — just a fraction of what Vice was once valued at.

“I was on a date recently ordering something, and the name of what I wanted came out wrong when I asked for it,” Lieberman said. “So I just talked in a British accent for the rest of the order. It’s a defense mechanism, a kind of buffer from my actual personality.” He also uses the voice as a conflict-management tactic. “I asked my roommate, ‘Can you please take out the rubbish,’” Lieberman explained, sounding like an EastEnders guest star. “It’s me being playful. It’s the British part of me asking for something that needs to be done, not the real me.” Brinton Parker, a 30-year-old who lives in the Bay Area, works in tech marketing. The deluge of bad news out of Silicon Valley has her feeling like she’s approaching burnout, and she recently asked her manager for support at work. “I said, ‘It’s affecting me mental health, innit?’” she explained. “And my boss was like, ‘Why did you say it like that?’ I think it adds levity to a vulnerable situation. The tougher the conversation, the more Cockney I become.” For Critter Fink, a 26-year-old New Yorker who works in high-end retail, speaking in a British accent can soften the blow of a dark joke. “When you slightly change how you say things with a little accent, it gives you space from a stressful thing,” they said. “It’s similar to when you add “lol” to the end of a dramatic text – it gives you distance.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation Monday banning state funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs at Florida's public universities, staging the event at New College of Florida, which the governor has transformed into a conservative higher education experiment. A New College board revamped by DeSantis abolished the school's DEI office, and the college's interim president recently fired the diversity dean, a precursor to what other Florida universities could experience under SB 266, which was a centerpiece of DeSantis' aggressive legislative agenda this year.

He said school has been "relatively normal" since he was told to take off the second shirt but added that more of his classmates have respect for him after what he did.

A 20-year-old man and 12-year-old boy from Fort Worth are behind bars after shooting and killing a Sonic employee in Keene Saturday night, police said. During their investigation, police determined that Davis and the adult suspect, identified as Angel Gomez, got into an argument due to Gomez acting "disorderly in the parking lot." Officials said the altercation "soon became physical," and the 12-year-old, who was a passenger inside Gomez's car, pulled out an AR-style weapon and fired at least six rounds at Davis. The suspects fled the area following the shooting; However, police said Gomez returned to the eastery and was subsequently taken into custody. Officers the located the 12-year-old in Rio Vista, and arrested him.

On the afternoon of April 3, a Monday, the partying took a dark turn. According to San Francisco prosecutors, Ms. Momeni’s older brother confronted Mr. Lee about her. Was she taking drugs or doing anything inappropriate, he wanted to know. Hours later the brother, Nima Momeni, stabbed Mr. Lee with a kitchen knife and left him to bleed out in the street, prosecutors alleged. Mr. Momeni, who was arrested on suspicion of murder, is being held without bail. He plans to plead not guilty, his attorney said.

A woman named Noelle Dunphy filed a shocking and graphic 70-page legal complaint against her former boss, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, accusing him of rape, sexual harassment, abuse of power, wage theft, and other misconduct while he was serving as former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer. Dunphy claims Guiliani hired her in 2019 as director of business development at a salary of $1 million per year plus expenses. Then, she says, he only paid her about $12,000 over the next two years, forced her to perform oral sex and have intercourse with him at work so he could “feel like Bill Clinton” and demanded she either be naked, wear a bikini, or wear short shorts he’d bought her with the American flag on them at work—even while he was on calls with the president. She also claims he regularly spouted off “confused and hostile alcohol-laced tirades” that were homophobic and racist in nature. She says she recorded some of their interactions as proof.

U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia says a man with a baseball bat walked into his Fairfax office, asked for him, and then assaulted two members of his staff. Fairfax City Police in northern Virginia said in a tweet that a suspect is in custody and, the victims are being treated for injuries that are not life-threatening. In a statement posted on Twitter, the Virginia Democrat said the man entered his district office Monday morning and asked for him before “committing an act of violence” against two staff members.

NEW: A South Korean truth commission created by law in 2019 is seeking classified U.S. military and intelligence records for its wide-ranging investigation into the Gwangju Uprising of 1980. It also wants answers about South Korean generals who were trained by U.S. Special Forces and fought with the United States during its counterinsurgency war in South Vietnam. Washington has not responded - yet.

“If you can’t accept me, you will lose me forever.” My undeniably female child came out at the age of 12, during lockdown, in a letter to me and her father, first as “nonbinary” and later as a “transboy”. For clarity, I shall call her “she” and “Jo” here throughout, but she demanded a new name and pronouns and immediate acceptance on threat of withdrawing all communication and love.

Twitter’s “official partner” monitored the precise time and location of post-Roe demonstrations, internal emails show.

The expiration of a Covid-related border restriction policy known as Title 42 has so far brought fewer migrant arrivals than expected, but southern border communities still worry about overcrowded migrant processing and detention facilities.

The tight ring of security that surrounds the seat of the Russian presidency was punctured in dramatic fashion by what appeared to be two attempted drone strikes in the early hours of Wednesday morning. But until the Kremlin chose to publicize the incident around 12 hours later, social media footage of the incident had gained little attention. Why Russia decided to reveal the security breach is unclear. But in a five-paragraph statement on Wednesday, the Kremlin made the incendiary claim that the incident was an assassination attempt launched by Ukraine on the the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Kyiv forcefully denied the claim.

Hundreds were drawn to a remote wilderness in southeastern Kenya by the End Times preaching of pastor Paul Mackenzie. Relatives and ex-members tried to intervene, but some did not want to be rescued.

A group of conservative operatives using sophisticated robocalls raised millions of dollars from donors using pro-police and pro-veteran messages. But instead of using the money to promote issues and candidates, an analysis by The New York Times shows, nearly all the money went to pay the firms making the calls and the operatives themselves.

"We don't blindly follow your authority just because you're the mayor."

Autumn Alston, a Democratic activist who canvassed for Cotham’s two most recent campaigns and advised her often, echoed that sentiment. “She used people when she needed them and now she has abandoned them,” Alston told me, noting that Cotham stopped contacting her after switching parties. Naturally, everyone would like to know what could possibly motivate a politician to abandon their whole platform, their constituents, and their dignity so suddenly and dramatically. We reported last week on the possibility that Cotham, a former charter school lobbyist, traded a vote on the abortion bill in order to co-chair the Education Committee. When she announced her defection, she said it was in part because she’d been “bullied by her fellow Democrats and had grown alienated from the party on issues like school choice,” per the New York Times. (Cotham has not responded to Jezebel’s requests for comment.) But Coby, in whom she confided about her decision to switch parties, said it wasn’t really about any genuinely held beliefs, political issues, or even money. “I wish I could say that she took a giant bag of cash at an IHOP and that’s why she did this—but it’s so much dumber than that,” he said. “It’s just a deeply petty, personal thing.”

For Republicans, the investigations into Clarence Thomas and his friendship with Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire, are just pretexts for an attack on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. “This assault on Justice Thomas is well beyond ethics,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week on Supreme Court ethics reform. “It’s about trying to delegitimize a conservative court that was appointed through the traditional process.” “This is an unseemly effort by the Democratic left to destroy the legitimacy of the Roberts court,” he went on to say. “It’s put people at risk. It’s put their personal safety at risk.” Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa accused Democrats and their “allies in the liberal media” of waging “a crusade to threaten to pack and smear the courts.” And Senator Mike Lee of Utah described the questions about Thomas’s conduct as “attacks” that are “undermining the rule of law, endangering the security of the justices and their families, and inflicting incalculable damage on our country.” For their part, Democrats do not seem eager to attack or undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. Just a handful of Democrats in the House of Representatives called for Justice Thomas’s resignation after reports that he accepted lavish trips and gifts from Crow, and Senate Democrats have been careful with the issue. There’s been no attempt to subpoena either Justice Thomas or Chief Justice John Roberts — who was politely asked by letter, last month, to come before the Senate Judiciary Committee — and there’s no indication that Democrats have the votes to pass anything like a meaningful Supreme Court ethics law. What’s more, Democrats still speak as if they hold the Supreme Court in high esteem. They defer to its judgments and trust it enough to think that it could, with a little prodding, handle its own ethics issues. The goal of their questions and investigations is not to delegitimize the court as much as it is to shore up the court’s legitimacy — to protect its standing in a world where most Americans take a dim view of most American institutions. Republicans, in other words, are wrong; Democrats are not out to undermine the Supreme Court. But they should be.