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The Senate on Wednesday voted 73-25 to approve a public land conservation bill. The vote delivers a rare bipartisan win for the often politically gridlocked legislature. The bill, titled the Great American Outdoors Act, was first introduced in March and will provide additional funding from oil, gas, coal, or alternative renewable energy revenues to the Land and [...]

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The US Air Force announced on Thursday that their inspector general would be opening an investigation into whether reconnaissance aircraft had been improperly deployed to surveil protests in Washington D.C. and Minneapolis earlier this month. The New York Times reports that it has seen messages indicating that on the morning of June 2 the West [...]

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The French Constitutional Court on Thursday reversed most of an online hate speech law, known as the ‘Avia Law,’ which was passed by the French National Assembly on May 13. “The requesting senators argue that these provisions would have been in violation of Article 45 of the Constitution,” says the ruling. “These provisions would impose [...]

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Roman Bonnefoy, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

According to a report released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Thursday, French police stop and search Black and Arab youths even without any indication of wrongdoing. These ‘identity checks’, which can involve invasive bag searches and body pat-downs, are done on children as young as ten. In France, the police have the authority to [...]

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The Chinese government charged two Canadian nationals with espionage on Thursday. Both Canadians, former diplomat Michael Kovrig and businessman Michael Spavor, were arrested in December 2018. Kovrig stands accused of acquiring state secrets, and Spavor of stealing and selling state secrets. Chinese authorities claim that they now have solid proof that both men committed espionage. [...]

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The European Court of Justice ruled on Thursday that Hungary’s Law on the Transparency of Organisations Supported from Abroad (Transparency Law) infringed upon European Union (EU) law. In 2017, Hungary adopted a rule that organizations had to register with the Hungarian courts as “an organization in receipt of support from abroad” when donations sent to [...]

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Facebook removed a series of President Trump’s campaign ads on Thursday, claiming it violated the company’s policy against organized hate. The ads included an inverted red triangle, a symbol that was used by Nazis to identify political prisoners in concentration camps. A Facebook spokesperson told CNN Business that “We removed these posts and ads for violating [...]

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US senators on Tuesday introduced legislation that would reform the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) aircraft certification process. The bill, titled the Aircraft Safety and Reform Act of 2020, seeks to give the FAA more authority over the aircraft certification process.  The proposed legislation is the first attempt at reform after the Boeing 737 MAX crashes [...]

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The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced on Thursday that more than one percent of the worlds population, nearly 80 million people, had been forcibly displaced by the end of last year according to the UNHCR’s global trend report. The UNHCR’s global trend report is an annual study whose goal is to track the [...]

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