10 things you need to know today: April 9, 2019

The Virginia Cavaliers hoist their NCAA trophy

(Image credit: Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)

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1. Secret Service chief resigns in Homeland Security shakeup
2. Virginia beats Texas Tech to win NCAA men's basketball title
3. Judge blocks Trump policy forcing asylum seekers to stay in Mexico
4. Trump brands Iran Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group
5. Measles cases surge to second highest level in 2 decades
6. Smallville actress Allison Mack pleads guilty in sex cult case
7. Maryland man accused of stealing truck for planned terror attack
8. Trump administration ends baseball deal with Cuba
9. Pinterest sets IPO price valuing company at $9 billion
10. Felicity Huffman among 13 parents pleading guilty in college admissions scandal

published 9 April 2019

1. Secret Service chief resigns in Homeland Security shakeup

Secret Service Director Randolph "Tex" Alles is stepping down, the White House announced Monday. "Mr. Alles will be leaving shortly and President Trump has selected James M. Murray, a career member of the USSS, to take over as director beginning in May," White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. The news came a day after President Trump announced the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in a shakeup of the department, which was reportedly orchestrated by presidential adviser Stephen Miller, a hardliner on immigration. The Associated Press, citing three administration sources, said Alles' departure was sparked by a personality conflict within his agency. Miller reportedly also is considering pushing out Lee Francis Cissna, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which runs the legal immigration system.

The Virginia Cavaliers beat Texas Tech 85-77 in the finals of the NCAA men's basketball tournament on Monday night to win UVA's first title. The victory came a year after the Cavaliers left March Madness as the only No. 1 seed to be knocked out in the first round by a No. 16 seed. De'Andre Hunter scored a career-high 27 points for the Cavaliers, including the three-pointer that tied the game with 12.9 seconds left and sent the game into overtime. Texas Tech took an early lead in overtime, but Virginia then scored 11 unanswered points, eight from the free-throw line. The Cavaliers took the lead for good on a three-pointer with just more than two minutes left in overtime, and they built on the lead from there.

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A federal judge on Monday issued an injunction against the Trump administration's Migrant Protection Protocols policy, which keeps asylum seekers in Mexico while they wait for their cases to go through the immigration court system. Under the law, migrants have the right to seek asylum once they reach U.S. soil; typically, they are housed in detention facilities or released into the United States. In his ruling blocking the policy, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco said his order will go into effect on April 12, and within two days, the 11 migrants who filed the lawsuit must be allowed to enter the U.S. The Trump administration enacted its policy in January, with outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen saying last week she would expand the program.

President Trump announced Monday that he was officially designating Iran's Revolutionary Guard as an international terrorist organization. The decision marked the first time the U.S. had branded part of a foreign government as a terror group. The designation, which includes sanctions, "underscores the fact that Iran's actions are fundamentally different from those of other governments," Trump said in a statement. "This action will significantly expand the scope and scale of our maximum pressure on the Iranian regime. It makes crystal clear the risks of conducting business with, or providing support to," the Iranian military unit. The Revolutionary Guard has operated across the Middle East. The decision comes with a risk of retaliation against U.S. troops and intelligence agents in the region.

The number of reported U.S. measles cases jumped by nearly 100 last week, pushing the total recorded in 19 states to 465 this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday. That's the second highest total, after the 667 recorded in 2014, since the U.S. declared measles eliminated in the country nearly two decades ago. There were 372 cases last year. The CDC said the increase has been partly driven by the anti-vaccination movement. Most of the measles patients had not been vaccinated, and up to 90 percent of those close to an infected person can get the disease. "The numbers serve as a kick in the butt that says, hey, we probably should start paying attention to vaccination again," said Ogbonnaya Omenka, an assistant professor at Butler University who has a doctorate in public health.

Smallville actress Allison Mack pleaded guilty to racketeering charges on Monday for her role in an alleged sex cult. Mack said in court that she had "come to the conclusion that I must take full responsibility for my conduct." The FBI said that Mack, who was arrested in April 2018 and originally pleaded not guilty, recruited women into the NXIVM organization by telling them they were joining a women's mentorship group, but they wound up as sex "slaves" controlled by "masters" and exploited for their labor. Mack allegedly "directly or implicitly required" women recruited for the organization to engage in sexual activity with its founder, Keith Raniere. Mack faces up to 20 years in prison.

Federal prosecutors on Monday accused a Maryland man, 28-year-old Rondell Henry, of stealing a rental truck he planned to use to kill pedestrians at National Harbor in Maryland, near Washington, D.C. Surveillance video showed Henry getting out of a stolen U-Haul truck. "He said he wanted to carry out a Nice-style attack," a law enforcement official said, referring to 2016 terror attack that killed 86 people in Nice, France. The Islamic State group claimed credit for that truck attack. "I was just going to keep driving and driving and driving. I wasn't going to stop," Henry, a U.S. citizen, told the FBI, according to documents filed Monday.

The Trump administration has sent a letter to Major League Baseball attorneys saying it is reversing an Obama administration policy allowing the league to pay the Cuban Baseball Federation to release players so they can play in the U.S. without having to defect. The fee would have equaled 25 percent of each Cuban player's signing bonus. The Treasury Department said the deal was incompatible with the policies of the Trump administration, which has been unwinding former President Barack Obama's efforts to normalize relations with the Communist-run island nation. "The U.S. does not support actions that would institutionalize a system by which a Cuban government entity garnishes the wages of hard-working athletes who simply seek to live and compete in a free society," National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis said.

Pinterest set a conservative price range of $15 to $17 per share for its upcoming initial public offering of stock. Pinterest aims to raise up to $1.5 billion in the IPO. The high end of the range would value the digital scrapbooking site at about $9 billion. Pinterest is treading carefully after ride-sharing company Lyft's stock dropped after its closely watched debut. Lyft's stumble served as a "major gut check time for Lyft and the tech IPO world to see how this stock trades given it was the first one out of the box," said Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives.

Actress Felicity Huffman and a dozen other parents charged in the college admissions scandal have agreed to plead guilty to bribery and other forms of fraud to get their children admitted to highly selective colleges and universities, federal prosecutors announced on Monday. Actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, were not on the list of 13 parents striking deals with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Boston, which is overseeing the investigation. Huffman said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter that she felt "deep regret and shame" for the "pain" she caused to her daughter, colleagues, educational institutions, students, and others. Huffman said her daughter knew nothing about the cheating, and "in my misguided and profoundly wrong way, I have betrayed her."

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.