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Group that vandalized Trump golf course faces UK ban as terrorist

LONDON (NYT) — The British government said Monday that it would ban as a terrorist group a pro-Palestinian organization that broke into a British air base and vandalized President Donald Trump’s Turnberry golf resort in Scotland.

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Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, announced the move against the group, Palestine Action, three days after members damaged military planes using red paint at Britain’s largest air force base, at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, on Friday.

Cooper said that a legal order to ban the group would be submitted to Parliament on June 30. She said Palestine Action had “orchestrated a nationwide campaign of direct criminal action” against defense companies and other targets, putting Britain’s national security at risk. She also said that its activities met the legal definition of terrorism because they included “serious damage to property.”

Palestine Action will join more than 80 groups banned as terrorist organizations by the British government, including the Islamic State, Hamas and al-Qaida, as well as Atomwaffen Division, a white supremacist group.

In a statement responding to the government’s announcement Monday, Palestine Action called the ban “unhinged” and said it was “plainly preposterous” to list the group with terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State.

A spokesperson for the group said that Cooper had made a number of “false claims” and added that its lawyers “are pursuing all avenues for legal challenge.”

Jonathan Hall, the British government’s adviser on terrorism laws, told The New York Times that to his knowledge the ban would be the “first time that a group has been proscribed on the basis of serious damage to property” in Britain rather than because of the use of, or support for, serious violence.

Court to hear case of Rastafarian prisoner’s shaved dreadlocks

WASHINGTON (NYT) — The Supreme Court said Monday that it would decide whether a Rastafarian man may sue prison guards in Louisiana who shaved off his dreadlocks in seeming violation of an appeals court’s ruling about how the state must treat members of his faith.

The case concerns Damon Landor, whose faith requires him to let his hair grow long. When he started a five-month prison term for drug possession in Louisiana in 2020, his dreadlocks fell nearly to his knees.

Landor was wary of the state’s prison system, according to a lawsuit he later filed, and he kept a copy of a 2017 judicial decision with him. That ruling, from a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, said that Rastafarian inmates in Louisiana must be allowed to keep their dreadlocks under a 2000 federal law protecting prisoners’ religious freedom.

After consulting the warden, two guards handcuffed Landor to a chair, held him down and shaved his head to the scalp.

“When I was strapped down and shaved, it felt like I was raped,” Landor said in a statement last year. “And the guards, they just didn’t care. They will treat you any kind of way. They knew better than to cut my hair, but they did it anyway.”

The case is in an early stage, and courts have assumed that Landor’s account of what happened to him is true. Officials in Louisiana have so far not disputed it.