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News release: “Today, the informal Ministerial meeting on urban matters agreed on the “Pact of Amsterdam”, which sets out the principles of the Urban Agenda for the EU. Today, the Commission is taking part in the informal meeting in Amsterdam of the 28 Ministers in charge of urban matters, along with representatives from other EU …
“Toward Harnessing Language in Support of Intersectionality and Cross-sector Power Building Language is a key ingredient in a winning theory of change. Language can build bridges and change minds. By acknowledging the ability of language to shape and reflect reality, progressive campaigns can become more powerful vehicles for social change, inclusion, and justice. In fact, …
“The Nonhuman Rights Project is the only civil rights organization in the United States working to achieve actual LEGAL rights for members of species other than our own. Our mission is to change the legal status of appropriate nonhuman animals from mere “things,” which lack the capacity to possess any legal right, to “persons,” who …
Disaster Recovery: FEMA Needs to Assess Its Effectiveness in Implementing the National Disaster Recovery Framework, GAO-16-476: Published: May 26, 2016. Publicly Released: May 26, 2016. DOD Financial Management: Greater Visibility Needed to Better Assess Audit Readiness for Property, Plant, and Equipment, GAO-16-383: Published: May 26, 2016. Publicly Released: May 26, 2016. Human Trafficking: Actions Taken …
“LexisNexis Legal & Professional today launches an interactive online tool that shows how the rule of law is measured and why it’s important. This first-of-its-kind data tool, the LexisNexis Rule of Law Impact Tracker, quantifies the relationship between rule of law and social and economic development. According to the United Nations, approximately 4 billion people …
Hacker, Philipp and Petkova, Bilyana, Reining in the Big Promise of Big Data: Transparency, Inequality, and New Regulatory Frontiers (May 2, 2016). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2773527 “The growing differentiation of services based on Big Data harbors the potential for both greater societal inequality and for greater equality. Anti-discrimination law and transparency alone, however, …
Mark Hertsgaard – The Guardian – “By now, almost everyone knows what Edward Snowden did. He leaked top-secret documents revealing that the National Security Agency was spying on hundreds of millions of people across the world, collecting the phone calls and emails of virtually everyone on Earth who used a mobile phone or the internet. …
Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: U.S. Assistance to Combat This Harmful Practice Abroad Is Limited, GAO-16-485: Published: Apr 27, 2016. Publicly Released: May 19, 2016. “U.S. and United Nations (UN) studies since 2010 have identified a variety of factors contributing to the persistence of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C). In many communities where FGM/C is prevalent, FGM/C is …
“Privacy protections against government surveillance are often scoped to communications content and exclude communications metadata. In the United States, the National Security Agency operated a particularly controversial program, collecting bulk telephone metadata nationwide. We investigate the privacy properties of telephone metadata to assess the impact of policies that distinguish between content and metadata. We find …
“Immigration Court judges have issued 44,204 removal orders during the first seven months of fiscal year 2016, according to the latest available court data. Texas leads the nation with 10,102 removal orders issued so far this fiscal year, over one fifth (22.9%) of the total. Next is California with 7,056 followed by Georgia with 3,698 …
The Independent: “The CIA inspector general’s office has said it “mistakenly” destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate torture report, despite lawyers for the Justice Department assuring a federal judge that copies of the documents were being preserved. The erasure of the document by the spy agency’s internal watchdog was deemed an “inadvertent” foul-up …
“H.R. 3713 would amend federal law to change the prison sentences associated with certain offenses. Based on information provided by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the U.S. Sentencing Commission (USSC), CBO estimates that implementing the legislation would reduce the cost of incarcerating offenders and would lead to a reduction in discretionary costs to DOJ …
