Authorities in Louisiana have arrested a man suspected of burning down three rural African American churches in the state. Holden Matthews, a 21-year-old white man, faces three state charges of simple arson of a religious building. Federal investigators are looking into whether race motived the crimes. The first fire burned St. Mary Baptist Church in Port Barre, La., last month. Days later, the Greater Union Baptist Church and Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Opelousas, La., were set ablaze. Each was more than 100 years old.

As asylum-seekers overwhelm immigration officials at the U.S. southern border, a federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked a Trump administration policy geared toward preventing sham asylum claims. U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of San Francisco ruled that the United States must put on hold its requirement that people seeking asylum at the border wait in Mexico while their cases are processed. He gave the federal government until Friday to appeal before the ruling takes effect.

One of the 33 parents charged in the college admissions bribery scandal agreed to plead guilty Wednesday. Peter Jan Sartorio, a packaged-food entrepreneur from California, disclosed the deal as Hollywood actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin appeared in federal court in Boston, along with some of the other defendants. Prosecutors accuse Sartorio, 53, of paying $15,000 in cash to have someone correct his daughter’s answers on the ACT college entrance exam. The exact charges to which he planned to plead were not immediately clear.

UPDATE: The U.S. Senate voted 51-48 Wednesday to limit debate on nominations for lower-level federal judgeships and executive appointments, a change that will speed confirmation of President Donald Trump’s nominees. The rules will allow a simple majority in the Senate to break a filibuster of a nominee’s confirmation after two hours instead of 30. The change will not apply to White House appointees to the Cabinet, Supreme Court, or appellate courts. Every Democrat opposed the measure, and Republican Sens.

UPDATE: Attorney General William Barr said Friday he should be able to deliver a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative report to Congress by mid-April. In a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary committees, Barr said he would remove from the report any grand jury material, information that would compromise sensitive sources and methods, facts that could affect ongoing investigations, and anything that could infringe on the personal privacy and reputation of “peripheral third parties.”

President Donald Trump, after several days of criticism, said Thursday he was backing off a budget request to cut funding for the Special Olympics. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos defended the proposed cut earlier this week as one of the “tough choices” her department had to make as it sought to reduce the 2020 budget by $7 billion. The plan would have cut funding for the sports organization for people with disabilities by $17.6 million, about 10 percent of the group’s overall revenue.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday declined to stop the Trump administration from enforcing its ban on bump stock devices, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire in rapid succession, similar to machine guns. The ban took effect Tuesday.