Nine more people were arrested Friday in an anti-ICE protest at a St. Paul church, according to a civil rights attorney federally indicted in the case last month.

Protesters disrupted services inside Cities Church on Summit Avenue near Snelling Avenue on Jan. 18, chanting “ICE out” amid an immigration enforcement crackdown in Minnesota. People also shouted, “Justice for Renee Good,” who was fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis on Jan. 7. They said the acting field office director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minnesota serves as a pastor at the church.

Seven people were indicted last month. Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Twin Cities civil rights attorney and activist, wrote on social media that the additional nine people were arrested Friday morning and are scheduled to be in court Friday afternoon.

The nine initially arrested are charged under the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. The FACE Act prohibits interference or intimidation of “any person by force, threat of force, or physical obstruction exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship.”

They have pleaded not guilty. The people charged last month were Levy Armstrong, former CNN host turned independent journalist Don Lemon, St. Paul School Board Member Chauntyll Allen, independent Twin Cities journalist Georgia Fort, Hennepin County Attorney’s Office lobbyist Jamael Lundy, St. Paul activist Trahern Crews, social media personality William Scott Kelly, along with Jerome Deangelo Richardson and Ian Davis Austin.

One of the people arrested Friday is also an independent journalist, according to Levy Armstrong.

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What are the worst tourist traps in the world? What attractions live up to the hype?

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Stasher, a company that hooks travelers up with temporary luggage storage, weighs in with its blog post, “World’s Best and Worst Tourist Attractions, Ranked.” These rankings were calculated by considering five factors: online ratings, TikTok likes, distance from an airport, the country’s safety and quality of local lodging.

Ergo, Stasher has determined the worst tourist attraction in existence is the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “Located 38.1 km from the LAX airport, this sidewalk of celebrity stars had the lowest Google rating and safety score,” it writes. Other sites that supposedly suck in terms of a visitor experience include Disneyland Paris and the Dead Sea, dinged for “accessibility challenges” and “regional instability.”

Conversely, places that scored high include Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Here are the first five from each list; check out the full post for more.

Stasher has determined the worst tourist attraction in existence is the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The rankings were calculated by considering five factors: online ratings, TikTok likes, distance from an airport, the country’s safety and quality of local lodging. (Dreamstime/TNS)

Stasher’s best and worst tourist attractions in the world

Worst:

1 Hollywood Walk of Fame, L.A.

2 The Dead Sea

3 The Grand Bazaar, Istanbul

4 Great Wall of China

5 Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong

Best:

Stasher has determined the best tourist attraction to be the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain. The rankings were calculated by considering five factors: online ratings, TikTok likes, distance from an airport, the country’s safety and quality of local lodging. (Dreamstime/TNS)

1 Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

2 Colosseum, Rome

3 Eiffel Tower, Paris

4 Milford Sound, New Zealand

5 Walt Disney World, Florida

Source: stasher.com/blog/worlds-best-and-worst-tourist-attractions-ranked

By MICHELLE CHAPMAN, AP Business Writer

ChatGPT maker OpenAI has received $110 billion in funding from Amazon, SoftBank and Nvidia, putting the technology company’s pre-money valuation at $730 billion.

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Amazon is leading the trio of tech heavyweights in commitments, putting up $50 billion, followed by $30 billion each from Nvidia and SoftBank, said OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman on Friday. Other investors are anticipated to join as the funding round progresses.

Amazon will start with an initial $15 billion investment and will invest an additional $35 billion in the coming months under preset conditions.

“These partnerships expand our global reach, deepen our infrastructure, and strengthen our balance sheet so we can bring frontier AI to more people, more businesses, and more communities worldwide,” he wrote.

Altman said that ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users, and more than 50 million consumer subscribers.

“We are entering a new phase where frontier AI moves from research into daily use at global scale,” he said. “Leadership will be defined by who can scale infrastructure fast enough to meet demand, and turn that capacity into products people rely on. This funding and these partnerships let us do both, and move faster on our mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity.”

OpenAI and Amazon’s multiyear partnership will include bringing new advanced AI capabilities to enterprises and having Amazon Web Services serve as the exclusive third-party cloud distribution provider for OpenAI Frontier. OpenAI and AWS will expand their current $38 billion multiyear deal by $100 billion over eight years. The companies will partner on developing customized models available to Amazon developers to power Amazon’s customer-facing applications.

OpenAI said it is also expanding its partnership with Nvidia.

OpenAI and Microsoft have had a partnership since 2019. OpenAI said in a statement that nothing about the funding or new partners announced Friday “in any way changes the terms” of its relationship with Microsoft.

“The partnership remains strong and central,” OpenAI said.

Texas Observer reader, 

And so comes primary season. That time of year when Texas Democratic voters gather to, through a process about as reliable as the reading of grackle entrails, divine which among various long-shot candidates has the greatest chance of breaking the GOP’s death grip on our still-worth-saving state. 

That same time of year when those same voters issue prayers that Republicans will finally nominate someone too unhinged even for Texas to elect—though perhaps those prayers would be better spent wishing for the GOP to send its own lesser evils on to November.

Over at the Observer website, we’ll do our best to parse these low-turnout affairs that unfortunately remain the elections of consequence in this state.

March/April cover (Brenda Bazan/Texas Observer)

Meanwhile, you—the savvy print reader who hasn’t let Elon Musk et al. sap all of your life’s limited attention—will be in for a treat with this magazine. In addition to our typical investigative fare, in this case covering privatized military housing and the Trumpian federal judiciary, we also have a feature that’s a bit unusual for us: an impassioned defense of a particular reptile. Lest you think we’ve taken a frivolous turn, I believe you’ll find that this story actually has quite a strong, well, bite. It takes to task not only certain profitable Texas traditions but also our blinkered way of viewing nonhuman life in this state and far beyond. 

You’ll find as well a beautiful reflection on belonging and exclusion from April Maria Ortiz, one of a few new contributing editors added to our masthead this issue, and, bittersweetly, a final magazine piece from our McHam investigative reporting fellow, Francesca D’Annunzio. 

After two years with the Observer, Francesca has taken an exciting new opportunity in journalism, the exact type of gig we love to see one of our fellows move on to. However, her enthusiasm, dedication, indignation, and black cat Luna will all be sorely missed here at Observer HQ.

Solidarity,

Note: To be the first to get all the stories in our bimonthly issues, become a Texas Observer member here.

The post Editor’s Letter: Introducing Our March/April 2026 Issue appeared first on The Texas Observer.