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A group of 36 lawmakers says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has created “disappearances” on US soil, due to the “increasingly unreliable” online system used to track people detained by immigration authorities, according to a letter shared with the Guardian.

The lawmakers, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, are urging that the DHS inspector general’s office open an investigation into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “online detainee locator system” (ODLS), which has been used for years by family members, attorneys and journalists to track people in the federal immigration detention system.

“Since January 2025, that system has grown increasingly unreliable,” the lawmakers, including Senator Ben Ray Luján and House representatives Veronica Escobar and Lauren Underwood, say in the letter. “Without a functional locator system, DHS is effectively creating ‘disappearances’ on US soil, and we urge the DHS office of inspector general (OIG) to investigate this matter.”

Iranian officials on Tuesday urged young people to form human chains to protect power plants, as Donald Trump warned that a “whole civilization will die tonight” if Tehran does not meet his latest deadline to agree to a deal that includes reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

While Iran cannot match the sophistication of U.S. and Israeli weaponry or their dominance in the air, its chokehold on the strait is roiling the world economy and raising the pressure on Trump both at home and abroad to find a way out of the standoff.

Officials involved in diplomatic efforts said talks were ongoing, but Iran has rejected the latest American proposal, and it was unclear if a deal would come in time to head off Trump’s threatened attacks. World leaders and experts warned that strikes as destructive as Trump threatened could constitute a war crime.

The DC US attorney’s office under Jeanine Pirro has had an unusually low win rate in trials in Washington’s federal district court this year, at a moment when the White House has been clamoring for President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to deliver on prosecutions.

In its first eight criminal trials this year, the DC US attorney’s office has won only half of them — far below the national average.

The dicey record appears to stem from several issues in court, including a jury pool that has lost trust in the Trump administration, the FBI and the Justice Department, according to roughly a dozen people who have interacted with juries in the DC District Court in recent months.

Vietnam unanimously elected Communist Party General Secretary To Lam as president for a five-year term, consolidating his control over both the party and the state.

The move departs from Vietnam’s tradition of shared leadership, in which the jobs have typically been held by different people, and echoes power structures in China under Xi Jinping and neighboring Laos.

It has been widely expected since Lam’s reelection as Communist Party head in January, when observers noted that his consolidation of party authority positioned him to assume the presidency as well.

Iran’s military may be badly damaged by the U.S. and Israel’s campaign. But that damage has exposed a more enduring threat: asymmetric warfare, in which individuals or small groups of militants can pose threats strategic to the American military.

Donald Trump wants to know who leaked details about the missing U.S. airman who was rescued from the mountains of Iran in a high-stakes mission on Sunday.

The U.S. carried out a daring operation to extract two airmen who ejected from the F-15E fighter jet that was shot down by Iranian forces on Friday. The military plucked the pilot out of Iranian territory on Friday, and later pulled out the second service member who was hiding in the mountains.

But during a press conference on Monday, Trump accused a media organization of jeopardizing the mission for reporting that a second airman was missing on Friday. He did not name the media organization, but threatened to jail the journalist who first reported that a second airman was missing.

The Education Department said Monday it has terminated agreements that previous administrations reached with five school districts and a college aimed at upholding rights and protections for transgender students.

The decision means the department will no longer play a role in enforcing those agreements, which called for schools to take steps to comply with federal civil rights law. The districts affected are Cape Henlopen School District in Delaware, Fife School District in Washington, Delaware Valley School District in Pennsylvania, and La Mesa-Spring Valley School District, Sacramento City Unified and Taft College in California.

Under the Biden and Obama administrations, the department interpreted Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education, to include protections for transgender and gay students.

‘She got ripped away from me,’ army soldier Matthew Blank said after his wife Annie Ramos was detained in Louisiana

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents under the command of the Trump administration have reportedly detained the wife of a US army staff sergeant at his military base in Louisiana amid his preparations to deploy.

The arrest of Annie Ramos, 22, took place last Thursday, just days after she married 23-year-old Matthew Blank, a soldier who has served for more than five years and previously deployed to the Middle East and Europe, the New York Times first reported on Sunday.

Ramos, a biochemistry student with no criminal history who also teaches Sunday school, had been subject to a deportation order issued in absentia in 2005 when she was an infant after her family missed an immigration court hearing, the New York Times reported.

Some candidates are making public health a central part of their midterm campaigns amid Trump’s war on science

As public health has become increasingly politicized in the US, with a particularly chaotic year under the Trump administration, some political candidates are pushing back by making public health a central part of their campaigns – and the grassroots organization Defend Public Health has ideas about how to do it.

On Monday, the group launched guiding principles for campaigns to prioritize public health, called the People’s Health Platform, highlighting the importance of ensuring healthcare for all, protecting and expanding sexual, reproductive, and gender-affirming healthcare, preparing for the climate crisis and the next pandemic, and taxing billionaires, among other tenets.

“Public health needs to be a higher priority,” said Richard Pan, a pediatrician who is running to represent California’s sixth congressional district.