Happy Wednesday in New York City, where the courts are offering no shortage of intrigue.

Yesterday, a federal appeals court overturned a September 2025, ruling that released pro-Palestinian activist Mohsen Mahdawi from federal detention.

Mahdawi made a name for himself as a student at Columbia University, where he helped organize protests against Israeli war efforts in Gaza. He was arrested during a citizenship interview in April 2025 on the grounds that his activism would roadblock peace deals in the Middle East. Last year, a federal judge in Vermont ordered Mahdawi be released and compared his arrest to McCarthy-era first amendment suppression.

The latest ruling leaves Mahdawi vulnerable to rearrest. “The government is claiming the unprecedented power to detain people for months or even years on end to censor their speech, with no ability to challenge their detention in court,” Michael Tan, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and a lawyer for Mahdawi, said in a statement.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in Manhattan denied a motion from the city of New York to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a transgender woman identified as Jane Doe, who was repeatedly placed in men’s homeless shelters. Doe claims that a 311 dispatcher blocked her from staying in a woman’s intake center until after a year of hormone replacement therapy, forcing her instead to go to a men’s shelter where she was repeatedly assaulted and harassed.

“It’s an incredible decision that reflects New York’s laws protecting trans people in shelters against discrimination and abuse,” Mariann Wang, an attorney for the firm representing Doe, told Gothamist about the court’s ruling. “We are incredibly proud and privileged to represent Jane Doe who went through so much.”

Lastly, a man arrested in Lower Manhattan after lighting a fire and setting off fireworks outside the immigration courthouse at 26 Federal Plaza was charged with arson yesterday.

The man, identified as Andrew Arrabaca, a 43-year-old Army veteran, was protesting the treatment of New York immigrants by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, a flashpoint in the national debate around President Trump’s deportation agenda. Arrabaca allegedly shouted derogatory slurs aimed at ICE agents and carried a manifesto in his backpack. He also brought axes, a machete, a hammer and knives and fired a number of pellets from an airsoft gun.

If convicted, Arrabaca faces up to seven years in prison.

After wild turkeys attacked an 83-year-old woman in May 2026, sending her to the emergency room for stitches, police warned residents of Alameda, California, to avoid interacting with the animals. Wild turkeys can be particularly aggressive during mating season. They can also damage property: digging up gardens, staining decks with their droppings and occasionally attacking cars and windows when they mistake their own reflections for rival turkeys.

Turkeys may be a nuisance to Alameda’s human residents, but they have also been highly valued by multiple cultures throughout the history of North America. Given these threats to human safety and property, is it fair to call this quintessentially American bird a pest?

As an anthropologist who studies human-animal interactions, I have found that the idea of a “pest” is a flexible concept that changes over time and across cultures. Just as one person’s weed can be another’s wildflower, the category of pest is a subjective one that depends on social, aesthetic and economic values within a particular culture.

Read on to learn more.

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