Bradley Manning’s court-martial opened at Fort Meade this week, more than three years after his arrest — and press freedom advocates say the trial’s own procedural secrecy has become nearly as significant a story as the leak case at its center. A Trial Three Years in the Making Army Private First Class Manning, then 25,…
The House narrowly passed a $1.1 trillion spending bill Thursday night, averting a government shutdown just hours before the midnight deadline — but only after a last-minute revolt from within the Democratic Party nearly sank the deal entirely. A Bill With a Deliberately Split Purpose The legislation, quickly nicknamed the “CRomnibus” for combining a full-year…
A satellite symposium hosted by a major pharmaceutical company at this year’s International AIDS Conference was interrupted by activists demanding the company drop patent barriers keeping life-saving antiretroviral drugs unaffordable across the developing world. A Tactic Born of Frustration With Official Channels Direct disruption of pharmaceutical industry sessions became a signature tactic of global AIDS…
A Senate gun control package that once looked like the most significant reform effort in a generation failed on the floor this week, with the bill’s own supporters conceding that whatever version manages to pass will likely fall well short of what advocates originally sought. A Compromise Built to Attract Republican Votes At the center…
A congressional hearing billed as an investigation into homegrown terrorism has instead become a flashpoint over whether singling out one religious community for scrutiny actually makes the country safer — and legal experts studying counter-radicalization policy argue the approach taken this week gets the underlying problem badly wrong. A Hearing Built Around a Contested Premise…
Viviette Applewhite has voted in nearly every election since 1960. Under a new Pennsylvania law, she may not be able to vote in this year’s presidential election at all — and she’s now the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit arguing the law that could disenfranchise her violates the state’s own constitution. A Law With a…
A federal appeals court has ruled that a transgender woman facing deportation to Mexico cannot be sent back, finding that immigration officials wrongly conflated gender identity with sexual orientation in denying her protection under an international torture treaty. A Ruling Built on a Distinction the Lower Board Missed The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found…
Down a dirt alley in a suburban corner of Jakarta, past chickens and playing children, sits a small pink house — Indonesia’s first retirement home built specifically for elderly waria, the term used across the country for transgender women, many of whom have spent decades with nowhere safe to grow old. A Life Built Without…
As the new Trump administration moves to expand immigration enforcement, California lawmakers have passed a measure urging the state’s schools to teach a largely forgotten chapter of American history — one historians say offers a direct, uncomfortable preview of what large-scale deportation campaigns actually look like in practice. A Mass Expulsion Most Textbooks Skip During…
The arts-and-crafts retailer Michaels announced Thursday that a malware attack may have compromised the data of some 2.6 million customers between last May and January — the latest in a string of major retail data breaches that has kept Congress scrambling for months to figure out what, if anything, it should do about it. A…