When the Supreme Court ruled on March 4, 2024, that former President Donald Trump could appear on state presidential ballots for the 2024 election, it did not address an idea that seemed simple and compelling when Justice Brett Kavanaugh raised it during the Feb. 8, 2024, oral arguments in the case: “What about the idea...
The evidence does not support disqualifying District Attorney Fani Willis. But Nathan Wade needs to step aside. As television drama, it could not have been more riveting: one part Perry Mason, one part General Hospital, and one part House of Cards. It featured damaging testimony suggesting that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis might not...
A review of Lee McIntyre, “On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy” (MIT 2023) In his 1962 book, “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” future Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin predicted a time in which our ability to technologically shape reality would become so sophisticated that our creations would...
Employers making hiring decisions, landlords considering possible tenants and schools approving field trip chaperones all widely use commercial background checks. But a new multi-institutional study co-authored by a University of Maryland researcher shows that background checks themselves can’t be trusted. Assistant Professor Robert Stewart of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Associate Professor Sarah Lageson...
New legal protections are needed to empower the media to play its vital role in informing citizens about their government. The press and the executive branch routinely battle over access to government secrets. Frequently reporters seek to extract information the government would prefer to withhold and to withhold information the government would prefer to extract....
Senior Biden administration aides summoned Amazon officials to the White House during the height of the pandemic to discuss “propaganda and misinformation” in books for sale on the retail giant’s website that questioned the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. White House officials “spent a week berating Amazon” in March 2021 over books related to “vaccine misinformation” and asked what steps...
In a new JAMA viewpoint, Boston University School of Public Health researchers Sondra Crosby and Leonard Glantz denounce rectal feeding practices that occurred at these prisons, and call for medical officers who enabled this “medicalized rape” to be held accountable for violating ethical and legal standards. Nearly 10 years ago, a US Senate Intelligence committee report detailed for the first time the horrors of forced rectal...
Recent U.S. wildfire events — including the 2023 Maui wildfire in Hawaii, the 2022 Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon fire in New Mexico, and the 2020 Cameron Peak Fire in Colorado — are tragic examples of how disadvantaged communities can suffer most during and after a wildfire. While all three fires had a devastating impact on an...
City lawmakers in Brazil have enacted what appears to be the nation’s first legislation written entirely by artificial intelligence — even if they didn’t know it at the time. The experimental ordinance was passed in October in the southern city of Porto Alegre and city councilman Ramiro Rosário revealed this week that it was written...
Should it be legal to take away the guns of people who are under a domestic violence protective order, which aims to shield victims from their abusers? That’s the question posed in one of the biggest cases of the current Supreme Court term, focused on the limits of individual gun rights, which will be argued...
