The Missouri Senate voted in favor of legislation Thursday that would make it more challenging to amend the state’s constitution. Essentially, the legislation imposes a higher threshold for ballot initiatives submitted to Missouri voters to succeed in passing constitutional amendments. The legislation, Senate Substitution (SS) No. 4, is a substitute for Senate Joint Resolutions (SJRs) [...]

The Supreme Court of Canada agreed on Thursday to hear prosecutors’ appeal of a decision that overturned a man’s conviction for firearms offences because he was arrested after a person he was with called emergency services to report a drug overdose. In the case His Majesty the King v. Paul Eric Wilson, the court will [...]

Nigerian authorities must comply with a recent federal high court judgment ordering them to investigate and appropriately punish all attacks against journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said Thursday. The landmark judgment, delivered on February 16, could have significant implications for Nigerian journalists, who are frequently monitored, arbitrarily arrested, attacked and killed. However, the [...]

Federal prosecutors indicted freelance journalist Tim Burke on Thursday for allegedly illegally accessing computer servers of several media companies. According to Burke’s indictment, in February 2023, Burke entered into a conspiracy with an unnamed co-conspirator to access private servers owned by the National Sports League (NSL), as well as the company StreamCo Inc., which provides [...]

A Texas judge ruled in favor of Barbers Hill Independent School District on Thursday, finding that the school district did not violate a new state law prohibiting race-based hair discrimination when it punished a black student for refusing to change his hairstyle. The case involved Darryl George, a junior in high school, who was initially [...]

Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, passed Friday legislation legalizing the limited production as well as the consumption of cannabis. The legislation was brought by the federal government, and in a roll-call vote, 407 MPs supported the law, 226 opposed it and four abstained. The legislation faced opposition from the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU)/Christian Social [...]

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled Thursday in M.H. and S.B. v. Hungary that Hungarian authorities violated Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights by arbitrarily detaining two minors who crossed the Hungarian border in 2016. Hungarian authorities detained the minors for about three and two months, respectively. The first minor was [...]

Former US President Donald Trump asked the federal judge overseeing his criminal retention of classified documents case on Thursday to dismiss the case based on a claim of presidential immunity. Trump currently faces 40 criminal charges in the case. His motion to dismiss only deals with the first 32 counts of the indictment against him, [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and ACLU of South Carolina filed a lawsuit against the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) on Thursday, claiming the department’s ban on news media interviews for incarcerated people violates the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The department’s policy explicitly prohibits “personal contact interviews” with inmates, and in [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report Thursday detailing an increase in countries sanctioning human rights abuses outside their borders. Normally this would take the form of a former citizen of the nation who had either been exiled or forced to flee being harassed or worse by their nation of origin. These breaches have occurred [...]