David French writes: To fully understand the Trumpist threat to the rule of law, it’s necessary to discuss what the rule of law means. A nation truly governed by the rule of law isn’t going to have a perfect legal system — no human system can be perfect — but it will have a double check against injustice. The rule of law depends on both substance and process, just laws and just processes, and respect for the rule of law…
The New York Times reports: Norfolk Southern once had so few accidents and injuries that it won the rail industry’s prestigious E.H. Harriman safety award for 23 years in a row until it was retired in 2012. But in the last decade, the company has gone from an industry leader to a laggard. The rate at which its trains are involved in accidents and its workers are injured on the job has soared, putting it at or near the bottom…
Horses are an active part of life for the Lakota and many other Plains nations today. Jacquelyn Córdova/Northern Vision Productions By William Taylor, University of Colorado Boulder and Yvette Running Horse Collin, Université de Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier Few places in the world are more closely linked with horses in the popular imagination than the Great Plains of North America. Romanticized stories of cowboys and the Wild West figure prominently in popular culture, and domestic horses are embedded in…
Ronald Brownstein writes: The dilemma for the Republican Party is that Donald Trump’s mounting legal troubles may be simultaneously strengthening him as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination and weakening him as a potential general-election nominee. In the days leading up to the indictment of the former president, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced two days ago, a succession of polls showed that Trump has significantly increased his lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his closest competitor in…
The Washington Post reports: Former president Donald Trump is quite familiar with New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, the judge who oversaw the grand jury that indicted Trump this week and will preside over the criminal proceedings that follow. Merchan, 60, who has sat on the New York bench since 2009, also presided over the jury trial last year of Trump’s namesake real estate company, which resulted in a conviction in December, and the prosecution of the company’s longtime…
Al Jazeera reports: Last January, an escaped mercenary of the Wagner private military company crossed into Norway by walking over a frozen river marking the border with Russia, pursued by Russian police. Andrei Medvedev told the rights group Gulagu.net that his life was in danger, after a soldier under his command attempted to flee the Ukraine war, in which Wagner is playing a leading role, and was murdered with a sledgehammer blow to the head. Medvedev said this was standard…
Alice Speri writes: On very clear days, you can follow the rolling hills surrounding the Palestinian city of Yatta all the way to the Dead Sea on one side, the Negev desert on the other. The windswept landscape offers idyllic views, with clusters of olive trees alternating with narrow rows of cultivated land, patches of shrubs, and the occasional grazing sheep. This is also a unique observation point to watch the reality of Israeli apartheid take hold of the land….
Inside Climate News reports: A team of researchers is ringing new alarm bells over the potential dangers artificial intelligence poses to the already fraught landscape of online misinformation, including when it comes to spreading conspiracy theories and misleading claims about climate change. NewsGuard, a company that monitors and researches online misinformation, released a study last week that found at least one leading AI developer has failed to implement effective guardrails to prevent users from generating potentially harmful content with its…
CNN reports: News organizations have a message for Elon Musk: We are not going to pay you for checkmarks on Twitter. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, POLITICO, and Vox all scoffed at the notion on Thursday that they would pay Twitter for the feature, which has been free since it was introduced years ago but will soon be phased out. CNN said it has no intention of paying for Twitter’s subscription service for its…
Science News reports: The language we learn growing up seems to leave a lasting, biological imprint on our brains. German and Arabic native speakers have different connection strengths in specific parts of the brain’s language circuit, researchers report February 19 in NeuroImage, hinting that the cognitive demands of our native languages physically shape the brain. The new study, based on nearly 100 brain scans, is one of the first in which scientists have identified these kinds of structural wiring differences…
Rep. Dan Goldman writes: The rule of law that underlies our democratic values finds its roots in the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who stated: “Passion influences those who are in power … Law is reason without desire.” Our second president John Adams stressed the importance of this concept for our fledgling democracy, insisting that “it may be a government of laws and not of men.” In order to preserve fidelity to the rule of law, Adams and our other Founding Fathers…
The Washington Post reports: The office of New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Friday urged House Republicans to withdraw a demand for information on its case against former president Donald Trump, again rebuffing what it characterized as “unlawful political interference” in an ongoing criminal case. In a letter to the three committee chairmen who are pressing for documents and testimony about Trump’s case, Leslie B. Dubeck, the general counsel for Bragg’s office, chastised them for choosing to “collaborate”…
Vice News reports: Minutes after former President Donald Trump was indicted by a grand jury in New York, his supporters flooded social media and extremist message boards with violent and racist threats against the officials prosecuting Trump, as well as bloody civil war. “This cannot go unpunished,” one member of the rabidly pro-Trump message board The Donald wrote on Thursday night. “The DA needs to pay dearly.” “None of this will stop unless there is blood in the streets,” another…
Rolling Stone reports: A jury has found former internet troll Douglass Mackey guilty of violating people’s constitutional right to vote by disseminating memes encouraging Democrats to vote via text in the 2016 election. The decision comes after more than four days of deliberations. During the two-week trial, the prosecution presented testimony by MicroChip, a co-conspirator-turned-cooperating witness, who was identified by only his social media handle. On the stand, MicroChip spoke of his mission to sow chaos ahead of the election,…