Arkansas Tried to Restrict the Use of This Controversial Pesticide. Monsanto Fought Back and Won.
Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. Arkansas regulators voted last Wednesday to relax restrictions on the controversial weedkiller dicamba, despite testimony from top scientists and scores of concerned citizens who urged them to reject the move in a public hearing. As reported last year by FERN and Reveal, dicamba…
Trump Judicial Nominees Are Refusing to Endorse Brown v. Board of Education
Neomi Rao, President Donald Trump’s nominee for a seat on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 5.Scott Applewhite/AP Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. There’s no Supreme Court decision more widely celebrated than Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous 1954 ruling that…
Why the Green New Deal Is So Vague About Food and Farming
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) hold a press conference on the Green New Deal outside of the Capitol on February 7, 2019. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/AP Images Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. The Green New Deal resolution, released last week by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed…
10 Years of Privacy Violations, Disinformation, and Friend Requests From Facebook
Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. As Facebook assumed its central role in the information landscape, the company quietly made decisions that boosted profits with little regard to the consequences for privacy, politics, and the news industry. When those controversial calls and other travails associated with abuses of the platform gradually…
How Facebook Screwed Us All
Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. This essay is the cover story for our March/April issue. (Subscribe here!) Portions of it appeared earlier here and here. A country riven by ethnic tension. Spontaneous protests driven by viral memes. Violence and riots fueled by hateful fake-news posts, often about “terrorism” by marginalized…
Apple Is Doing More to Police Facebook Than the US Government
Giannis Alexopoulos/NurPhoto/ZUMA Press Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. When Apple said on Wednesday that, in response to a revelation that Facebook was monitoring minors’ cellphone usage, it would curtail the platform’s ability to distribute apps, it overshadowed the US government as a regulator of the company’s privacy practices. Apple’s action comes after…