A pregnant Black activist serving four years in prison for her behavior at racial justice protests will have her sentence reconsidered as she struggles to reach her due date behind bars. Raising questions about free speech and equal justice, Brittany Martin, 34, was found guilty this spring of breaching the peace in a high and aggravated manner over comments she made to police. Her lawyers have been pushing for a lesser sentence amid increasing concerns about her health and that of her baby, due in November. Advocates with Black Voters Matter have been circulating a petition calling for her release. Civil rights attorney and former state lawmaker Bakari Sellers will tell the judge on Sept. 12 that the punishment is unjust. “She’s in jail because she talked in America,” said Sybil Dione Rosado, her trial attorney. “She’s a dark-skinned Black woman who is unapologetically Black and radical."

The Senate candidate decried the "miserably peculiar American diety [sic] called Democracy" and more in emails to his Stanford vegetarian co-op.

Legal analysts lit up social media on Monday in response to the broad and potentially devastating order by Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Donald Trump appointee to the Southern District of Florida, temporarily halting the criminal investigation of the former president and his alleged pilfering of classified documents. Her order further authorized a special master to identify and return the small fraction of materials seized in last month’s court-approved search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence that may belong to him. One analyst after another meticulously detailed the failings of Cannon’s reasoning: It was “untethered to the law,” “a political conclusion in search of a legal rationale,” “deeply problematic,” “laughably bad.” At some point, one truly runs out of euphemisms for lawless partisan hackery. It’s possible to agree with every one of these criticisms but still find them less than satisfying. Because at the end of the day, no matter how much withering criticism she faces, Cannon still gets to put on the black robe and run interference for her benefactor. She will still get a standing ovation at some future Federalist Society gathering. She remains in control of this case. But it’s not just Cannon: Many smart lawyers also noted that the Justice Department now faces the unenviable task of having to appeal this decision up to higher courts that are filled with Trump appointees, which takes the sting out of the opprobrium: For all we know, the Trump-stacked 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals or five radical justices on the Supreme Court may also greet her outrageous decision with a standing ovation. So the problem is not just the extreme and heinous flaws in Cannon’s ruling. It’s also the Trump-shaped world in which Cannon operates, with impunity, which we will all have to endure for the foreseeable future. It’s the brutal reality that we may face a steady stream of depraved decisions like Cannon’s for the rest of our lives—and the pain of hearing from every quarter that nothing can be done to remedy it. We watched the same pattern play out at the end of this last Supreme Court term. One case after another blew up decades of existing precedent and tests and doctrine and replaced them with Rorschach exams that transformed contemporary Republican policies into constitutional law. Smart lawyers dutifully digested these opinions and set to work figuring out just how the EPA, or public school districts, or state legislatures that want to stop mass shootings can plausibly work around these new tests. And of course, were we living in a rational regime in which the rule of law governed, that would make perfect sense. But if the last term at the Supreme Court and indeed Cannon’s baffling new order mean anything, they signify that in this new age of legal Calvinball, one side invents new “rules” and then the other scrambles to try to play by them. For every single legal thinker who read the Mar-a-Lago order to mean, quite correctly, that ex-presidents are above the law, furrowing your brow and pointing out its grievous errors only takes you halfway there. The better question is what, if anything, do you propose to do about it? The furrowing is cathartic, but it’s also not a plan. If there were a principle that best embodies why progressives are losing ground so quickly—even as they are correct on the facts, and the law, and the zeitgeist—it must be this tendency to just keep on lawyering the other side’s bad law in the hopes that the lawyering itself will make all the bad faith and crooked law go away. But for those who are genuinely worried that democracy will rise or fall based on whether a case lands before their judges or others, merely explaining legal flaws in pointillist detail isn’t an answer. And soberly explaining that Cannon was wrong about most stuff but correct about two things is decidedly not an answer, either. You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to them.

Police arrested Ashley Banks on May 25 with an unregistered gun and a small amount of marijuana. Under normal circumstances, the 23-year-old from Gadsden would have been able to post bond and leave jail until her criminal trial. But Banks admitted to smoking pot on the same day she found out she was pregnant – two days before her arrest. In Etowah County, that meant she couldn’t leave jail unless she entered drug rehab, leaving her in limbo for three months. She’s not the only one, according to attorneys involved in her case. Several pregnant women and new moms accused of exposing their fetuses to drugs have been held for weeks or months inside the Etowah County Detention Center under special bond conditions that require rehab and $10,000 cash. "The court has a duty to consider the safety of the children and others within our community," wrote the judge when denying the release of a mother arrested at the hospital six days after giving birth.

Conversations about debt are never purely about economics. They are always, also, conversations about power, morality and shame. The debate over President Biden’s student loan relief plan is no exception. Immediately after the initiative was announced, opponents of debt cancellation began denouncing slacker baristas, overeducated Ivy League lawyers and impractical lesbian dance theory majors. Immune to accusations of hypocrisy, Republican members of Congress who had received hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars in federal relief castigated student debtors who might receive $10,000 to $20,000 in aid. It was a stark reminder that shame, like wealth, is not evenly distributed in our society. For working-class people, insolvency is often seen as a sign of profligacy and personal irresponsibility, while large corporations and the wealthy routinely walk away from their obligations and are celebrated as savvy for doing so. Donald Trump can boastfully call himself the “king of debt” for his string of strategic bankruptcies; the average debtor would never dare. Debts are, first and foremost, financial burdens. But most people in arrears must shoulder a boulder of shame as well. This is the factor most commentary about Mr. Biden’s student debt relief plan has missed. The mass cancellation of federal student loans will not only remove a crushing economic weight for tens of millions of people; it will lift a significant emotional one, too. This psychological shift could, in turn, have further political implications, by emboldening those who find their obligations overwhelming to engage in collective action aimed at winning more relief and changing the policies that make indebtedness so pervasive. To understand what a pivotal moment this is, we must first appreciate just how profoundly the moral decks are usually stacked against regular debtors. Even the seemingly innocuous phrase “loan forgiveness” implies culpability and blame, when in reality the majority of debtors are simply struggling to make ends meet — a problem likely to be most acute for Black and brown people, who tend to lack family wealth and access to credit on fair terms.

The names of hundreds of U.S. law enforcement officers, elected officials and military members appear on the leaked membership rolls of a far-right extremist group that's accused of playing a key role in the Jan.

Earlier this year, Motherboard reported about an internal Facebook document that said the company has no idea where users’ data goes, and what the company is doing with it. During a previously sealed court hearing in March, two veteran Facebook engineers confirmed what the leaked document revealed. “It would take multiple teams on the ad side to track down exactly the—where the [user] data flows,” said Eugene Zarashow, a Facebook engineering director who’s worked at the company since 2011, according to his LinkedIn profile. “I would be surprised if there's even a single person that can answer that narrow question conclusively,” Zarashow added, referring to the question of exactly where personal data may be stored within 55 Facebook subsystems, which were the subject of the hearing. A transcript of the engineers’ testimony was included in a newly unsealed court document. The Facebook’s engineers testimony was first reported by The Intercept.

Dallas' encampment sweeps have gotten more tense in recent months, with some activists showing up in protest with rifles. The city has a plan to deal with the armed encounters.

The massive field at Hosford Middle School in Southeast Portland had, for decades, been used as a de facto dog park. For most of those years, it was a peaceful relationship between pup owners and the school: Dogs could roam the field surrounding the school so long as owners cleaned up after their pooches and kept them leashed. But last year, Portland Public Schools finished erecting a fence around the field and locked its gates, after a number of incidents since 2019, including a student being bitten by a dog and an armed man wandering onto the property. Since then, dog owners have been routinely cutting locks, entering the field and getting in heated confrontations with school security guards. And the battle has escalated since school began last week. In a letter sent to school families and neighbors last week, Hosford principal Jill Liddle wrote that dog owners were regularly harassing, following and threatening school staff since school had begun. She reported that people were throwing feces at the building. A video shared with WW shows a campus security guard asking a dog walker to keep his dog on a leash as he’s leaving the field. The man starts screaming at the guard: “Fuck you! We hate you! We fucking hate you! The whole community despises you now! We’re going to keep cutting this shit open day after day!” The guard reminds the man it’s his own tax dollars paying for the repairs, and the dog owner approaches him, yelling: “Why don’t you shut your fucking mouth? You’re obviously fucking unhinged!”

Athletes are increasingly being hospitalized — or worse — from trying to cut weight. Will combat sports ever stop it?

What has Johnson’s culture of corruption wrought?

With cannabis now legal, people return to the plant traditionally used to add a savory characteristic to their dishes.

If the drug becomes significantly cheaper than newer, better diabetes treatments, more people could die from the disease.

California lawmakers passed a bill that aims to promote pay equity by requiring employers to post salary ranges with job listings in the state. The bill, SB 1162, "would require an employer with 15 or more employees to include the pay scale for a position in any job posting." It also would require companies to include median and mean hourly rates for each combination of race, ethnicity, and sex within each job category in their pay data reports to the state. The legislation will become law in California if Governor Gavin Newsom signs the bill before September 30, 2022. Newsom has not expressed an opinion on the bill. SB 1162 is similar to a Colorado law passed to deal with salary disparities. Colorado approved the Equal Pay for Equal Work Act in 2019 and created rules to implement the law in 2021. However, employers like DigitalOcean have ducked Colorado's rules by not offering certain positions to state residents.

After an unprecedented harmful algae bloom first turned San Francisco Bay a murky brown color and then littered its shores with dead fish, many people assumed it was yet another climate disaster to add to the list, along with extreme drought, wildfires and heat waves. While scientists suspect climate change played a role in triggering the bloom, what fueled it is not a mystery. Algae blooms need food to grow, and this one had plenty: nutrients originating in wastewater that the region’s 37 sewage plants pump into the bay. In other words — we wouldn’t have this problem without the poop and pee of the Bay Area’s 8 million residents.

Over half a million Pacific Gas and Electric Company customers may be impacted by rotating outages Tuesday as the state continues to deal with a brutal heat wave.

Emails and interviews reveal privacy-obsessed electronics magnate Barre Seid’s long history of backing efforts to attack climate science, fight Medicaid expansion, and remake the higher education system in a conservative mold.

She was hired by Emily Carr University in an effort to recruit Indigenous faculty. Then questions arose about her identity.

Some baby boomers were permanently shaped by their participation in the countercultural protests and the antiwar activism of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Others were shaped by their aversion to those movements. Justice Samuel Alito belongs to the latter category. For many years, he lacked the power to do much about that profound distaste, and in any case he had a reputation for keeping his head down. When President George W. Bush nominated Alito to the Supreme Court, in 2005, many journalists portrayed him as a conservative but not an ideologue. The Times noted that legal scholars characterized his jurisprudence as “cautious” and “respectful of precedent.” Self-described liberals who’d known him—as an undergraduate at Princeton, as a law student at Yale, or in some later professional capacity—sketched portraits of a quiet, methodical, reasonable man. On the Court, even as Alito’s opinions aligned consistently with the goals of the Republican Party—in particular, of social conservatives—admirers praised him as pragmatic and Burkean. According to a 2018 C-span/P.S.B. poll, he was the conservative Justice the fewest Americans could name, and for years he was overshadowed by his more flamboyant late colleague, Antonin Scalia; by Clarence Thomas, whose notorious confirmation hearings were followed by a rivetingly long silence on the bench; even by Neil Gorsuch, with his cussed libertarian streak. Richard Lazarus, a professor at Harvard Law School who has studied the Court, told me that in Alito’s first years as a Justice he was known primarily as Chief Justice John Roberts’s right-hand man—“someone the Chief could assign to write an opinion” that would not be too flashy or provocative, and that “would keep five votes together when he couldn’t trust Scalia to do it, because Scalia would swing for the fences and risk losing votes.” Now, though, Alito is the embodiment of a conservative majority that is ambitious and extreme. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.) With the recent additions of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the Court, the conservative bloc no longer needs Roberts to get results. And Alito has taken a zealous lead in reversing the progressive gains of the sixties and early seventies—from overturning Roe v. Wade to stripping away voting rights. At a Yale Law School forum in 2014, he was asked to name a personality trait that had impeded his career. Alito responded that he’d held his tongue too often—that it “probably would have been better if I said a bit more, at various times.” He’s holding his tongue no longer. Indeed, Alito now seems to be saying whatever he wants in public, often with a snide pugnaciousness that suggests his past decorum was suppressing considerable resentment. Last term, Alito landed the reputation-defining assignment of writing the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion enshrined by Roe nearly fifty years ago. In May, a draft of his opinion was leaked, and from start to finish it sounded cantankerous and dismissive. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito declared. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.” He likened Roe to Plessy v. Ferguson, the notorious decision upholding segregation; approvingly cited centuries-old common law categorizing a woman who received an abortion after “quickening” as a “murderess”; and used the inflammatory word “personhood” when describing “fetal life.”

Kids in the Philippines were earning hundreds of dollars from a play-to-earn Minecraft game, until new rules sent the community into a tailspin. Not everyone shares the same outlook on play-to-earn gaming. Mikhai Kossar, a chartered accountant and a member of Wolves DAO, a group that consults with NFT gaming projects in the early stages of their development, told Rest of World that some players will always go wherever they can make more money. “They will play Pac-Man if they can earn more,” he said. According to Kossar, NFT renting mechanisms in play-to-earn games are important to keep them accessible to poorer players. “You have people that have money, but don’t have the time to play the game, and on the other hand, you have people that don’t have money but have time,” he said. He sees a future, however, where guild ownership and management could upend the model of wealthy Western players managing those in low-income countries. “Filipinos could band together to buy some assets and then rent them out to themselves and make money that way,” he said. But he also envisions NFT games that could exploit the wealth gap between players to deliver a different experience. “With the cheap labor of a developing country, you could use people in the Philippines as NPCs (“non-playable characters”), real-life NPCs in your game,” said Kossar. They could “just populate the world, maybe do a random job or just walk back and forth, fishing, telling stories, a shopkeeper, anything is really possible.”