DoJ had demanded that LA county confirm citizenship of people on list in thumb drive, but officials refused

• Send us your questions about immigration and the midterms

The US Department of Justice sued California on Thursday, seeking a court order to prevent the state from tabulating certain ballots cast in the midterm elections.

The suit came two days after the department made a specious demand to the state. On Tuesday, the department sent election officials in Los Angeles county a thumb drive with a handwritten password purporting to contain the names of noncitizens registered to vote. The department asked officials to confirm the citizenship of anyone on the list and set aside ballots from those whose status could not be confirmed. It gave the state 48 hours – an extremely narrow window – to take action. It did not provide details on how it came up with the names on the list. In its lawsuit, filed in federal court in the central district of California, the justice department said it had provided the state with more than 20,000 names of likely noncitizens.

Jane Does allege ex-congressman and two others coordinated ‘payments, drugs and travel’ for sexual acts

The Republican former congressman Matt Gaetz has been accused of participating in the sex trafficking of two young women in a civil lawsuit filed on Thursday in district court in Florida.

The allegations, which Gaetz denied in a statement to the Guardian, are the latest developments in a long-running sexual abuse scandal involving the politician who resigned from Congress in November 2024.

The president is used to bullying his media targets. The quagmire that is his libel actions shows the broadcaster is working to a different script

For the greatest account of the BBC’s finest hour, one must turn to Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, Human Voices, written in 1980 and set 40 years earlier, at the corporation’s Portland Place wartime HQ. Flanked by sandbags and infused with a smell of cooking “from the deep hold that suggested more strongly than ever a cruise on the Queen Mary”, the organisation that Fitzgerald describes is at once noble and deeply eccentric. “Broadcasting House stood headed on a fixed course south,” she writes. “With the best engineers in the world, and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster.”

In other words, a formidable foe, one that in the spring of 1940, in the face of anticipated Nazi invasion, decided “without prompting, that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective”. I bring this up in respect to the gathering storm of Donald Trump versus the BBC, a fight triggered by the US president’s $10bn defamation lawsuit – $10bn! It’s a wonder he didn’t go for $10 gazillion – brought against the corporation at the end of last year in response to a poorly edited episode of Panorama. The BBC was at fault, editing together comments made by the US president at a rally on 6 January 2021 to give, as the corporation’s apology put it, “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”. But it is fighting the lawsuit.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

Ana Reyes demands Trump officials explain East Potomac tree cutting saying it will probably cause ‘irreparable harm’

US district judge Ana Reyes on Monday ordered a 24-hour halt to tree cutting at the historic East Potomac golf course while she decides on an emergency order from plaintiffs concerned that Donald Trump’s plans for the course are moving forward despite a pending court case challenging them.

“Tree removal for routine maintenance is not exempt from this order,” Reyes wrote. “Plaintiffs are likely to suffer immediate and irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary relief.

New York judge also orders administration to cancel remaining portion of a $20m advertising purchase

A federal judge has ordered Donald Trump’s administration to temporarily halt the broadcast of taxpayer-funded television ads promoting the president ahead of the 3 November midterm elections.

Effective as of 6.45pm ET on Sunday, US district judge Jennifer L Rochon of the southern district of New York issued a temporary restraining order aimed at the ads that is meant to stay in effect for at least 14 days.

Judge says justice department policy of checking state voter rolls against a federal immigration database is unlawful

A federal judge ruled on Friday that the US justice department’s policy of collecting states’ unredacted voter rolls to check them against a federal immigration database is unlawful.

The ruling, by the US district judge Sparkle Sooknanan, was a setback for Donald Trump, who has pushed his administration to ramp up investigations into non-citizen voting ahead of the November midterm elections, with control of Congress at stake.

Liability lawsuits have held tobacco, oil and pharma companies to account in the past. AI investors won’t ignore this threat

The most basic function of government is to protect people from harm. Two growing phenomena – the climate crisis and AI – pose escalating risks of extraordinary harm.

The climate crisis is already causing floods, wildfires, drought and record heat. AI agents are already escaping super-secure environments to hack into systems they’re supposed to avoid.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US columnist and his newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com. His new book, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, is out now in the US and in the UK

Ousted Venezuelan president and Cilia Flores have been in jail in New York since early January

The deposed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, have been indicted for alleged conspiracy to commit torture, according to Manhattan federal court papers unsealed on Thursday.

The superseding indictment was unsealed shortly before Flores appeared at court in her ongoing push for pretrial release – which was denied by Judge Alvin Hellerstein. Maduro and Flores have been jailed in New York City since early January.

Suit says AI tool allows independently owned franchises to exchange nonpublic price and sales information

McDonald’s is facing a lawsuit in federal court over its alleged use of an AI tool to determine pricing across independent franchises, which prosecutors say violates antitrust laws and has unfairly inflated menu prices for Americans.

The vast majority of McDonald’s US stores are independently owned and are said to individually decide on prices under company policy. Antitrust laws require businesses to set prices independently from their competitors, as coordinating prices can stifle market competition and push up costs for consumers.

Officials file ‘denaturalization actions’ against people accused of crimes in what they call ‘largest’ such initiative

Donald Trump’s justice department has moved to strip the citizenship of 40 naturalized citizens accused of crimes in what authorities describe as “the largest” such initiative over a single period during his administration.

US justice department officials on Monday announced the filing of “denaturalization actions” against more than three dozen people alleged to have committed such offenses as “acting as an agent for a foreign government, committing voluntary manslaughter, and aggravated sodomy against a special‑needs man”.