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When news organizations around the world have faced criticism, they have historically turned to specialists: ombudsmen, in-house critics empowered to investigate their employers’ coverage and report their findings to the public.

But when CBS News appointed one last year, under an agreement with the Federal Communications Commission, it took a different tack. It tapped Kenneth Weinstein to flag complaints privately to its executives, pitching him in the hiring announcement as “an independent, internal advocate for journalistic integrity and transparency.”

As CBS News has been shaken by infighting between management and its star correspondents this year, Weinstein’s silence is being criticized by media experts. They say Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, has essentially hired a watchdog who doesn’t bark.

In the nine months since he was hired, Weinstein has issued no public statements about CBS News’ coverage or its controversies. He has not issued any guidance or feedback in staffwide emails or memos, three employees said. He has told some employees that he is scheduled to work only one day per month, two people said, though one said he responded to queries outside his monthly workday.

Most ombudsmen are much more public facing, said Jeffrey Dvorkin, a former NPR ombudsman who wrote the handbook for the Organization of News Ombuds and Standards Editors. That handbook says ombudsmen should report to the public, usually in a weekly column or mutually agreeable time slot.

Part of “stewarding public trust,” as Weinstein promised to do in his hiring announcement, is addressing the public, Dvorkin said.

“What’s the point then?” he said of CBS News’ decision not to require Weinstein to publish anything. “How is an ombudsman going to convey the public’s concerns, both internally and externally?”

Paramount said in a statement that Weinstein had been doing his job.

“He’s there to review concerns about CBS News’ reporting and coverage through a process that has been clear from the beginning,” the statement said. “Since September, he’s independently assessed the issues brought to him and, when appropriate, discussed them with CBS News and Paramount Skydance leadership.”

After Weinstein flags potential problems to Paramount’s executives, they decide whether to raise them with CBS News.

Since Weinstein was hired, Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief of the network, has been accused of injecting political bias into stories by three high-profile journalists for CBS’s 60 Minutes. She fired them all as part of a broader shake-up of the show. The remaining three correspondents said they would stay only because they didn’t want the show to die. (CBS News has denied the allegations of editorial meddling.)

Many newsrooms have done away with their ombudsmen. Some, like the New York Times, which dropped the position in 2017, argued that they were anachronisms in an era of instant online criticism. Others have cited dwindling resources. In addition to the Times, the Washington Post, ESPN, and the Boston Globe did away with their in-house critics in the last quarter-century; NPR and PBS are among the last remaining U.S. news organizations that employ a full-time public editor.

The FCC announced the creation of the CBS News ombudsman when it approved Skydance’s acquisition of Paramount in July. The agency’s chair, Brendan Carr, had been investigating a complaint about a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris from the previous fall, but allowed the deal after the company agreed to employ, for two years, an ombudsman who would evaluate claims of bias. (President Donald Trump sued Paramount over the interview. Press freedom advocates said the controversy was baseless.)

Carr said the move would “promote transparency and increased accountability.”

In September, Paramount announced that it had found its pick: Weinstein, a veteran of the Hudson Institute, a right-leaning Washington think tank. Though he had no experience overseeing news coverage, Weinstein had served on the board of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, an independent federal agency that oversees U.S. government-supported civilian media such as Voice of America. There, he worked alongside Jeff Shell, who would become Paramount’s president.

Though Weinstein does not respond to complaints publicly, he is easy to reach. CBS News set up a website where viewers can submit their concerns, anonymously or by name. One of the people said that many of the notes Weinstein received focused on the network’s coverage of the war in the Gaza Strip.

At least one inquiry to Weinstein has been made public. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) sent him a letter in December to ask for a full accounting of the network’s decision-making around a November interview with Trump.

But Weinstein did not reply. Instead, Paramount’s general counsel sent a letter to Raskin explaining that the interview had been edited for length.

In December, after a 60 Minutes correspondent, Sharyn Alfonsi, accused Weiss of meddling in one of her stories, media critics mused publicly about whether Weinstein would weigh in.

“I wonder if the CBS News ombudsman will have anything to say about this,” Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst, wrote on social media. Eric Deggans, the Knight professor of journalism and media ethics at Washington & Lee University, posted: “Wonder if Weiss will ever say exactly why she pulled the story? Or if CBS News new ombudsman will somehow surface?”

Carr, at least, does not seem concerned by the public silence from Weinstein.

This month, after Weiss fired the three 60 Minutes correspondents, Carr was asked directly whether Weinstein would look into their complaints of editorial interference.

Jake Tapper, an anchor on CNN, sat down with Carr and pointed out that the FCC had pushed for an ombudsman to evaluate claims of bias, and asked whether Weinstein should investigate.

“I don’t think so,” Carr said.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

An Iranian court has sentenced an outspoken female singer to 74 lashes for performing at a concert without wearing a hijab, according to a family member and state media news reports. The punishment indicated a possible tightening of religious rules for women under an Iranian political order reshaped by war.

The singer, Parastoo Ahmadi, was sentenced last week at a closed trial in Qom province along with eight band and crew colleagues.

A video of the 2024 performance, in which the singer’s hair, arms, and shoulders are uncovered, in defiance of Iranian law, went viral on YouTube.

Ahmadi and her colleagues were also banned from performing or leaving the country for two years, said the family member who asked to remain anonymous, fearing reprisal for speaking to the media. Two of the nine individuals sentenced were not in Iran when the verdict was announced, the family member said.

The sentencing came just days after Iran and the United States tentatively agreed to end a monthslong conflict that has killed thousands across the Middle East and sent shock waves throughout the global economy.

The government’s crackdown on artistic expression and women’s dress has dampened hopes among some Iranians for a more moderate postwar order.

“Besides being an inhumane and humiliating punishment, the 74-lash sentence against Parastoo Ahmadi simply for singing without compulsory hijab is a dangerous signal that the regime, emboldened by the peace deal with the U.S., may intensify its crackdown on women,” said Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, director of the Norway-based Iran Human Rights.

The strikes against Iran by the United States and Israel that began in February killed several key figures, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who oversaw the violent and repressive theocracy over nearly four decades.

President Donald Trump justified the war, in part, by saying the United States intended to help Iranians overturn their leaders. “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING — TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he wrote on social media in January.

That month, Iranian authorities responded to widespread protests by killing thousands of people. Raha Bahreini, a lawyer and an Iran researcher at Amnesty International, called it a “state-orchestrated massacre.”

Now, it is not clear that the war has left Iran in less restrictive hands than before. Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, has succeeded his father as supreme leader, and a group of hard-line senior members of the Revolutionary Guard has assumed an expansive role in running the country.

In 2022, there were also hopes that change might come for Iranian women. Large protests erupted after the death of a young woman who was in the custody of the country’s morality police for violating the hijab law. The state responded by killing hundreds of people.

During the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement that followed, more Iranians decided to flout the hijab rules, and violent crackdowns appeared to abate slightly, according to a U.N. report documenting the aftermath of the protests.

It was in that context that the video of Ahmadi’s 2024 performance, in which she crooned a set of patriotic folk songs while wearing a simple black dress, went viral. The caption read: “I am Parastoo, a girl who wants to sing for the people I love. This is a right I could not ignore; singing for the land I love passionately.”

Ahmadi and two of her collaborators were briefly detained after the video was posted.

Now, with a postwar political order appearing to solidify in Iran, some in the country are looking at the sentencing of Ahmadi and her bandmates and wondering what it may mean for the future.

“Will this country ever be fixed one day?” said Mariam, 30, a teacher in Mashhad who asked that her last name be withheld for fear of reprisals. “Where in the world is a woman’s singing punishable by lashes?”

Iranian authorities have attempted to “project an image of normalcy” after the war, said Bahar Ghandehari, director of advocacy at the Center for Human Rights in Iran. But, she said, “cases like Parastoo’s expose the reality of the human rights situation in Iran: Women continue to face profound discrimination under the law, and defiance results in punishment and state violence.”

It was unclear when the authorities planned to lash Ahmadi and the other defendants. Since the 2022 protests, there have been multiple documented cases of the authorities whipping women accused of violating hijab rules or speaking out against them.

Court documents related to the trial have not been made public.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Tuesday allowed the Trump administration to resume using a fast-track deportation process throughout the country that is typically reserved for people apprehended shortly after crossing the southern border.

The decision revived a pillar of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans, after a lower court ruled last August that attempts to use the procedure to potentially remove millions of people without immigration hearings most likely violated their due process rights and risked wrongful detentions.

In a 2-1 vote, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found that it did not violate immigrants’ rights to use the policy to the maximum extent allowed by law. Judge Justin R. Walker, a Trump appointee, wrote the majority opinion, joined by Judge Neomi Rao, also a Trump appointee. Judge Robert L. Wilkins, an Obama appointee, wrote in a dissent that he would have let the lower court’s ruling stand.

Writing for the majority, Walker wrote that Congress had delegated to the executive branch decisions about which migrants to designate for expedited deportations.

“For many years, while some were designated, others were not,” he wrote. “But that changed in January 2025 when the executive expanded expedited removal to the maximum extent allowed by Congress,” he wrote.

He added that the Homeland Security Department was not legally required to tell those arrested that they could avoid expedited removal if they could prove they had been in the country continuously for at least two years.

“It is not a requirement that the government explain how the individual might prevail,” the opinion said.

Immediately upon taking office in January, Trump empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to use the process, known as expedited removal, against an expanded population of immigrants lacking legal status.

Expedited removal had been used narrowly for migrants lacking legal status who are detained near the southern border. It allows officials to deport people who have been in the country for less than two years without hearings in immigration courts.

Trump’s expanded policy encouraged agents to detain and designate for rapid removal migrants questioned even deep in the country’s interior if they could not produce proof on the spot that they had been in the country beyond that two-year threshold.

But judges have been deeply skeptical of the policy, noting that throwing out immigrants’ rights to challenge their removal in court could lead to abuse when carried out at scale.

During a hearing last December, the three-judge appeals court panel focused on how immigration agents had used the policy in 2025 before it was blocked by a lower court. Judges pressed Drew Ensign, a lawyer for the government, for specifics.

The three judges questioned why the government had waited until October 2025 to share with the court a policy memo circulated at ICE last February, which explained how and when expedited removal should be used.

The guidance instructed agents that if someone apprehended by immigration agents professed to have been in the country longer than two years, they should be given “a brief but reasonable opportunity” to provide documentation to avoid being placed in expedited removal. Walker wrote in the opinion Tuesday that as long as migrants are provided that “reasonable opportunity,” the requirements of the law had been fulfilled.

In his dissent, Wilkins wrote that the Department of Homeland Security had not disputed that in using the policy, it had deported a number of individuals who had been in the country longer than two years.

“A procedure that can result in persons being deported pursuant to the expedited removal statute without even being asked how long they have been in the country might satisfy due process for persons encountered at the border, but it is woefully inadequate for persons encountered in the interior of the country,” he wrote.

In a statement, James Percival, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, celebrated the ruling. He wrote that the department had long “arbitrarily limited expedited removal,” though the law allows it to be used more broadly.

He said the appeals court had “vindicated” the Trump administration’s practices.

Anand Balakrishnan, a lawyer representing Make the Road New York, a nonprofit immigrant advocacy group that brought the lawsuit, argued during the hearing last year that such groups had been in the dark about how the procedure had been used. He said that the decision to give migrants lacking legal status an opportunity to state their case and avoid being placed into fast-track deportation was being made by individual agents with little oversight.

“I don’t have any clue how this process is supposed to work in practice, particularly when the only check on it is that individual officer who is supposedly, in their discretion, providing them with time,” he said.

Balakrishnan said the aggressive expansion of the policy effectively left everyone without full legal status vulnerable to being placed on a fast track for deportation, including those who had lived in the country for decades and had deep ties to their communities or to U.S. citizens.

But Balakrishnan had faced skeptical questioning from Rao and Walker. At one point, Walker appeared to dismiss the case as an attempt to stall the deportation process nationally, rather than maintain what had for decades been a more circumscribed use of the expedited removal process.

Walker observed that all of the people challenging the policy were in the country illegally.

“So whether they get expedited removal or nonexpedited removal, the proper result is removal, right?” he said.

“I don’t know whether the proper result is removal,” Balakrishnan said. “I mean, the proper result would be procedures to access the relief that Congress has afforded them.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Crews began dismantling a state-run immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades on Monday, signaling its closure even as state and federal officials continued to say little about the shutdown of a year-old facility that they once praised on a near-daily basis.

State officials informed vendors in a call Monday morning that they could begin “demobilizing,” or taking down, the tents, fences, trailers, and other structures at the detention center, known as Alligator Alcatraz, according to three people familiar with the call. Vendors are supposed to make significant progress on the work by Wednesday, two of the people said.

The directive came days after the Department of Homeland Security said that all detainees had been transferred out of the remote center, which opened a little less than a year ago to much fanfare from President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis, his fellow Republican.

“As we enter into hurricane season, ICE and the state of Florida have moved illegal aliens from the soft sided facility,” the department said in a statement last Tuesday, referring to the detention center. “For the safety of the illegal alien detainees, we transferred them to other facilities.”

Last year, however, thousands of detainees spent the bulk of hurricane season at the center, which became the nation’s first state-run facility to hold federal immigration detainees. The tropical storm season runs from June 1 through Nov. 30.

Immigration lawyers and activists took last week’s statement from DHS as the latest evidence that the facility would soon close.

On Friday, Kevin Guthrie, Florida’s emergency management chief, whose agency operates the center, insisted that it remained open. “At this point in time, we have not been told to stand down, so we are still in a posture to receive detainees,” he told reporters, according to the Miami Herald.

The Florida Division of Emergency Management did not respond to requests for comment Monday. Monday morning’s call between state officials and the detention center’s vendors was first reported by CBS Miami.

The New York Times first reported last month that federal and state officials were considering closing the facility, which has cost Florida hundreds of millions of dollars to operate, by June.

When asked about a closure since then, DeSantis has said that the Homeland Security Department is reassessing its detention needs now that Markwayne Mullin is in place as the agency’s new secretary. The agency plans to sell or give away most of the 11 warehouses it bought to detain immigrants, the Times reported last week.

On Monday, DeSantis’ office referred questions about the center to the emergency management division. James Uthmeier, the Florida attorney general who was instrumental in opening the center, said Monday that he could not confirm if it was closing, though he knew that the number of detainees had been dropping.

“Alligator Alcatraz actually stayed open longer than it was intentionally planned,” he said at a news conference in Tampa. “It was never expected to be a long-term thing.”

To many who have closely followed the center over the past year, the inconsistent messaging about whether it is closing — and, if so, for what reason — has left the impression that Alligator Alcatraz, with its hefty price tag and ongoing reports of troubling conditions, has become too much of a political liability.

“It’s been an expensive failure,” said Jeff Brandes, a Republican and former state senator who now runs the Florida Policy Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization. “Nobody would say this was a success.”

The facility has cost state officials more than $1 million per day to operate, including for trucking in water and trucking out wastewater. The federal government had committed to pay the state more than $600 million to defray costs, but it has provided only a fraction of that amount so far.

This year, Florida lawmakers imposed new rules on the emergency fund that the state has been using to cover the center’s operating costs. Those rules take effect July 1, the start of Florida’s new budget year.

State officials hastily erected the detention center on a training airport about halfway between Miami and Naples, hailing it as the showcase of Florida’s cooperation with Trump’s immigration crackdown. They also erected an “Alligator Alcatraz” sign on a road leading to the facility, ignoring criticism that the moniker — and jokes they made about any escapees being intercepted by alligators — was cruel.

Detainees, their relatives, and their lawyers have regularly denounced what they have described as unsanitary and inhumane conditions at the center, allegations that state officials deny. Environmental advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against the state and the federal government, arguing that the facility was illegally constructed in sensitive wetlands.

Last week, after Homeland Security officials said that detainees had been moved out, a lawyer for the environmental groups vowed to continue the lawsuit over what he called the “secret Gulag in the Everglades.”

“They hope that they can slink away in the middle of the night without explaining to anyone what they did, why they did it, or how they proposed to clean up the mess that they’ve made,” the lawyer, Paul J. Schwiep, said at a virtual news conference Wednesday. “And we don’t intend to let them get away with it.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.