Laws and regulations

Federal Judge Blocks Texas Law Allowing Police to Arrest Migrants Suspected of Being in Country Illegally
Senate Bill 4 was Texas’ latest attempt to deter people from crossing the Texas-Mexico border amid a surge in migration. SB 4 was scheduled to take effect Tuesday. “SB 4 threatens the fundamental notion that the United States must regulate immigration with one voice,” Judge David Ezra wrote.
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New York Appeals Court Strikes Down Law Allowing Non-Citizens to Vote
The law, pushed through the Democratic-controlled Legislature last year, was expected to add another 800,000 new eligible voters in New York City, which has a population of nearly 8.5 million. “As there is no reference to noncitizens, and thus, an irrefutable inference applies that noncitizens were intended to be excluded from those individuals entitled to vote in elections,” the court said.
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Top Lawmaker Warns U.S. 'Less Prepared' for Election Meddling
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner said that the prevalence of artificial intelligence could also make Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential election look “like child’s play.”
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Berkeley K-12 Schools Accused of "Severe and Persistent" Antisemitic Bullying
A complaint filed with the Department of Education charges that the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) for failing to take action to end nonstop bullying and harassment of Jewish students by peers and teachers since Oct. 7. According to the complaint, Berkeley administrators have ignored parent reports and knowingly allowed its K-12 schools to become hostile environments for Jewish and Israeli students.
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Farrakhan Responds to Israel-Hamas War with Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories
The Nation of Islam (NOI) held its annual Saviours’ Day conference at the Huntington Place convention center in Detroit, Michigan, on February 22–25. As in years past, the event featured significant antisemitism, including from longtime NOI leader and keynote speaker Louis Farrakhan.
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Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin and the Pernicious Myth of the Free Market of Ideas
The so-called free market of ideas asserts that if we encourage all points of view into the digital town square and let them thrash it out according to the natural laws of competition, good ideas will flourish, and bad ones will sink. The wrongheadedness of this idea needs to be called out.
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Lifting of Federal Funding Ban Tied to Increase in Gun Violence Research
The lifting of a two-decade drought in federal funding for firearm injury prevention research was strongly associated with an increase in both clinical trials and publications on gun violence, according to a new report.
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Ongoing Conspiracies Pushed Out the Elections Staff in This Texas County. The New Director Won’t Budge.
Jim Riley, who took the job as elections administrator in Gillespie County more than a year after the entire staff there quit, says he won’t give in to demands from voter fraud activists who want to ditch electronic voting equipment and hand count ballots.
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Shoring Up Ports to Withstand Cyberattacks
There are more than 300 ports in the United States, employing an estimated 31 million Americans, and contributing about $5.4 trillion to the country’s economy The White House is moving forward with reforms aimed at shoring up cybersecurity at U.S. ports, some of which may already be in danger of falling under the sway of hackers linked to China.
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AI and Election Integrity
We don’t yet know the full impact of artificial intelligence-generated deepfake videos on misinforming the electorate. And it may be the narrative around them — rather than the deepfakes themselves — that most undermines election integrity.
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Compulsory Voting Can Reduce Political Polarization in the U.S.: Study
Introducing compulsory voting in the United States and other majoritarian democracies, with meaningful and enforceable penalties for abstention, has the potential to reduce political polarization and protect democratic institutions from anti-democratic threats, according to a groundbreaking paper.
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Disinformation Threatens Global Elections – Here’s How to Fight Back
With over half the world’s population heading to the polls in 2024, disinformation season is upon us — and the warnings are dire. Many efforts have focused on fact-checking and debunking false beliefs. In contrast, “prebunking” is a new way to prevent false beliefs from forming in the first place. Polio was a highly infectious disease that was eradicated through vaccination and herd immunity. Our challenge now is to build herd immunity to the tricks of disinformers and propagandists. The future of our democracy may depend on it.
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AfD’s Remigration Agenda: Germany’s Challenge of Far-Right Extremism
In November 2023, the German populist, far-right AfD organized a covert meeting in Potsdam which featured the leader of the ethnonationalist Identitarian Movement, Martin Sellner. The attendees, adherents of a conspiracy theory commonly known as the Great Replacement, which claims that there is a deliberate attempt to replace the white European population with migrants of color, debated ways forcefully to deport migrants who failed to assimilate, had non-German lineage, or demonstrated support for asylum seekers.
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Seeking Protection: How the U.S. Asylum Process Works
Record numbers of migrants seeking to cross the southern U.S. border are challenging the Joe Biden administration’s attempts to restore asylum protections. Here’s how the asylum process works.
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FBI Foils 2022 Plot by Militiamen to “Start a War” at the Texas-Mexico Border
A Tennessee man arrested Monday hoped to travel to the southern border with a militia group that allegedly plotted to go “to war with the border patrol,” believing that the country was being invaded by migrants.
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