1 hospitalized after shooting incident at Southern University
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(BATON ROUGE, LA.) — Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, went into lockdown after a shooting took place on campus Sunday evening.
The incident, which took place in the Ulysses S. Jones Hall dormitory, left at least one person injured and taken to the hospital, according to ABC affiliate WBRZ. Their condition is unknown.
No identities related to the incident have been released.
The school posted a message on its website at 7:24 p.m. local time, stating: “ATTENTION: There has been a shooting incident in U.S. Jones Hall. The possible suspect is a Black male waring a black hoodie with rhinestones and dark pants. The campus is locked down for safety. Please remain in your dorm rooms/offices until an all-clear is given.”
Southern University and A&M College is a Historically Black College and University and, with five locations across Louisiana, it is the only HBCU system in the United States, according to its website.
An all-clear was issued at 9:15 p.m. local time, according to WRBZ. It remains unclear if the alleged suspect described in the school’s previous announcement was located or taken into custody.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — Fourteen states have filed a federal lawsuit against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, challenging Musk’s role as head of the new Department of Government Efficiency and accusing him of being a “designated agent of chaos” whose “sweeping authority” is in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
“Musk’s seemingly limitless and unchecked power to strip the government of its workforce and eliminate entire departments with the stroke of a pen, or a click of a mouse, would have been shocking to those who won this country’s independence,” reads the complaint, which was filed Thursday in federal court in Washington, D.C.
Led by the state of New Mexico, the lawsuit argues — in often dramatic terms — that the Appointments Clause of the Constitution calls for someone with such significant and “expansive authority” as Musk to be formally nominated by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
“There is no greater threat to democracy than the accumulation of state power in the hands of a single, unelected individual,” says the lawsuit, filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez and officials from Arizona, Michigan, Maryland, Minnesota, California, Nevada, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii. “Although our constitutional system was designed to prevent the abuses of an 18th century monarch, the instruments of unchecked power are no less dangerous in the hands of a 21st century tech baron.” Two of the 14 states are led by Republican governors.
Separately, 26 current and former USAID employees and contractors brought suit against Musk Thursday in a lawsuit that makes the same constitutional claim. That suit, filed in federal court in Maryland, asks a judge to block Musk and any DOGE subordinates from continuing their budget-slashing work unless Musk is nominated by Trump for an official position and confirmed by the Senate.
“The scope and reach of his executive authority appear unprecedented in U.S. history,” that lawsuit says. “His power includes, at least, the authority to cease the payment of congressionally approved funds, access sensitive and confidential data across government agencies, cut off systems access to federal employees and contractors at will, and take over and dismantle entire independent federal agencies.”
The suit filed by the 14 states says the Constitution blocks the president from overriding “existing laws concerning the structure of the Executive Branch and federal spending.” As a result, the suit says, the commander-in-chief from is forbidden from creating — or even “extinguishing” — federal agencies, and from “slashing federal programs or offering lengthy severance packages as a means of radically winnowing the federal workforce,” in a nod to the Trump administration’s “deferred retirement” offer to government employees.
DOGE, led by Musk as the centerpiece of Trump’s campaign promise to trim the federal government, has found itself in the crosshairs of multiple federal lawsuits, which allege that it has improperly accessed sensitive records and is unlawfully gutting government agencies. Federal judges have temporarily blocked DOGE from accessing sensitive data at the Treasury Department, while the Department of Education recently reached an agreement to limit DOGE’s access to student loan records.
A lawsuit challenging the dismantling of USAID also resulted in a temporary order that blocks the agency from placing more than 2,000 employees on leave.
“[T]he President does not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally dismantle the government. Nor could he delegate such expansive authority to an unelected, unconfirmed individual,” Thursday’s lawsuit says.
The Appointments Clause of the Constitution has generally been interpreted to require that anyone deemed a “principal officer” of the U.S. government must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The White House has called Musk a “special government employee” as head of DOGE.
But in their lawsuit Thursday, the states insisted that Musk has such “significant authority” and such “unprecedented and seemingly limitless access across the federal government,” while reporting “solely to President Trump,” that he is actually serving as a “principal officer.”
“Musk is far more than an adviser to the White House,” the lawsuit says. “He executes the President’s agenda by exercising virtually unchecked power across the entire Executive branch, making decisions about expenditures, contracts, government property, regulations, and the very existence of federal agencies.”
The lawsuit claims that Musk’s DOGE “has inserted itself into at least 17 federal agencies,” and that Musk has “authority to direct and veto the staffing decisions of” multiple federal agencies.
“The specifics of Musk’s conduct within various agencies confirm that he is wielding the power of a principal officer, a principal officer that has never previously existed,” the lawsuit says.
“As a result, all of Musk’s actions are [beyond his authority] and contrary to law,” says the suit.
The 14 states are asking a federal judge to at least temporarily limit Musk’s ability to cut or otherwise overhaul federal agencies, and they want the judge to declare “that Musk’s officer-level governmental actions to date, including those of his subordinates and designees” are unlawful.
Both Musk and the Trump administration have insisted that Musk and DOGE are simply rooting out vast government waste and potentially even criminal corruption within federal agencies.
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt has repeatedly said Musk is “complying with all applicable federal laws.”
(BOSTON) — As more than two million federal employees face a midnight Thursday deadline to accept the Trump administration’s buyout offer, a federal judge in Massachusetts will consider an eleventh-hour request to block the buyout from moving forward.
U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. set Thursday afternoon hearing to consider a request by three federal unions to issue a temporary restraining order that would suspend Thursday’s deadline for the buyout and require the Office of Personnel Management to provide a legal basis for the unprecedented offer, which offers to continue to pay federal employees through Sept. 30, 2025, if they resign by Thursday at 11;59 p.m..
Three unions representing a combined 800,000 federal civil servants argue that the “deferred resignation” offer is unlawful, arbitrary, and would result in a “dangerous one-two punch” to the federal government.
“First, the government will lose expertise in the complex fields and programs that Congress has, by statute, directed the Executive to faithfully implement,” the lawsuit said. “And second, when vacant positions become politicized, as this Administration seeks to do, partisanship is elevated over ability and truth, to the detriment of agency missions and the American people.”
The lawsuit comes as at least 40,000 federal workers — roughly 2% of the civilian federal workforce — have accepted the deferred resignation offer to leave the federal government since last week, ABC News has reported.
The three unions — the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Association of Government Employees, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — argue that the OPM violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to provide a legal basis for the buyout offer and leaving open the possibility that the government might not follow through with the buyout once federal employees agree to resign.
The lawsuit added that the buyout’s promise of payments through September violates the law because the current appropriation for federal agencies expires in March. Moreover, the buyout is unfair because it was made alongside a threat of future layoffs, the lawsuit said.
The buyout offer, part of DOGE head Elon Musk’s effort to trim the size of government under President Donald Trump, was sent out under the subject line “Fork in the Road” — the same language Musk used when he slashed jobs at Twitter after taking over that company in 2022.
“To leverage employees into accepting the offer and resigning, the Fork Directive threatens employees with eventual job loss in the event that they refuse to resign,” the unions’ lawsuit says.
Overall, the lawsuit alleges that the OPM rushed the offer with a questionable legal basis, largely mimicking Elon Musk’s management style following his takeover of Twitter.
“OPM’s rapid adoption of Musk’s private-sector program confirms that the agency took very little time to consider the suitability of applying an approach used with questionable success in a single for-profit entity to the entirety of the federal workforce,” says the lawsuit.
(WASHINGTON) — A federal appeals court on Thursday struck down a longstanding federal ban that prevented the sale of handguns to Americans between the ages of 18 and 20 — a landmark gun control regulation in place since 1968.
The conservative Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the federal law banning handgun sales to teens is inconsistent with the nation’s historical tradition and violates the Second Amendment.
The decision cited the Supreme Court’s 2022 opinion by Clarence Thomas in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which significantly expanded gun rights and threatens to rollback other gun safety laws nationwide.
“Ultimately, the text of the Second Amendment includes eighteen-to-twenty-year-old individuals among ‘the people’ whose right to keep and bear arms is protected,” the court wrote in its opinion statement.
The statement went on, “The federal government has presented scant evidence that eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds’ firearm rights during the founding-era were restricted in a similar manner to the contemporary federal handgun purchase ban, and its 19th century evidence ‘cannot provide much insight into the meaning of the Second Amendment when it contradicts earlier evidence.'”
The immediate nationwide impact of the ruling is unclear. The case is almost certainly bound for the Supreme Court.
Handguns have been the most commonly used weapons in murders and mass shootings for decades in the United States, according to government data analyzed by The Violence Project.
Last term, the Supreme Court upheld a longstanding federal law prohibiting the possession of firearms by people under domestic violence restraining orders.
In the next few weeks, it will consider whether gun manufacturers can be held liable for violent crimes perpetrated by criminals who easily get the weapons.
