New York
Judge rules Trump administration’s cancellation of humanities grants unconstitutional
The Trump administration’s cancellation of more than $100 million in humanities grants to scholars, writers, research groups and other organizations was unconstitutional, and the Department of Government Efficiency had no authority to end the funding, a federal judge in New York ruled on Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan sided with The Authors Guild, several other groups and several people who had their grants canceled and sued DOGE and the National Endowment for the Humanities. McMahon permanently barred the administration from terminating the grants and criticized DOGE’s use of artificial intelligence in nixing the funding.
Government lawyers had argued that the cuts of more than 1,400 grants of congressionally approved funds were legal moves to implement President Donald Trump’s directives, eliminate grants associated with diversion, equity and inclusion and reduce discretionary spending under the administration’s priorities.
The White House and Department of Justice, which defended against the lawsuit, did not immediately return emails seeking comment Thursday evening. It was not immediately clear if an appeal was planned.
McMahon said the government violated the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection right, and DOGE did not have the lawful authority to cancel the grants. She wrote, for example, that it was “a textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination” when officials canceled the grants based on DEI.
“The public interest favors permanent relief,” McMahon wrote in her ruling. “The public has a strong interest in ensuring that federal officials act within the bounds set by Congress and the Constitution.”
Several groups that sued the government, including the American Council of Learned Societies, American Historical Association and Modern Language Association, hailed the decision in a joint statement.
“This ruling in an important achievement in our effort to restore the NEH’s ability to fulfill the vital mission with which Congress charged it: helping to create and sustain ‘a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry’ through the humanities,” said Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the American Historical Association.
Yinka Ezekiel Onayemi, an attorney for the Authors Guild, called the grant cancellations “a direct assault on constitutional free speech and equal protection.”
“We’re pleased with the Court’s decision, which vindicates our clients: the brilliant academics, writers, and institutions doing work that is deeply important to our democracy,” Onayemi said in a statement. “It also reaffirms that Congress’s 60 year old commitment to the humanities cannot be dismantled by an overreaching executive.”
The judge scrutinized how government officials classified grant projects as DEI and used ChatGPT to target them for funding cuts. In one case, she said officials, using the AI platform, labeled as DEI an anthology titled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union.” She also listed numerous other examples.
McMahon also rejected the government’s argument that there was no constitutional problem because any viewpoint classification was ChatGPT’s doing, and not the government’s.
“ChatGPT was the Government’s chosen instrument for purposes of this project, and DOGE’s use of AI to identify DEI-related material neither excuses presumptively unconstitutional conduct nor gives the Government carte blanche to engage in it,” she wrote.
The grant cancellations were announced in April 2025, three months after Trump issued an executive order titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” In February 2025, Trump issued another executive order implementing DOGE’s “cost efficiency initiative.”
Michael McDonald, then the acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, sent letters to grant recipients informing them that their grants were canceled.
In a letter to one organization on April 1, 2025, he wrote, “The NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”
Many of the canceled grants were awarded during the Biden administration, and only about 40 grants awarded by that administration were spared from the cuts, the judge wrote.
McMahon wrote that while a new administration may pursue lawful funding priorities, “it has no license to suppress disfavored ideas.”
In a temporary block of the grant cancellations issued last year that raised First Amendment and other issues, the judge said the “defendants terminated the grants based on the recipients’ perceived viewpoint, in an effort to drive such views out of the marketplace of ideas.”
Ohio
Ex-Ohio State players, including NFL veterans, to join a sexual abuse lawsuit against the school
Thirty former Ohio State football players, including some former NFL players, have agreed to join a federal lawsuit against the university over the sexual abuse of student athletes decades ago by a team doctor, a lawyer in the case said Thursday.
The lawyer, Rocky Ratliff, said in an interview that the men came forward some eight years after the first lawsuit was filed because they needed to overcome the shame of revealing that they’d been sexually abused by another man and the fear of taking on the university publicly.
They are “tearful and living with it,” Ratliff said. “But as this case progresses on, they see how Ohio State’s treating athletes from the university and I think they want people to know it’s OK, even if it is male to male (sexual abuse), to come forward.”
Ohio State has fought lawsuits in federal court since 2018 brought by former student athletes against the university over its failure to stop abuse by Dr. Richard Strauss. Hundreds say they were abused by Strauss, who worked at the school from 1978 to 1998. He died in 2005.
The men have signed letters of agreement to join a lawsuit filed by other student-athletes who say they are victims of Strauss, Ratliff said.
Of the 30, only three have agreed to make their identities public, Ratliff said. They are Al Washington, Ray Ellis and Keith Ferguson, he said. All were members of the 1980 Rose Bowl team and were recruited by and played for legendary coach Woody Hayes. The Associated Press does not identify people who say they’re victims of sexual abuse unless they choose to make their names public.
Some other former football players have settled with the school in sealed agreements that kept their names a secret, Ratliff said.
In a statement, Ohio State said it has “sincerely and persistently tried to reconcile with survivors, including former football student-athletes, through monetary and non-monetary means, including settlements, counseling services and other medical treatment.”
As of April 15, the university has settled with 317 survivors for more than $61 million, and is remains actively engaged in mediation, the school said.
In an interview, Washington said it was hard to talk about the abuse he suffered and recalled being subjected to “unlawful” physical exams by Strauss when he was 18 or 19. He and the other players tried to make light of it with each other and joke about it.
“But it was really uncomfortable,” said Washington, now 67.
He didn’t discuss it with others over the decades, but watching the 2025 documentary film “Surviving Ohio State” put it back into his thoughts.
“As a matter of fact, I couldn’t make it through that movie,” Washington said. “The pain and anguish that I saw, I just couldn’t take it.”
Strauss was on the faculty and medical staff and Ohio State. He retired in 1998 with emeritus status. School trustees revoked that mark of honor three years ago.
Washington played linebacker at Ohio State and was a fourth-round draft pick by the New York Jets in 1981. After a year with the Jets he went to the Ottawa Roughriders of the Canadian Football League.
Ellis, 67, was a safety at Ohio State and spent five years with the Philadelphia Eagles and two with the Cleveland Browns. He recorded 14 interceptions and three sacks over seven NFL seasons.
Ferguson, 67, was a defensive end at Ohio State and a fifth-round draft pick by San Diego in 1981. He spent five years with the Chargers and six more with Detroit. His best season came in 1986, when he recorded 9 1/2 sacks for the Lions.
California
Jury finds city of LA not liable in death of 14-year-old girl hit by police officer’s stray bullet
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A jury Thursday found the city of Los Angeles was not liable in the killing of a 14-year-old girl who was hit by a police officer’s stray bullet during a shootout while Christmas shopping in 2021 with her mother.
The ruling came after a nearly monthlong trial in the wrongful death lawsuit filed against the LA Police Department by the parents of Valentina Orellana-Peralta. She was at a Burlington store in the North Hollywood neighborhood on Dec. 23, 2021, when she was struck by a bullet that had gone through the dressing room wall.
The jury sided with the city 9-3 after deliberating for just over a day.
The family’s attorney, Nick Rowley, in a video statement called it “the most devastating loss of my career” and said he doesn’t understand the jury’s decision.
Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto said the city shares the family’s grief but the jury made the correct decision and that the city stands by the officer who will carry the “burden of Valentina’s death with him for many years.”
Police responded to calls for help after a man wielding a bike lock attacked two women in the building. Officer William Dorsey Jones Jr. was part of a group of armed officers that walked through the store. He fired his rifle three times, killing the man and Orellana-Peralta.
The lawsuit filed by the girl’s parents alleged wrongful death, negligence and negligent infliction of emotional distress. The jury found the city not negligent on all accounts.
Jones told the LAPD’s Use of Force Review Board that he mistook the bike lock the man was holding for a gun. He said he thought the man stood in front of an exterior brick wall, when the area actually contained the women’s dressing rooms. One of the bullets he fired ricocheted off the ground behind the man and went through the wall, hitting Orellana-Peralta.
The Los Angeles Police Commission, a civilian oversight board, ruled in 2022 that Jones was justified in firing once but that his two subsequent shots were out of policy. Then-Police Chief Michel Moore found in his own review that all three shots were unjustified.
A report by the California Attorney General’s office in April 2024 found that Jones acted with the intent to defend himself from “what he reasonably believed to be imminent death or serious bodily injury” and decided not to file criminal charges.
Judge rules Trump administration’s cancellation of humanities grants unconstitutional
The Trump administration’s cancellation of more than $100 million in humanities grants to scholars, writers, research groups and other organizations was unconstitutional, and the Department of Government Efficiency had no authority to end the funding, a federal judge in New York ruled on Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan sided with The Authors Guild, several other groups and several people who had their grants canceled and sued DOGE and the National Endowment for the Humanities. McMahon permanently barred the administration from terminating the grants and criticized DOGE’s use of artificial intelligence in nixing the funding.
Government lawyers had argued that the cuts of more than 1,400 grants of congressionally approved funds were legal moves to implement President Donald Trump’s directives, eliminate grants associated with diversion, equity and inclusion and reduce discretionary spending under the administration’s priorities.
The White House and Department of Justice, which defended against the lawsuit, did not immediately return emails seeking comment Thursday evening. It was not immediately clear if an appeal was planned.
McMahon said the government violated the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection right, and DOGE did not have the lawful authority to cancel the grants. She wrote, for example, that it was “a textbook example of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination” when officials canceled the grants based on DEI.
“The public interest favors permanent relief,” McMahon wrote in her ruling. “The public has a strong interest in ensuring that federal officials act within the bounds set by Congress and the Constitution.”
Several groups that sued the government, including the American Council of Learned Societies, American Historical Association and Modern Language Association, hailed the decision in a joint statement.
“This ruling in an important achievement in our effort to restore the NEH’s ability to fulfill the vital mission with which Congress charged it: helping to create and sustain ‘a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry’ through the humanities,” said Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the American Historical Association.
Yinka Ezekiel Onayemi, an attorney for the Authors Guild, called the grant cancellations “a direct assault on constitutional free speech and equal protection.”
“We’re pleased with the Court’s decision, which vindicates our clients: the brilliant academics, writers, and institutions doing work that is deeply important to our democracy,” Onayemi said in a statement. “It also reaffirms that Congress’s 60 year old commitment to the humanities cannot be dismantled by an overreaching executive.”
The judge scrutinized how government officials classified grant projects as DEI and used ChatGPT to target them for funding cuts. In one case, she said officials, using the AI platform, labeled as DEI an anthology titled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union.” She also listed numerous other examples.
McMahon also rejected the government’s argument that there was no constitutional problem because any viewpoint classification was ChatGPT’s doing, and not the government’s.
“ChatGPT was the Government’s chosen instrument for purposes of this project, and DOGE’s use of AI to identify DEI-related material neither excuses presumptively unconstitutional conduct nor gives the Government carte blanche to engage in it,” she wrote.
The grant cancellations were announced in April 2025, three months after Trump issued an executive order titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” In February 2025, Trump issued another executive order implementing DOGE’s “cost efficiency initiative.”
Michael McDonald, then the acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, sent letters to grant recipients informing them that their grants were canceled.
In a letter to one organization on April 1, 2025, he wrote, “The NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”
Many of the canceled grants were awarded during the Biden administration, and only about 40 grants awarded by that administration were spared from the cuts, the judge wrote.
McMahon wrote that while a new administration may pursue lawful funding priorities, “it has no license to suppress disfavored ideas.”
In a temporary block of the grant cancellations issued last year that raised First Amendment and other issues, the judge said the “defendants terminated the grants based on the recipients’ perceived viewpoint, in an effort to drive such views out of the marketplace of ideas.”
Ohio
Ex-Ohio State players, including NFL veterans, to join a sexual abuse lawsuit against the school
Thirty former Ohio State football players, including some former NFL players, have agreed to join a federal lawsuit against the university over the sexual abuse of student athletes decades ago by a team doctor, a lawyer in the case said Thursday.
The lawyer, Rocky Ratliff, said in an interview that the men came forward some eight years after the first lawsuit was filed because they needed to overcome the shame of revealing that they’d been sexually abused by another man and the fear of taking on the university publicly.
They are “tearful and living with it,” Ratliff said. “But as this case progresses on, they see how Ohio State’s treating athletes from the university and I think they want people to know it’s OK, even if it is male to male (sexual abuse), to come forward.”
Ohio State has fought lawsuits in federal court since 2018 brought by former student athletes against the university over its failure to stop abuse by Dr. Richard Strauss. Hundreds say they were abused by Strauss, who worked at the school from 1978 to 1998. He died in 2005.
The men have signed letters of agreement to join a lawsuit filed by other student-athletes who say they are victims of Strauss, Ratliff said.
Of the 30, only three have agreed to make their identities public, Ratliff said. They are Al Washington, Ray Ellis and Keith Ferguson, he said. All were members of the 1980 Rose Bowl team and were recruited by and played for legendary coach Woody Hayes. The Associated Press does not identify people who say they’re victims of sexual abuse unless they choose to make their names public.
Some other former football players have settled with the school in sealed agreements that kept their names a secret, Ratliff said.
In a statement, Ohio State said it has “sincerely and persistently tried to reconcile with survivors, including former football student-athletes, through monetary and non-monetary means, including settlements, counseling services and other medical treatment.”
As of April 15, the university has settled with 317 survivors for more than $61 million, and is remains actively engaged in mediation, the school said.
In an interview, Washington said it was hard to talk about the abuse he suffered and recalled being subjected to “unlawful” physical exams by Strauss when he was 18 or 19. He and the other players tried to make light of it with each other and joke about it.
“But it was really uncomfortable,” said Washington, now 67.
He didn’t discuss it with others over the decades, but watching the 2025 documentary film “Surviving Ohio State” put it back into his thoughts.
“As a matter of fact, I couldn’t make it through that movie,” Washington said. “The pain and anguish that I saw, I just couldn’t take it.”
Strauss was on the faculty and medical staff and Ohio State. He retired in 1998 with emeritus status. School trustees revoked that mark of honor three years ago.
Washington played linebacker at Ohio State and was a fourth-round draft pick by the New York Jets in 1981. After a year with the Jets he went to the Ottawa Roughriders of the Canadian Football League.
Ellis, 67, was a safety at Ohio State and spent five years with the Philadelphia Eagles and two with the Cleveland Browns. He recorded 14 interceptions and three sacks over seven NFL seasons.
Ferguson, 67, was a defensive end at Ohio State and a fifth-round draft pick by San Diego in 1981. He spent five years with the Chargers and six more with Detroit. His best season came in 1986, when he recorded 9 1/2 sacks for the Lions.
California
Jury finds city of LA not liable in death of 14-year-old girl hit by police officer’s stray bullet
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A jury Thursday found the city of Los Angeles was not liable in the killing of a 14-year-old girl who was hit by a police officer’s stray bullet during a shootout while Christmas shopping in 2021 with her mother.
The ruling came after a nearly monthlong trial in the wrongful death lawsuit filed against the LA Police Department by the parents of Valentina Orellana-Peralta. She was at a Burlington store in the North Hollywood neighborhood on Dec. 23, 2021, when she was struck by a bullet that had gone through the dressing room wall.
The jury sided with the city 9-3 after deliberating for just over a day.
The family’s attorney, Nick Rowley, in a video statement called it “the most devastating loss of my career” and said he doesn’t understand the jury’s decision.
Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto said the city shares the family’s grief but the jury made the correct decision and that the city stands by the officer who will carry the “burden of Valentina’s death with him for many years.”
Police responded to calls for help after a man wielding a bike lock attacked two women in the building. Officer William Dorsey Jones Jr. was part of a group of armed officers that walked through the store. He fired his rifle three times, killing the man and Orellana-Peralta.
The lawsuit filed by the girl’s parents alleged wrongful death, negligence and negligent infliction of emotional distress. The jury found the city not negligent on all accounts.
Jones told the LAPD’s Use of Force Review Board that he mistook the bike lock the man was holding for a gun. He said he thought the man stood in front of an exterior brick wall, when the area actually contained the women’s dressing rooms. One of the bullets he fired ricocheted off the ground behind the man and went through the wall, hitting Orellana-Peralta.
The Los Angeles Police Commission, a civilian oversight board, ruled in 2022 that Jones was justified in firing once but that his two subsequent shots were out of policy. Then-Police Chief Michel Moore found in his own review that all three shots were unjustified.
A report by the California Attorney General’s office in April 2024 found that Jones acted with the intent to defend himself from “what he reasonably believed to be imminent death or serious bodily injury” and decided not to file criminal charges.
