The state Supreme Court split, 4-2, Friday on allowing Justice Phil Berger Jr. to take part in next week’s hearing in the 30-year-long education funding dispute commonly known as Leandro. That means all seven justices will take part in oral arguments on Feb. 22. Plaintiffs in the case sought Berger’s recusal because his father is an intervening party in the case as the top officer in the state Senate. The younger Berger rejected a similar recusal request in the Leandro case in August 2022. “Because it offers no new grounds for recusal, plaintiffs’ pending recusal motion amounts to an impermissible challenge to Justice Berger’s denial of their first motion,” according to the new court order signed by Justice Trey Allen. “Under the Recusal Procedure Order, when a Justice rules on a recusal or disqualification motion, ‘[t]hat determination shall be final.’ The motion is therefore dismissed.” The four-page order prompted a nine-page dissent from Justice Allison Riggs, the court’s other Democrat. She focused on the contrast between Berger’s and Earls’ recent responses to recusal requests. “In this instance, Justice Berger has opted for the alternative approach, referring the motion to the entire Court because ‘members of this Court should strive to fortify public trust, and unilateral action in this matter could undermine public confidence.’ In my view, this unnecessary commentary itself undermines public confidence in the Court,” Riggs wrote.

As the high court deliberates, policymakers are preparing for the possibility that they might solve a problem they created in the most punitive way. Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, advocates and policy analysts have warned of a homelessness “tsunami.” It’s the worst-case scenario where the combination of lost income, backlogs of owed rent, and a lack of local government foresight contribute to a surge of people losing housing and ending up on the street. Well, it has arrived—and it’s poised to get much worse as the Supreme Court is set to decide whether to make homelessness a de facto crime. This past month, many cities and counties conducted their annual point-in-time homelessness counts. The results of January’s counts won’t be known for several more months, but they’re likely to be dire. The end-of-2023 results found that approximately 653,000 people were experiencing homelessness. That’s up more than 70,000 over 2022, or a 12 percent increase. In the 12 months since that data was collected, those numbers have likely gone up. But the raw numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. As more people end up experiencing homelessness, they’re also facing increasingly punitive and reactionary responses from local governments and their neighbors. Such policies could become legally codified in short order, with the high court having agreed to hear arguments in Grants Pass v. Johnson.

In California’s struggle to create safer cities, there are those who blame crime on liberal policies aimed at reducing mass incarceration and the imaginary fallout from a police defunding movement that never happened. Robust law enforcement, they claim, is the key to improving public safety. A scathing new study argues this is not true — and hasn’t been for decades. The study comes from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice and examines crime clearance rates — a key indicator of how well police are doing their jobs — for California between 1990 and 2022. During the past three decades, the percentage of reported violent and property crimes solved by police through an arrest dropped a whopping 41%. During the same three decades, the amount California taxpayers spend to fund law enforcement has risen by a staggering 52%. The numbers only get more concerning from here. The report’s author and senior researcher at CJCJ, Mike Males, told me that over the last 30 years, the number of reported crimes to police has plunged about 50%, so it’s not like police are underperforming because they’re getting swamped in crime reports. Yet, in San Francisco and Alameda County, home to some of the state’s loudest calls for more cops and more police funding, police clearance rates are abysmal. San Francisco’s 6.7% clearance rate, and Alameda County’s 5.8% — which includes the Oakland Police Department’s 1.5% clearance rate — make them some of the worst-performing jurisdictions in California, according to the study.

Forget private developers—cities and states could just build their own housing to solve the crisis. In New York, now there’s a bill to do it.

Lough Neagh’s flies were seen as a nuisance. Now their sudden disappearance is a startling omen for a lake that supplies 40% of Northern Ireland’s water

A new legal interpretation may mean that the Dallas Community Police Oversight Board can't investigate police complaints until after a police internal affairs review.

But recent US sanctions against violent West Bank settlers have put them — and their connections to America — back on the agenda

Raw Story spent four months investigating the 2119 Blood and Soil Crew, a nationwide network of teenage Nazis. The investigation revealed that Fowler now ranks among the leaders of the network. In recent months, 2119 members have waged a campaign of targeted terror aimed at Jews, African Americans, LGBTQ+ people and leftists. Their targets include Florida, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Texas and California. In mid-November, 2119’s official Telegram channel suggested the group had expanded to 21 states. The 2119 gang’s rise as a clandestine network of teenagers who promote and carry out acts of antisemitic and racist violence hasn’t been organic. The group has undertaken a concerted marketing strategy of recruiting children by appealing to their interests, such as online gaming and skateboarding.

You have to have a heart of stone to read this without laughing.

Clara Barbour, 82, died in her Jackson home when it exploded on Jan. 24. Another house exploded three days later. A federal investigation is underway.

Coloradans voted in 2018 to amend their state constitution to ban forced labor in prison. Years later, incarcerated people are still being punished for refusing work assignments. Throughout Abron Arrington’s decades-long incarceration in Colorado, he often found himself in solitary confinement—not because he was causing trouble, but simply because he refused to work. He didn’t see the point given he was paid 13 cents an hour and figured his time could be better spent learning physics. Before Arrington was incarcerated in 1989, he was studying to get his aircraft mechanic license. But within weeks of returning home from the U.S. Air Force, at 22 years old, he was arrested and ultimately sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. In 2019, he received clemency from Governor Jared Polis and was released after three decades behind bars. “I was actually 30 years a slave,” Arrington, who is Black, told a crowd of people gathered in one of Colorado’s oldest Black churches on Juneteenth, the federal holiday that commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. “So, this is deeply personal to me.”

A revolution in education! A resuscitation of the university mission! To happen in, of all places, not the pompous old northeast or the debauched West Coast, not New York or California but the country’s southern reaches—in the Texas Hill Country, in the city of Austin, where already technologists and venture capitalists had swarmed, drawn by the absence of income tax and the looseness of labor regulations, pulled by the mild zoning laws and the natural beauty and the food trucks and the good vibes. Austin, because it was “a hub for builders, mavericks, and creators.” Here a new university: the University of Austin, or UATX. THE University of Austin is not in Austin. Not yet. It’s 200 miles northeast, in Dallas, on an office complex owned by Mr. Harlan Crow. “Old Parkland,” the complex is called. Crow, a conservative billionaire who recently made the news for funneling thousands of dollars in undisclosed gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas and his family, gives money to UATX, too. He also rents out rooms in Old Parkland to the nascent university, at what UATX founder Peter Boghossian called “a generous rate.” I would later encounter the rich Texan at several UATX lectures, squinting and smiling in preppy athleisure. Crow is a savvy investor, from a family of savvy investors. (His father, Trammell Crow, was thought to be the largest private landlord in the US.) He invests not only in real estate but ideology. He’s donated to the conservative magazine The National Review, conservative thinktank The Witherspoon Institute, and at least two powerful libertarian organizations started with funds from Charles Koch—The Institute For Justice and The Cato Institute. If Crow is putting money behind UATX, it can be inferred that he believes the school will promote the same values as other recipients of his patronage—privatizing social services, lambasting attempts to increase sexual and racial diversity in education and the workplace—and will lead to the same effect—maintaining power in the hands of wealthy white men.0

According to the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law: “stochas­tic terrorism involves ‘the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideolog­i­cally motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpre­dict­able.’” Self-described stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik, owner of the social media account Libs of TikTok, has become infamous for her viral harassment and moral panic campaigns targeting minorities— with an emphasis on vilifying LGBTQ+ existence. Since 2021, Raichik’s posts targeting advocates for and members of the LGBTQ+ community have been followed with a deluge of violent death threats (including lynching threats against the Los Angeles Unified School District). Children’s hospitals and school districts in the crosshairs of Raichik and her devoted fans have collectively suffered over 20 bomb threats so far, according to various law enforcement agencies. Detective Hanna Dvorak of the Coralville Police Department, who investigated one of these bomb threats against a junior high school in her city, told her superiors that “it appears this all stems from a post made earlier this week by Chaya Raichik and her ‘Libs of TikTok’ account.” Nowhere has Raichik’s influence been more visible than Oklahoma, where her anti-LGBTQ+ exploits earned her an official position on the Oklahoma Department of Education’s Library Media Advisory Committee by controversial far-right Superintendent Ryan Walters. Under Walters’ leadership, Oklahoma has been aggressively working to ban books and education on LGBTQ+ issues in schools across the state, with Oklahoma’s Attorney General Gentner Drummond stating that proposed rules to ban LGBTQ+ books and content were “unconstitutional and cannot be enforced.” It’s been confirmed that Raichik’s posts have fueled multiple bomb threats against schools specifically in Oklahoma. Officials from Oklahoma told NBC News that they believe Chaya Raichik’s anti-LGBTQ+ culture warring “sparked threats in their localities with her posts on social media that digitally heckle people such as drag performers, LGBTQ teachers and doctors who treat transgender patients.” One of these instances was at the Owasso School District (just outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma). In 2022, Chaya Raichik targeted an Owasso teacher for speaking out in support of LGBTQ+ students who lacked acceptance from their parents. Raichik’s post was shared thousands of times on social media and resulted in the teacher getting condemned and harassed until they resigned. The posts Raichik made about the teacher were later deleted, but have been archived. It’s unclear what prompted the deletion of the posts by Raichik. We know Raichik’s Libs of TikTok posts have contributed to a culture of intolerance against LGBTQ+ youth in schools, and now this hate may be manifesting beyond mere threats. This month, a non-binary 16-year-old student at Owasso High School was brutally murdered in the girl’s restroom. According to local news outlets and family, Nex Benedict was beaten by three older female students. The mother of Benedict’s best friend told KJRH News that "one of the girls was pretty much repeatedly beating [Benedict’s] head across the floor.” Reports say Benedict was unable to take themselves to the nurse’s office after a teacher finally intervened in the brutal assault. For reasons that remain unclear, Owasso High School refused to call an ambulance for 16-year-old Nex Benedict, who died from their injuries in the hospital the next day. A motive for this killing has not been shared by law enforcement, but we know that schools in Oklahoma have been specifically pushing violent eliminationist rhetoric against transgender and non-binary youth— a fact exemplified by the state’s hiring of Chaya Raichik following her incitements of terror against the state’s schools over LGBTQ+ rights.

A drugmaker’s feud with the DEA is exacerbating the ADHD meds crisis — at a rate of 600 million missing doses a year.

In a recent survey conducted by a panel of experts specializing in the American presidency, President Biden was ranked the 14th-best president, while his likely 2024 presidential opponent former President Trump found himself at the very bottom of the list.

The authors of the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) unveiled an amended version this week, but it’s still an unconstitutional censorship bill that continues to empower state officials to target services and online content they do not like.

The state's highest court reversed a judge's dismissal of the case involving embryos destroyed by a wandering Mobile hospital patient.

Leaked emails from the organisers of the prestigious Hugo awards for science fiction and fantasy suggest several authors were excluded from shortlists last year after they were flagged for comments or works that could be viewed as sensitive in China. In January the Hugo awards published the statistics behind the 2023 awards, which were held as part of the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in the Chinese city of Chengdu in October. The data showed that the New York Times bestseller RF Kuang and the young adult author Xiran Jay Zhao were among authors who had received enough nominations to be on the ballot in their respective categories but were deemed “not eligible” by the award’s administrators, without further explanation. The news sparked consternation in the science fiction community, with many fans and authors expressing concern that the awards had been tainted by censorship. Now emails leaked from the 2023 awards committee appear to have confirmed those fears, with a member of the 2024 Worldcon committee resigning as a result. In an email on 5 June 2023, Dave McCarty, the head of the 2023 Hugo awards jury, wrote: “We need to highlight anything of a sensitive political nature in the work. It’s not necessary to read everything, but if the work focuses on China, Taiwan, Tibet, or other topics that may be an issue *in* China … that needs to be highlighted so that we can determine if it is safe to put it on the ballot or if the law will require us to make an administrative decision about it.”

The marketing campaign for Madame Web, Sony's latest Spider-Man spin-off film, is a definitive guide on how not to promote a movie.

The owner of a Missouri-based technology business that was ordered to pay an ex-employee roughly $311,000 in unpaid wages, damages and legal costs was sanctioned Tuesday by an appellate court for briefing "deficiencies," including submitting fake cases generated by artificial intelligence.