The Supreme Court Friday granted review of Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, a case that will help determine the scope of a ruling from two years ago regarding major crimes committed in Indian country. In 2020 the justices decided McGirt v. Oklahoma, which held that a large portion of eastern Oklahoma, in fact remains an Native American [...]
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Thursday issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to increase network security monitoring for high and medium-impact bulk power systems to protect against cyberattacks. Existing Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) reliability standards focus on the security perimeter of computer networks, and there is concern that those standards do not address vulnerabilities [...]
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton Wednesday filed a lawsuit against tech giant Google for engaging in false and misleading advertising practices in violation of Texas law. The lawsuit alleges that in October 2019, Google hired iHeartMedia, the single largest owner of radio stations in the U.S., to have some of its media personalities record advertisements [...]
The New York Attorney General’s office Tuesday filed a motion to compel testimony by former president Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Ivanka Trump in connection with an investigation into the Trump Organization’s financial dealings. Attorney General Letitia James is seeking to have the court enforce subpoenas that the attorney general’s office issued to the [...]
The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the state’s new congressional map Friday, saying it violated a state constitutional amendment barring partisan gerrymandering. The 4-3 decision began by calling gerrymandering “the antithetical perversion of representative democracy.” It noted that Ohio voters passed two amendments to constrain the legislature’s ability to draw partisan legislative maps, in particular the adoption [...]
A Wisconsin county judge Thursday granted an injunction against the use of absentee ballot drop boxes in statewide elections. The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) issued guidance to county clerks about the use of drop boxes in March and again in August of 2020, in light of the growing COVID-19 pandemic. The guidance permitted, but did not [...]
A group of United Nations experts Monday condemned the U.S. Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, calling it a site of “unparalleled notoriety.” January 11 marks the twentieth anniversary of the arrival of the first terrorism suspects in Guantanamo Bay. The independent experts, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, said: Twenty years of practicing [...]
The three white men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery were sentenced to life in prison Friday by a Georgia superior court judge. Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, was killed in February 2020 by father and son Gregory and Travis McMichael and William Bryan, who pursued Arbery in their pickup truck and shot him multiple times. [...]
The US Justice Department Thursday unsealed an indictment charging a dual U.S.-Egyptian citizen with acting and conspiring to act in the US as an unregistered agent of Egypt. Pierre Girgis is a 39-year-old resident of Manhattan. He is alleged to have acted as an agent of the Egyptian government from approximately 2014 to 2019. During [...]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Thursday filed a lawsuit in Georgia, claiming that the state’s newly-drawn state House and Senate districts disadvantage Black voters. The complaint notes that Georgia is one of the fastest growing states in the nation, with much of that growth driven by an increase in the Black population which [...]
