• Ohio Chemical Spill Draws Focus on Railroad Dangers

    The U.S. has one of the most extensive rail networks in the world, but diminishing safety standards puts people and the environment at risk. The latest accident has drawn sharp focus onto the safety standards of the highly profitable freight rail industry and its prolific lobbying against regulation.

  • The Train Derailment in Ohio Was a Disaster Waiting to Happen

    The derailment of a freight train filled with volatile chemicals in rural Ohio earlier this month captured the headlines, but researchers and chemical spill experts say it’s a situation that plays out far too often across the country. Trains carry hazardous chemicals everyday. They’re also dangerously unregulated.

  • U.S.-Mexico Border Encounters Decline After Increased Migrant Expulsions

    The number of migrant encounters at the United States-Mexico border dropped nearly 40% — from a record of about 252,000 in December 2022 to about 156,000 in January — according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. CBP credits the decrease to a parole program that began on January 5 for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

  • Arizona’s Top Prosecutor Concealed Records Debunking Election Fraud Claims

    Following the 2020 election, the Arizona attorney general’s office conducted its own through investigation, and confirmed that Joe Biden had won the state, debunking Donald Trump’s false accusations. But Mark Brnovich, the attorney general, was by then running in the GOP primary for the Senate. In an effort to court primary voters, Brnovich refused to release his office report, and “began to flirt with claims of election fraud instead,” Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Isaac Stanley-Becker write.

  • Train Derailments Get More Headlines, but Truck Crashes Involving Hazardous Chemicals Are More Frequent and Deadly in U.S.

    Highway crash of hazmat-carrying trucks do not draw national attention the way train derailments do, or trigger a flood of calls for more trucking regulation like the U.S. is seeing for train regulation. Truck crashes tend to be local and less dramatic than a pile of derailed train cars on fire, even if they’re deadlier. Federal data shows that rail has had far fewer incidents, deaths and damage when moving hazardous materials in the U.S. than trucks.

  • 5 Key Takeaways from State of Antisemitism in America Report 2022

    For too many American Jews, being Jewish no longer feels as safe as it once did. And the younger those American Jews are, the more they experience that threat firsthand.

  • Bruen Decision Takes Gun Law Back to a Time Before ‘Domestic Violence’

    The Supreme Court introduced a historical test that is upending gun laws across the country. The most recent policy to fall: a ban for subjects of restraining orders.

  • American Democracy and Pandemic Security

    Covid-19 cost the nation and the world millions of lives and trillions of dollars in economic losses and caused major societal deficits in learning, health, and well-being. The United States faced specific challenges in how its national pandemic response, rooted in its culture and federated system of public health, was organized and executed. National crises have historically brought the country together. Yet, the United States was unable to organize cohesive leadership at the national, state, local, and tribal levels, and it failed to rapidly unify its citizens to act in solidarity to suppress the emerging pandemic.

  • EFF Files Amicus Briefs in Two Important Geofence Search Warrant Cases

    Unlike traditional warrants for electronic records, a geofence warrant doesn’t start with a particular suspect or even a device or account; instead police request data on every device in a given geographic area during a designated time period, regardless of whether the device owner has any connection to the crime under investigation. The EFF argues these warrants are unconstitutional “general warrants” because they don’t require police to show probable cause to believe any one device was somehow linked to the crime under investigation.

  • The Lessons of the Electoral Count Reform Act: Next Steps in Reform

    The passage of the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA), which President Biden signed into law on 29 December 2022, suggests there are achievable goals of democracy reform even as polarization retains its grip, we now have a divided government, and a presidential election is less than two years away.

  • John Eastman and the Limits of Bar Discipline

    The memos prepared by John Eastman constitute some of the most disturbing documentation of the plot to overturn the 2020 election in favor of Donald Trump. Eastman’s legal analysis sets out a range of supposed options by which swing-state electors from states supporting Joe Biden could be disregarded, thus handing Trump a second term in office. The State Bar of California announced that it will be seeking his disbarment from the practice of law over his role fomenting the Jan. 6 insurrection. Eastman “has now entered the select club of lawyers finally facing bar discipline for their involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election,” Quinta Jurecic writes.

  • George Santos: A Democracy Can’t Easily Penalize Lies by Politicians

    Historian Sean Wilentz remarked that while embellishments happen, Santos’ lies are different – “there is no example like it” in American history, Wilentz said. The Supreme Court has concluded that lies enjoy First Amendment protection, and that the government cannot be trusted with the power to regulate lies. Moreover, one local newspaper — the North Shore Leader — did report on Santos’ misrepresentations, but his election is evidence that the loss of news reporting jobs has damaged America’s democracy.

  • Exxon Disputed Climate Findings for Years. Its Scientists Knew Better.

    Projections created internally by ExxonMobil starting in the late 1970s on the impact of fossil fuels on climate change were very accurate, even surpassing those of some academic and governmental scientists. The oil company executives sought to mislead the public about the industry’s role in climate change, contradicting the findings of the company’s own scientists and drawing a growing number of lawsuits by states and cities.

  • Gun Control Measures Associated with Reduced Police Use of Force

    As police departments and activists look for strategies to reduce excessive use of force by police, new research shows limited data, lack of transparency and irregular implementation of reforms make it difficult to determine which approaches are effective.

  • Brazil, U.S. Show That Secure Elections Require Agreement – Not Just Cybersecurity and Clear Ballot Records

    The source of the violent disputes which followed the 2020 U.S. election and the 2022 election in Brazil were not the result of procedural or technical flaws in the voting systems, but rather a failure of certain individuals living in democratic society to uphold the fundamental principles of democracy. True democracies require candidates who agree on election rules and processes in advance and agree to abide by the outcome of elections, even when they wish the results were otherwise. The alternative is continuing instability and doubt in the electorate – an outcome that serves no citizen’s interests.