Unofficial totals following Tuesday’s election indicate that California voters have rejected a statewide ballot measure that would have amended the California Constitution to allow the state to reinstate affirmative action programs. Proposition 16, titled “Allow Diversity as a Factor in Public Employment, Education, and Contracting Decisions,” would have permitted government decision-making policies to consider race, [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday invalidated an order by the US Court of Appeal for the Fifth Circuit that granted prison officers qualified immunity in a lawsuit brought by a Texas inmate. Inmate Trent Taylor sued ten prison officials within the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for violating his Eighth Amendment rights, when they [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday vacated the decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Mckesson v. Doe, a case arising out of the Black Lives Matter movement. The case stems from a demonstration to protest the death of Alton Sterling, a Black man who was shot at close range [...]

US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo announced Thursday that “the State Department will allow US citizens born in Jerusalem to request either ‘Jerusalem’ or ‘Israel’ as their place of birth on consular documents,” including passports. The announcement is the latest in US pro-Israel policy shifts that began with President Donald Trump’s December 2017 presidential proclamation [...]

The UN announced Saturday that 50 countries have now ratified a treaty seeking to destroy all nuclear weapons and permanently ban their use—the minimum number required for the treaty to become law. The UN completed negotiations on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at its New York headquarters in July 2017. The treaty [...]

The environmental ministers of the European Council have reached an agreement to make the proposed European Climate Law legally binding, despite leaving out a 2030 emissions reduction target up for debate in December of 2020. “The EU is firmly committed to becoming climate neutral by 2050,” said the Federal Minister for the Environment of Germany, [...]

A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration acted within the law when it delayed implementing Obama administration-era rules intended to limit greenhouse gas emissions, including methane, from the nation’s landfills. The state of California in conjunction with the Environmental Defense Fund, along with several other states, sued to force the EPA to promulgate [...]

Several environmental nonprofit organizations brought a lawsuit against the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Wednesday, alleging the agency broke environmental laws by suppressing protests in Portland, Oregon with tear gas and other chemical munitions without first measuring the chemicals’ impacts on human health and the environment. The Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides, along [...]

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has signed three bills into law establishing a compassionate release program for certain inmates and also a Corrections Rehabilitation and Crime Prevention Fund. In addition to the compassion release program and crime prevention fund, the bills approved Monday will work together to require a cost-savings study of compassionate release programs and [...]

A New York federal judge Monday ordered transcripts of depositions conducted with Ghislaine Maxwell to be unsealed as soon as possible, to shed light on the sex-trafficking scheme she allegedly ran with the late registered sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell, who was arrested in New Hampshire in early July 2020, is accused of [...]