“Both Justice Clarence Thomas’s unanimous opinion in Twitter v. Taamneh and the Court’s brief, unanimous, and unsigned opinion in Gonzalez v. Google show admirable restraint. The justices add clarity to a 2016 anti-terrorism law that, if read broadly, could have made tech companies whose products form the backbone of modern-day communications liable for every violent act committed by the terrorist group ISIS.
Instead, the Court’s Twitter and Google decisions largely ensure that the internet will continue to function as normal, provided that websites like Twitter or YouTube do not actively provide assistance to terrorism.
The cases involve similar facts. Google concerns a wave of murders ISIS committed in Paris — one of the victims of those attacks was Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old American student who died after ISIS assailants opened fire on the café where she and her friends were eating dinner. Twitter, meanwhile, involves an ISIS attack on a nightclub in Istanbul, in which 39 people were killed including Nawras Alassaf, a Jordanian man with American relatives.
At this point, you’re probably wondering what these horrific acts have to do with tech companies like Google or Twitter. The answer arises from the US Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), which permits lawsuits against anyone “who aids and abets, by knowingly providing substantial assistance” to certain acts of “international terrorism.”
The plaintiffs in both cases, relatives of Gonzalez and Alassaf, essentially allege that Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (which is owned by Google) provided substantial assistance to ISIS by allowing it to use the companies’ social media websites to post videos and other content that promoted ISIS’s ideology and sought to recruit individuals to their cause. In effect, the plaintiffs argued that these tech platforms had an affirmative duty to stop ISIS from using their websites, and that the tech companies could be held liable if ISIS terrorists use a service that is freely available to billions of people across the globe.
It’s a breathtaking legal argument. As Thomas writes in the Twitter opinion, “under plaintiffs’ theory, any U.S. national victimized by an ISIS attack could bring the same claim based on the same services allegedly provided to ISIS.” The three tech companies, in other words, would potentially be liable for any American or relative of an American who is killed by ISIS.
The JASTA statute, moreover, authorizes a successful plaintiff to recover three times the loss inflicted upon them by a terrorist, which in a case similar to Twitter or Google could mean three times the cost of a mass murder. So even a corporate behemoth like Google could potentially be brought to its knees by the amount of money they would have to pay out in future cases if these lawsuits had prevailed.
The Court’s unanimous opinion, however, rejects that outcome. Though the plaintiffs’ theory rests on a plausible reading of the vaguely worded JASTA statute, the Court’s decision establishes that, at the very least, a company has to do more than provide its product to any customer in the world — including customers who may use that product for evil purposes — in order to be held liable for a terrorist act.”
“Hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their Medicaid benefits in April, as emergency pandemic provisions that kept people enrolled over the past few years began to end. The coverage losses are going to only grow.
In Florida, nearly 250,000 people lost Medicaid coverage in April, as states began a process to check whether everyone currently enrolled in Medicaid still meets the eligibility criteria. About 73,000 people were also deemed ineligible in Arkansas. Another 53,000 had their coverage terminated in Indiana and 40,000 were removed from Medicaid in Arizona.
Policy experts and advocates warned before the eligibility checks began that people who are still eligible for Medicaid could lose their insurance due to administrative problems, such as not receiving mail from the state or not returning documentation to confirm they are still eligible. Now the early evidence suggests that’s exactly what is happening.”
“On air, Fox News personalities have been endlessly attacking so-called “woke corporations.” But now, Fox News finds itself in the right’s cultural crosshairs — with conservatives accusing it of promoting “trans ideology” in its own workplace.
The inciting incident is a Monday morning story in the Daily Signal, the media arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. In the story, reporter Mary Margaret Olohan writes that Fox’s employee handbook allows employees to use “bathrooms that align with their gender identity, rather than their biological sex,” permits them to “dress in alignment with their preferred gender,” and requires that their coworkers use “their preferred name and pronouns in the workplace.”
Many of Fox’s rules in this area appear to be in line with state law: The company’s headquarters are in New York, where state law explicitly prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity (something Olohan notes in passing but doesn’t dwell on). Fox told me in a written statement, “FOX News Media is compliant with all Human Rights laws mandated by the cities and states in which we operate, including New York and California.”
That there’s less to the Daily Signal’s exclusive than meets the eye didn’t stop many on the culture war right from blasting Fox as a sellout.”
“The US government doesn’t have to work this way.
Congress could pass legislation doing away with the debt ceiling, and the president has options to ignore it as well, though they’d likely prompt legal challenges. As mentioned above, the president could invoke the 14th Amendment and ignore the debt limit, or Congress could approve an increase to the debt cap that’s so high it basically nullifies the ceiling.
Abolishing the debt limit altogether would prevent either party from using this process as political leverage. Doing so would greatly reduce the uncertainty that comes around every time there’s a deadline like this and prevent significant market volatility that results.
“There are zero downsides to getting rid of the debt ceiling,” said Bivens from the Economic Policy Institute.
Other economic experts note that eliminating the debt ceiling could take away an opportunity for Congress to debate fiscal policy. But many feel like that’s a moot point, given debt ceiling standoffs are rarely about any specific spending anymore, but rather about weakening the party in power.”
“The other problem with the “Americans want unbiased news” argument is a truth-in-labeling problem. It’s not that “Americans” think news is biased; it’s people who lean Republican. Democrats, by and large, think the news they get from existing outlets is reasonably trustworthy, as this helpful YouGov poll — which replicates a similar one conducted a year ago — spells out. It’s Republicans who distrust almost all outlets that aren’t explicitly aimed at them, like NewsMax. And even the Messenger’s own poll that purports to show a hunger for unbiased news underscores this: 55 percent of Democrats think coverage of their own party is fair — but only 19 percent of Republicans said the same.
Fox News, of course, figured this out from the get-go: That’s why their “fair and balanced” pitch actually means “news you’ll like if you’re on the right side of the political spectrum.” And that’s not what CNN and the Messenger say they’re selling.”
“None of those figures ignored a subpoena to turn over classified material concerning highly sensitive matters of national security and then sought to conceal it from federal officials and their own attorneys, as is alleged of Trump. And in fact, history suggests that if Trump complied with that request, as some of his peers did, prosecutors may not have pressed charges.
The case against Trump is not so much about the fact that he retained documents he had no right to keep — but that he allegedly did so knowingly and brazenly defying the federal government while putting US interests at risk. That puts Trump in a class of his own.”
“California, Arizona, and Nevada agreed to conserve at least 3 million acre-feet of water from the river over the next few years, or an average of about 1 million acre-feet per year. (An acre-foot fills one acre of land with one foot of water and is what two to three households use each year.)”
…
“These cuts are enormous, and they will certainly help safeguard the river and all that it sustains. Yet they’re only about half of what federal regulators had originally called for. An unusually wet winter in the West brought relief to the river’s ailing reservoirs, allowing states to get away with a much less ambitious offer.
Ultimately, however, this deal is not nearly enough to save the river, experts say. Steeper cuts are likely on the horizon.”