Piraters of ‘nearly every movie’ busted

Asylum seekers sue feds over Mexico wait

Now showing in Manhattan Federal Court: Pirates of the Film Studios.

Federal prosecutors busted an international movie-pirating operation that caused “tens of millions of dollars in losses” for film studios over the course of nine years, court filings reveal.

George Bridi, Umar Ahmad and Jonatan Correa belonged to a copyright-infringement crew called “The Sparks Group” that posted “nearly every movie released by major production studios” online, according to indictments unsealed Tuesday.

The trio allegedly duped distributors in

Manhattan, Brooklyn, New Jersey and Canada into mailing them advance Blu-Ray and DVD copies of movies and television shows.

The group then cracked copyright protections on the discs and posted the movies and TV shows online ahead of official release dates, prosecutors say.

The indictments do not indicate that the accused movie pirates profited from the scheme that started in at least 2011.

An unnamed co-conspirator in the scheme lived in Westchester, according to filings. Bridi, 50, is a British national living on the Isle of Wight. Ahmad, 39, lives in Oslo.

The names of attorneys representing the men were not available.

A group of women who fled their Latin American countries seeking asylum in the United States are suing the Trump administration for sending them back to unsafe conditions in Mexico to await their immigration court hearings.

The women, suing on behalf of themselves and their young children, were all caught by the Border Patrol after entering the U.S., but were quickly forced back over the border even as their applications for asylum were pending, according to the suit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.

At issue is the Migrant Protection Protocols, implemented by the Trump administration in 2018, which allowed it to return people who cross the border back to Mexico “for the duration of their immigration proceedings.”

The lawsuit calls on the federal courts to declare the Trump administration’s enforcement of the Migrant Protection Protocols illegal, and allow the women to enter the U.S. for at least the duration of their immigration court cases.

“Substantially all asylum-seekers are returned to Mexico without consideration for their safety or their ability to litigate asylum claims while living in danger and destitution in Mexico,” wrote lawyers with the New York Civil Liberties Union, who represent the women and their families.