• Utah Supreme Court Upholds Right to Refuse to Tell Cops Your Passcode

    The Utah Supreme Court ruled that prosecutors violated a defendant’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination when they presented testimony about his refusal to give police the passcode to his cell phone. The Utah court’s opinion is the latest in a thicket of state supreme court opinions dealing with whether law enforcement agents can compel suspects to disclose or enter their passwords.

  • U.S. Elected Officials Targeted by Vandalism, Threats Following October 7 Attacks

    In the weeks following the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel, political activists have targeted elected officials – and their offices – with harassment and vandalism. Many of these incidents featured anti-Israel rhetoric, allegations of support for genocide and demands for a ceasefire.

  • U.S. Election: How Populists Encourage Blind Mistrust – and How to Push Back

    At the heart of liberal democracy lies the principle ofnumerous institutions which operate independently to balance competing interests. For this principle to work, it’s important that the public trust that these diverse voices act in good faith. Populists, however, seek to chip away at this by accusing a wide variety of organizations as either being run by “elites,” or working as agents of elite interests. Details may vary from country to country, but the overall function remains the same: to discredit democratic institutions or the media. As the US gears up for the 2024 election, it’s crucial for people to understand how populists cultivate blind mistrust of independent institutions.

  • Democracy “Erodes from the Top”: How Elites Nurture Illiberal Populism

    Liberal democracy is losing steam,with third of Europeans voting for populist, anti-establishment parties. Recent studies show that it is elites, not the “masses,” who destroy democracies, but: If demagogues get an opportunity to capture democratic institutions, they can often do so without resistance from the citizenry, aspeople are reluctant to punish politicians for anti-democratic behavior if doing so runs against their own party or policy preferences.

  • Yes, Trump Is Disqualified from Office

    And no, it’s not undemocratic to use the Fourteenth Amendment to keep him off the ballot: Disqualifying Trump from becoming president again under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment is well justified on legal and moral grounds, and any pragmatic concerns are outweighed by the likely benefits. Barring Trump is far from a complete cure for the problems that ail our political system. Much else needs to be done to address potential threats to democracy, and improve its functioning. But disqualifying a former president whose words and deeds prove him to be a dangerous menace to liberal democracy would be a step in the right direction.

  • Anti-Semitism on U.S. College Campuses

    A new survey asked students whether they have experienced any adverse academic, social, or other consequences as a direct result of 10/7 and its aftermath, as well as their opinions about their university’s response to the Hamas attacks on Israel and the resulting conflict. The results were sobering.

  • Interference-Free Elections? How Quaint!

    There are three major elections taking place in 2024: in Taiwan, the United States, and Russia. So, what are the chances that we’ll see cyber-enabled disruption campaigns targeting each of these polls? Tom Uren writes that in the case of the upcoming U.S. election, it seems inevitable.

  • Texas Must Remove Floating Barrier from Rio Grande, Fifth Circuit Court Orders

    The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Texas on Friday to remove the floating barrier it deployed in the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass this summer, affirming a lower court’s ruling. The appeals court upheld an earlier ruling by an Austin federal judge to remove the 1,000-foot-long barrier the state deployed near Eagle Pass.

  • How Word Choices in the Mainstream News Media Signal a Country's Level of Peace

    By analyzing the frequency of certain words within mainstream news media from any country, a machine learning algorithm can produce a quantitative “peace index” that captures the level of peace within that country.

  • Argentina: Can Milei’s “Radical, Untested” Ideas Supplant Peronist Clientelism?

    As an antisystem candidate and now president-elect, Javier Milei, who will become Argentina’s news president on 10 December, is not a singular phenomenon in Latin America. Dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy was key to catapulting Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Milei, however, has significantly less political experience than either of them, and his proposals are a more radical break from the past than what even most political outsiders propose.

  • Can the Democracy Europe Has Cultivated Endure?

    The modern concept of democracy originated in Europe and, from ancient Athens to 21st-century Brussels, governments have sought to ensure that elections are free and secret, state power is shared, and fundamental rights are guaranteed. But the continent is not immune to the anti-democratic developments across the world.

  • How Do Reasonable People Disagree?

    U.S. politics is heavily polarized. This is often regarded as a product of irrationality: People can be tribal, are influenced by their peers, and often get information from very different, sometimes inaccurate sources. Tribalism and misinformation are real enough. But what if people are often acting rationally as well, even in the process of arriving at very different views? A study explains how political differences can result from a process of “rational polarization.”

  • Crowdsourced Fact-Checking Fights Misinformation in Taiwan

    As journalists and professional fact-checkers struggle to keep up with the deluge of misinformation online, fact-checking sites that rely on loosely coordinated contributions from volunteers, such as Wikipedia, can help fill the gaps, Cornell research finds.

  • “Rogue” Security Officers Pose a Threat to Life and Public Safety

    Halo Solutions, a British security and safety technology firm helps stamp out fraudulent security guards at events and gigs. The issue of qualified and certified security officers becomes even more important now, ads the U.K. is about to mandate robust public security measures at public events.

  • Antisemitism and Anti-Muslim Hate Are Surging. Here's How to Curb the Worst American Tradition.

    As violence escalates in Israel’s struggle with Hamas, the potential for hate-based violence in the United States grows, too. American leaders need to step in to defuse tensions – with the awareness that the United States has a history of mirroring overseas conflicts in its own communities.