California Governor Gavin Newsom approved Assembly Bill 793 Thursday, amending parts of the California Beverage Container Recycling and Litter Reduction Act. The amended act requires beverage manufacturers to use at least 15 percent recycled plastic in their total number of plastic beverage containers by 2022. This percentage increases to 25 percent by 2025, and to [...]

Vermont’s Senate voted Tuesday to override the governor’s veto of the Global Warming Solutions Act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While both the Senate and House had already passed the act, Governor Phil Scott vetoed the bill. Scott claimed the bill would lead to “inefficient spending and long, costly court battles.” Vermont requires a two-thirds [...]

Ethiopia’s attorney general filed charges on Saturday against 24 activists for alleged terrorism and incitement to violence. Jawar Mohammed and Bekele Gerba, two leading opposition politicians of the Oromo Federalist Congress, were among those charged. Jawar and Gerba belong to the ethnic Oromo group. Despite being the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia, Oromos have historically [...]

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on Wednesday changed Juan Lizcano’s death sentence to life in prison because of intellectual disability. Lizcano joins the list of five other inmates taken off Texas’s death row since the US Supreme Court invalidated Texas’s method for determining intellectual disability of death row inmates. Lizcano killed Dallas police officer [...]

A federal judge on Saturday temporarily blocked the US Postal Service (USPS) from sending election notices to Colorado households that state officials claimed contain “patently false information” about the 2020 election process in Colorado. The USPS claimed that the notices help voters understand the mail-in process. However, Colorado’s secretary of state criticized the notices as [...]

The US District Court for the Southern District of New York Thursday blocked President Trump from excluding undocumented immigrants in certain census counts. More than 20 states and cities had filed the lawsuit in response to a presidential memorandum issued in late July. This memorandum sought to reapportion the House of Representatives by excluding undocumented [...]

More than 20 states filed a lawsuit Friday against the US Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) over changes to a key environmental law. The lawsuit seeks to vacate a final rule, promulgated in July, which made various changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Since 1970, NEPA has served as the US’s “bedrock law [...]

The US Department of Justice on Wednesday executed Lezmond Mitchell, a 38-year-old member of the Navajo Nation who had been sentenced to death for the murder of Alyce Slim and her granddaughter, Tiffany Lee, in 2001. Mitchell’s death marks the fourth federal execution since the revival of federal capital punishment earlier this year. However, Mitchell’s [...]

US House Democrats on Monday revealed the Moving Forward Act, which combines various proposals into one package infrastructure plan. The Moving Forward Act proposes spending $70 billion to upgrade the energy grid. This investment will go towards strengthening existing infrastructure, as well as expanding renewable energy. The bill also proposes providing more than $500 billion [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on Tuesday lifted a preliminary injunction ordering the transfer of vulnerable inmates from Elkton Federal Correctional Institution. The injunction came as a response to a COVID-19 outbreak at Elkton. Approximately one-fourth of Elkton’s inmates have tested positive for the virus, 19 dying from it. Due to the [...]