The Justice Department today announced an important change in policy: Local police will be able to use their body-worn cameras when they’re involved in a task force with federal officers. Over the past decade we’ve seen a huge and somewhat successful push to have police wear cameras. The aim is to better document their behavior, […]
Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray frequently and insistently demand that social media platforms and messaging apps implement encryption backdoors that allow law enforcement to bypass user security in order to access communications. Cybersecurity experts and tech companies warn that such backdoors will inevitably compromise everybody’s data and lead to hacking and […]
Citizens of Illinois pay a lot of taxes, but on Election Day, state leaders are begging its residents for permission to tax them even more. The state currently ranks seventh nationally in sales taxes and second in property taxes. But Illinois is one of only 11 states that have a flat income tax rate for […]
President Donald Trump has granted clemency to five federal inmates, putting the total for his first term at 16 commutations and 27 pardons. On Wednesday the White House announced that Trump had commuted the sentences of five prisoners who have already served years in federal prison for drug or fraud crimes. Lenora Logan served 27 […]
Thursday night’s final presidential debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden was notable in that neither man rushed to the defense of America’s tendency to throw people in jail to serve long sentences for crimes, even if both men have records of wanting to do so. Biden reiterated his position on […]
Same-sex couples should be recognized under the law, Pope Francis said in a new documentary that premiered in Rome today. “What we have to create is a civil union law,” he said in an interview for the documentary Francesco, according to Jesuit magazine America. “That way they are legally covered. I stood up for that.” […]
Today the Department of Justice, joined by the governments of 11 states, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google in which they accuse the internet search company of “unlawfully maintaining monopolies in the markets for general search services, search advertising, and general search advertising in the United States through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices … .” The […]
It has been nearly 70 years since the federal Bureau of Prisons executed a woman. That will change in December if Attorney General William Barr gets his way. The Department of Justice announced Friday that Lisa Marie Montgomery, 52, will be executed via lethal injection on December 8. Montgomery was convicted in 2007 of choking […]
The federal government is back in the business of executing prisoners. Prior to 2020, the last federal death row inmate to be executed was Louis Jones Jr., put to death by lethal injection in 2003. Only three federal prisoners were executed under GOP President George W. Bush, among them Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. None […]
Tonight, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden will host separate town hall events where each of them will answer questions from voters. These two events are a replacement for what was supposed to be another presidential debate, but after Trump’s COVID-19 infection, the Commission on Presidential Debates decided they’d go with a […]
