What happened
U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. yesterday ruled that President Donald Trump's invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged members of a Venezuelan gang was "unlawful" and barred him from using the 18th century law to detain, transfer or deport migrants from southeastern Texas. Rodriguez, a Trump appointee, was the first judge to permanently block Trump's use of the law and rule it legally invalid.

Who said what
Rodriguez's 36-page ruling "amounted to a philosophical rejection" of the White House's "attempts to transpose" the 227-year-old law "into the context of modern-day immigration policy," The New York Times said. Trump's proclamation declaring the Tren de Aragua gang an invasion force "exceeds the scope" of the Alien Enemies Act and is "contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning" of its terms, historically and definitionally, the judge wrote.

Rodriguez's decision "correctly recognized that the president cannot simply declare there’s an invasion and invoke a wartime authority during peacetime," said ACLU lead lawyer Lee Gelernt, who has also secured temporary injunctions in several other states. Vice President J.D. Vance told Fox News the administration would be "aggressively appealing" the ruling.

What next?
Rodriguez's injunction "only covers his southern Texas-based district," Politico said, and an appeal would be heard by the "most conservative federal appeals court in the country." But his ruling is "extremely detailed, well reasoned, well grounded in the law," Elora Mukherjee, director of Columbia Law School's Immigrants' Rights Clinic, told The Washington Post, "and hopefully other federal courts will consider it precedent."

What happened
A 15-year-old sea lion named Ronan proved better at keeping a beat than 10 college students in a rhythmic dance-off, researchers reported yesterday in the journal Scientific Reports. The results challenge the long-held theory that "only animals who were vocal learners — like humans and parrots — could learn to find a beat," Hugo Merchant, a researcher at Mexico's Institute of Neurobiology not involved in the study, told The Associated Press.

Who said what
Ronan first upended ideas about which animals can dance in 2013, when she was shown to move in time with music. Her "headbanging ability sparked a scientific debate over whether what she was doing could really be compared with human's rhythmic skills" or whether it was a fluke, The New York Times said. 

A team led by Peter Cook, a behavioral neuroscientist at New College of Florida, decided to test that out with the dance-off between the students and Ronan, a resident of U.C. Santa Cruz's Long Marine Laboratory. "No human was better than Ronan at all the different ways we test quality of beat-keeping," Cook said, and "she's much better than when she was a kid."

What next?
Cook and his colleagues plan to "train and test other sea lions" to see if they can "also bob to a beat," the AP said, and challenge Ronan with more unpredictable rhythms. "Can she do things that accelerate or decelerate?" Cook told the Times. "These are things humans can be quite good at. Can a nonhuman do those?"