The US Department of Justice announced Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has reached a settlement agreement with Home Depot over its failure to follow rules involving lead paint in renovations. The complaint was lodged in Atlanta and claimed that Home Depot had violated the Toxic Substances Control Act. According to the complaint, Home [...]

The New Jersey legislature voted to legalize the sale of marijuana on Thursday in a move making New Jersey the first state in the region to legalize the drug. The New Jersey legislature voted to approve the New Jersey Cannabis Regulatory, Enforcement Assistance, and Marketplace Modernization Act (S21). The vote is in line with the [...]

The Teitiota family from a little-known Pacific island didn’t intend to become a catalyst for expanding the concept of asylum—but they became one anyway.  In 2015, New Zealand denied the family’s asylum claim and deported them, despite the parents’ plea that their three children’s health and well-being were at risk amid crop failure, withering coconut [...]

As the political conversation in the United States increasingly scrutinizes the problems with policing and the inequities within America’s criminal justice system, many books have been published on the topic. From Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, to Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, to Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be An Anti-Racist, these books paint a [...]

The Chilean Senate unanimously approved a bill to reserve 17 of its 155 seats for indigenous communities in its upcoming constitutional convention. The bill provides a fixed number of seats for representatives of certain indigenous communities in the country. Mapuche, the largest indigenous group, will enjoy seven seats. The Senate did not reserve seats for [...]

Federal judges in Georgia dismissed two GOP-led lawsuits Thursday that attempted to modify the state’s absentee voting rules ahead of the January 5 Senate run-off elections. The elections will determine control of the Senate in 2021. Both lawsuits allege that the mail-in absentee ballot process presents “opportunities to obscure the true identities of persons fraudulently claiming to [...]

The promulgation of the Kerala Police (Amendment) Ordinance 2020 on 21st November 2020 and its subsequent repeal in a matter of four days, with the repeal order being signed by the Kerala Governor on 25th November 2020 makes a very good case for responsive governance in the state of Kerala. The abovementioned ordinance was sanctioned [...]

A French court convicted 14 people on Wednesday as the accomplices of the Islamic extremists who carried out the 2015 terrorist attacks against the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish market. The Paris judges found the defendants guilty of various crimes including, financing terrorism, membership in a criminal network, and complicity [...]

The Trump administration finalized a rule on Tuesday allowing the US to send people seeking asylum to countries they pass through on their journey to the border. The most recent deal to come out of the Asylum Cooperative Agreement (ACA) is with El Salvador. Similar agreements also exist with Guatemala and Honduras. But critics say [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported Tuesday that Saudi Arabia is detaining hundreds of migrants, mainly Ethiopian, in degrading conditions at a deportation center in Riyadh. Migrants alleged to HRW that authorities are keeping them in overcrowded rooms for extended periods. Migrants also alleged that guards have beaten and tortured them with rubber-coated metal rods, which has [...]