Washington
Appeals court rules against administration’s efforts to end protected status for Haitians
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court this week sided with a lower judge’s ruling against the Trump administration’s efforts to end temporary protected status for roughly 350,000 Haitians living in the U.S.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., issued the 2-1 ruling on Friday.
“The government’s failure to meet its burden of demonstrating irreparable harm alone justifies denying emergency relief that would upend the status quo and increase uncertainty while this appeal proceeds,” the court said.
A message seeking comment was left Saturday with the Homeland Security Department.
Temporary Protected Status can be granted by the Homeland Security secretary if conditions in home countries are deemed unsafe for return due to a natural disaster, political instability or other dangers. While it grants TPS holders the right to live and work in the U.S., it does not provide a legal pathway to citizenship.
Haiti’s TPS status was initially activated in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake and has been extended multiple times. The country is racked by gang violence that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
The Trump administration has aggressively sought to remove the protection, making more people eligible for deportation. The moves are part of the administration’s wider, mass deportation effort.
In addition to the migrants from Haiti, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — whom Trump announced he was firing on Thursday — has terminated protections for about 600,000 Venezuelans, 60,000 people from Honduras, Nicaragua and Nepal, more than 160,000 Ukrainians and thousands of people from Afghanistan and Cameroon. Some have pending lawsuits in federal courts.
Temporary protected status can be granted by the Homeland Security secretary if conditions in home countries are deemed unsafe for return due to a natural disaster, political instability or other dangers. It is granted in 18-month increments and does not provide a legal pathway to citizenship.
Washington
Two companies end lawsuit over weight loss medications
Novo Nordisk is dismissing its patent infringement lawsuit against telehealth company Hims & Hers, as the two companies have reached an agreement that will see Novo Nordisk’s branded weight loss medicines sold through the Hims platform.
Shares of Hims & Hers Health Inc. jumped more than 40% in Monday morning trading.
Early last month Hims & Hers said that it was going to launch a cheaper, off-brand version of the weight-loss pill Wegovy, just weeks after drugmaker Novo Nordisk launched its highly anticipated reformulation of the blockbuster medication. At the time, Novo Nordisk vowed to sue Hims, calling the new product “an unapproved, inauthentic, and untested knockoff” of semaglutide, the chemical name for Wegovy.
But just two days later, Hims dropped its plan to offer the cheaper, off-brand version of Wegovy. That move came a day after the Food and Drug Administration threatened to restrict access to the ingredients needed to copy popular weight-loss medications.
The FDA permits specialty pharmacies and other companies to make compounded versions of brand name drugs when they are in short supply. And the booming demand for GLP-1 drugs in recent years prompted companies like Hims to jump into the multibillion-dollar market for the drugs, with many patients willing to pay cash.
In 2024, the FDA said that GLP-1 drugs were no longer in a shortage, which was expected to put an end to the compounding. But companies like Hims relied on an exception to keep selling their versions of the medications because the practice is still permitted when a prescription is customized for the patient.
As part of the deal the two companies reached that was announced on Monday, Hims will offer oral and injectable versions of Wegovy and Ozempic on its platform later this month. Hims will also stop advertising compounded GLP-1 drugs on its platform or in its marketing.
Novo Nordisk said in a statement that it is reserving the right to refile its lawsuit in the future.
California
Woman sues author Amy Griffin, saying her memoir ‘The Tell’ stole stories of sexual abuse
A woman has sued author and venture capitalist Amy Griffin over her bestselling 2025 memoir “The Tell,” saying that Griffin’s descriptions of childhood sexual abuse in the book were stolen from her experience.
The plaintiff identifies herself only as Jane Doe in the lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court. An attorney for Griffin called the suit “absurd” and “meritless.”
In “The Tell,” published a year ago, Griffin writes that undergoing therapy using the psychedelic drug MDMA uncovered previously buried childhood memories of being sexually abused by a teacher at her middle school in Amarillo, Texas, in the 1980s.
“I knew that these memories were real,” Griffin writes in the book. “My body knew what had happened to me.”
The memoir was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and was also touted by Reese Witherspoon and Gwyneth Paltrow.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiff says the descriptions match her own sexual assaults by a different teacher at a school dance and in a school bathroom. The lawsuit says Griffin had reason to know about the abuse.
“‘The Tell’ constitutes neither a genuine nor harmless memoir,” the lawsuit says, alleging Griffin engaged in intrusion, invasion of privacy, publication of private facts, negligence and infliction of emotional distress. It seeks damages to be determined at trial.
The lawsuit also names Griffin’s publishers and a ghostwriter as defendants.
The New York Times published a story in September raising questions about the book. It included people who expressed doubts about the reliability of the memories. The story also pointed out financial ties between Griffin and the prominent people who helped promote the book.
The plaintiff first learned of the existence of the memoir when the Times reached out to her during its reporting.
“She immediately recognized that the character of Claudia appeared to be based on herself,” the lawsuit says. “She further recognized that a number of stories attributed to the memories of Defendant GRIFFIN that supposedly resurfaced during MDMA therapy were actually her own real life past experiences.”
Griffin’s attorney, Thomas A. Clare, said in an email: “We look forward to exposing these meritless claims in court, as well as the deeply flawed New York Times reporting that is at the center of it.”
“Just like the New York Times manufactured a false narrative about Amy Griffin and ‘The Tell,’ it also engineered the premise for this absurd lawsuit,” Clare said. “After two New York Times reporters instigated this whole situation by bringing the book to her attention, the Plaintiff made her own choice to publicize her narrative to a global audience.” He added, “For its part, the Times took full advantage, publicizing this inaccurate narrative despite receiving many red-flag warnings.”
Danielle Rhoades Ha, a Times spokeswoman, said in response, “We’re confident in the accuracy of our reporting.”
The lawsuit says that when the plaintiff was assaulted at the school dance, she was wearing a dress she had borrowed from Griffin. The lawsuit says the abuse would have been apparent to some people at the dance because of how she left and how she returned. It also says the dress was returned to Griffin with bodily fluids from the assault. The plaintiff also said she asked Jesus for forgiveness for the assault at a church youth group meeting that Griffin attended.
The lawsuit says she met with Griffin for the first time in decades at a California coffee shop in 2019, a meeting that is recounted in the book. But the woman said she did not discuss her sexual assaults during the meeting.
The plaintiff says she did describe the abuse in detail to a talent agent who called her later about her life story. According to the lawsuit, the agent told the plaintiff he learned about her and her stories through an unidentified third party. The lawsuit says the agent stopped contact when she began asking him too many probing questions about him, and that details from the conversations “found their way into ‘The Tell.’ “
North Carolina
Man who recruited players into basketball point-shaving scheme pleads guilty
One of the so-called fixers in a sprawling betting scheme to cash in on big bets on rigged NCAA basketball games pleaded guilty Monday, according to the federal prosecutors’ office in Philadelphia.
Jalen Smith appeared in federal court in Philadelphia and pleaded guilty to wire fraud and bribery charges, becoming the first of 26 people charged in the scheme to formally do so. It came a week before the start of March Madness, in which bettors will wager billions legally — and illegally — on the 64 college basketball teams in the tournament.
Smith, of Charlotte, North Carolina, trained and developed local basketball players for professional scouting combines and used those connections with players when he became part of the scheme, prosecutors say.
Charges against Smith were unsealed in January along with 25 others. Besides the fixers who recruited players and placed bets, the charges targeted 17 former college basketball players and four other players who were active with their college teams this season.
More than a dozen players tried to fix games as recently as last season and some helped recruit other players, federal prosecutors said.
Smith was active in helping fix games in the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons, placing bets and recruiting players with the promise of a big payment in exchange for purposefully underperforming during a game, prosecutors said.
The fixers would then bet against the players’ teams in those games, defrauding sportsbooks and other bettors, authorities said.
Smith often traveled to meet players to deliver cash payments by hand, prosecutors said. In one case, Smith traveled to Louisiana to arrange the delivery of about $32,000 in cash to two of the players charged in the scheme, prosecutors say.
Two the fixers started with two games in the Chinese Basketball Association in 2023, according to the indictment. Successful there, they recruited Smith and two other fixers and moved on to rigging NCAA games as recently as January 2025, it said.
Their scheme grew to involve more than 39 players on more than 17 different NCAA Division I men’s basketball teams, who then rigged and attempted to rig more than 29 games, prosecutors said.
They wagered millions of dollars, raking in “substantial proceeds” for themselves, and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to players in bribes, prosecutors said. Payments to players typically ranged from $10,000 to $30,000 per game, they said.
Prosecutors named more than 40 schools where games were allegedly targeted by the scheme. Those included Tulane University and DePaul University.
Rigged games included major conferences and some playoffs, including the first round of the Horizon League championship and the second round of the Southland Conference championship, prosecutors said.
Players often recruited teammates to cooperate by playing badly, sitting out or keeping the ball away from players who weren’t in on the scheme to prevent them from scoring. Sometimes the attempted fix failed, meaning the fixers lost their bets, prosecutors say.
Appeals court rules against administration’s efforts to end protected status for Haitians
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court this week sided with a lower judge’s ruling against the Trump administration’s efforts to end temporary protected status for roughly 350,000 Haitians living in the U.S.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., issued the 2-1 ruling on Friday.
“The government’s failure to meet its burden of demonstrating irreparable harm alone justifies denying emergency relief that would upend the status quo and increase uncertainty while this appeal proceeds,” the court said.
A message seeking comment was left Saturday with the Homeland Security Department.
Temporary Protected Status can be granted by the Homeland Security secretary if conditions in home countries are deemed unsafe for return due to a natural disaster, political instability or other dangers. While it grants TPS holders the right to live and work in the U.S., it does not provide a legal pathway to citizenship.
Haiti’s TPS status was initially activated in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake and has been extended multiple times. The country is racked by gang violence that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
The Trump administration has aggressively sought to remove the protection, making more people eligible for deportation. The moves are part of the administration’s wider, mass deportation effort.
In addition to the migrants from Haiti, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — whom Trump announced he was firing on Thursday — has terminated protections for about 600,000 Venezuelans, 60,000 people from Honduras, Nicaragua and Nepal, more than 160,000 Ukrainians and thousands of people from Afghanistan and Cameroon. Some have pending lawsuits in federal courts.
Temporary protected status can be granted by the Homeland Security secretary if conditions in home countries are deemed unsafe for return due to a natural disaster, political instability or other dangers. It is granted in 18-month increments and does not provide a legal pathway to citizenship.
Washington
Two companies end lawsuit over weight loss medications
Novo Nordisk is dismissing its patent infringement lawsuit against telehealth company Hims & Hers, as the two companies have reached an agreement that will see Novo Nordisk’s branded weight loss medicines sold through the Hims platform.
Shares of Hims & Hers Health Inc. jumped more than 40% in Monday morning trading.
Early last month Hims & Hers said that it was going to launch a cheaper, off-brand version of the weight-loss pill Wegovy, just weeks after drugmaker Novo Nordisk launched its highly anticipated reformulation of the blockbuster medication. At the time, Novo Nordisk vowed to sue Hims, calling the new product “an unapproved, inauthentic, and untested knockoff” of semaglutide, the chemical name for Wegovy.
But just two days later, Hims dropped its plan to offer the cheaper, off-brand version of Wegovy. That move came a day after the Food and Drug Administration threatened to restrict access to the ingredients needed to copy popular weight-loss medications.
The FDA permits specialty pharmacies and other companies to make compounded versions of brand name drugs when they are in short supply. And the booming demand for GLP-1 drugs in recent years prompted companies like Hims to jump into the multibillion-dollar market for the drugs, with many patients willing to pay cash.
In 2024, the FDA said that GLP-1 drugs were no longer in a shortage, which was expected to put an end to the compounding. But companies like Hims relied on an exception to keep selling their versions of the medications because the practice is still permitted when a prescription is customized for the patient.
As part of the deal the two companies reached that was announced on Monday, Hims will offer oral and injectable versions of Wegovy and Ozempic on its platform later this month. Hims will also stop advertising compounded GLP-1 drugs on its platform or in its marketing.
Novo Nordisk said in a statement that it is reserving the right to refile its lawsuit in the future.
California
Woman sues author Amy Griffin, saying her memoir ‘The Tell’ stole stories of sexual abuse
A woman has sued author and venture capitalist Amy Griffin over her bestselling 2025 memoir “The Tell,” saying that Griffin’s descriptions of childhood sexual abuse in the book were stolen from her experience.
The plaintiff identifies herself only as Jane Doe in the lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court. An attorney for Griffin called the suit “absurd” and “meritless.”
In “The Tell,” published a year ago, Griffin writes that undergoing therapy using the psychedelic drug MDMA uncovered previously buried childhood memories of being sexually abused by a teacher at her middle school in Amarillo, Texas, in the 1980s.
“I knew that these memories were real,” Griffin writes in the book. “My body knew what had happened to me.”
The memoir was an Oprah’s Book Club selection and was also touted by Reese Witherspoon and Gwyneth Paltrow.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiff says the descriptions match her own sexual assaults by a different teacher at a school dance and in a school bathroom. The lawsuit says Griffin had reason to know about the abuse.
“‘The Tell’ constitutes neither a genuine nor harmless memoir,” the lawsuit says, alleging Griffin engaged in intrusion, invasion of privacy, publication of private facts, negligence and infliction of emotional distress. It seeks damages to be determined at trial.
The lawsuit also names Griffin’s publishers and a ghostwriter as defendants.
The New York Times published a story in September raising questions about the book. It included people who expressed doubts about the reliability of the memories. The story also pointed out financial ties between Griffin and the prominent people who helped promote the book.
The plaintiff first learned of the existence of the memoir when the Times reached out to her during its reporting.
“She immediately recognized that the character of Claudia appeared to be based on herself,” the lawsuit says. “She further recognized that a number of stories attributed to the memories of Defendant GRIFFIN that supposedly resurfaced during MDMA therapy were actually her own real life past experiences.”
Griffin’s attorney, Thomas A. Clare, said in an email: “We look forward to exposing these meritless claims in court, as well as the deeply flawed New York Times reporting that is at the center of it.”
“Just like the New York Times manufactured a false narrative about Amy Griffin and ‘The Tell,’ it also engineered the premise for this absurd lawsuit,” Clare said. “After two New York Times reporters instigated this whole situation by bringing the book to her attention, the Plaintiff made her own choice to publicize her narrative to a global audience.” He added, “For its part, the Times took full advantage, publicizing this inaccurate narrative despite receiving many red-flag warnings.”
Danielle Rhoades Ha, a Times spokeswoman, said in response, “We’re confident in the accuracy of our reporting.”
The lawsuit says that when the plaintiff was assaulted at the school dance, she was wearing a dress she had borrowed from Griffin. The lawsuit says the abuse would have been apparent to some people at the dance because of how she left and how she returned. It also says the dress was returned to Griffin with bodily fluids from the assault. The plaintiff also said she asked Jesus for forgiveness for the assault at a church youth group meeting that Griffin attended.
The lawsuit says she met with Griffin for the first time in decades at a California coffee shop in 2019, a meeting that is recounted in the book. But the woman said she did not discuss her sexual assaults during the meeting.
The plaintiff says she did describe the abuse in detail to a talent agent who called her later about her life story. According to the lawsuit, the agent told the plaintiff he learned about her and her stories through an unidentified third party. The lawsuit says the agent stopped contact when she began asking him too many probing questions about him, and that details from the conversations “found their way into ‘The Tell.’ “
North Carolina
Man who recruited players into basketball point-shaving scheme pleads guilty
One of the so-called fixers in a sprawling betting scheme to cash in on big bets on rigged NCAA basketball games pleaded guilty Monday, according to the federal prosecutors’ office in Philadelphia.
Jalen Smith appeared in federal court in Philadelphia and pleaded guilty to wire fraud and bribery charges, becoming the first of 26 people charged in the scheme to formally do so. It came a week before the start of March Madness, in which bettors will wager billions legally — and illegally — on the 64 college basketball teams in the tournament.
Smith, of Charlotte, North Carolina, trained and developed local basketball players for professional scouting combines and used those connections with players when he became part of the scheme, prosecutors say.
Charges against Smith were unsealed in January along with 25 others. Besides the fixers who recruited players and placed bets, the charges targeted 17 former college basketball players and four other players who were active with their college teams this season.
More than a dozen players tried to fix games as recently as last season and some helped recruit other players, federal prosecutors said.
Smith was active in helping fix games in the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons, placing bets and recruiting players with the promise of a big payment in exchange for purposefully underperforming during a game, prosecutors said.
The fixers would then bet against the players’ teams in those games, defrauding sportsbooks and other bettors, authorities said.
Smith often traveled to meet players to deliver cash payments by hand, prosecutors said. In one case, Smith traveled to Louisiana to arrange the delivery of about $32,000 in cash to two of the players charged in the scheme, prosecutors say.
Two the fixers started with two games in the Chinese Basketball Association in 2023, according to the indictment. Successful there, they recruited Smith and two other fixers and moved on to rigging NCAA games as recently as January 2025, it said.
Their scheme grew to involve more than 39 players on more than 17 different NCAA Division I men’s basketball teams, who then rigged and attempted to rig more than 29 games, prosecutors said.
They wagered millions of dollars, raking in “substantial proceeds” for themselves, and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to players in bribes, prosecutors said. Payments to players typically ranged from $10,000 to $30,000 per game, they said.
Prosecutors named more than 40 schools where games were allegedly targeted by the scheme. Those included Tulane University and DePaul University.
Rigged games included major conferences and some playoffs, including the first round of the Horizon League championship and the second round of the Southland Conference championship, prosecutors said.
Players often recruited teammates to cooperate by playing badly, sitting out or keeping the ball away from players who weren’t in on the scheme to prevent them from scoring. Sometimes the attempted fix failed, meaning the fixers lost their bets, prosecutors say.
