Media Mentions

Disinformation targeting Latino communities is ramping up ahead of Election Day, when the demographic is expected to play a crucial role in key battleground states. Advocacy groups and election security experts alike say material is circulating on social media platforms and online messaging apps that pushes false conspiracies that echo larger disinformation campaigns in English. The misinformation efforts, some of which reflect the QAnon conspiracy theory, are especially critical in Florida, a crucial swing state where polls show Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is running behind Hillary Clinton’s 2016 support among Latino voters. Advocates said the misinformation could dissuade Latino voters, who have historically low levels of voter participation, from voting in this year’s election...Oumou Ly, a staff fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, said foreign actors are likely propping up these narratives. Officials have warned against similar foreign interference efforts from four years ago heading into the 2020 election. FBI Director Christopher Wray told a House panel last week that Russia is seeking to denigrate Biden’s campaign through social media interference. Much of the disinformation targeting Latino voters has the intent to dissuade their participation in the election, advocates said, including pushing unsubstantiated claims that vote by mail is not secure or the election system can be hacked. The disinformation is targeting Latino voters beyond Florida.

The animated 1998 film Mulan remains one of Disney's all time greatest hits. Fans greeted Disney’s announcement of a live-action reboot starring an all Asian cast with great excitement. But COVID-19 forced the film from the big screen to Disney streaming, and the film’s recent debut sparked controversy both here and in China. At a time when Asian Americans are being attacked publicly — and being erroneously blamed for the coronavirus — 2020 has been fertile ground for significant growth in Asian themed feature films and TV programs, with independent films helmed by Asian directors and Asian actors in lead roles. What is the power of this expansion of representation? And does it especially matter in this moment? Guests: Elena Creef, professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She specializes in Asian American visual history in photography, film and popular culture. Jenny Korn, fellow and the founding coordinator of the Race and Media Working Group at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

When the framers of the Constitution debated the document’s careful system of checks and balances, they confronted a question that would only become more important over time: Should there be a mandatory retirement age for federal judges? Alexander Hamilton argued against one. Writing in The Federalist Papers, he dismissed “the imaginary danger of a superannuated bench.” Hamilton won out, and the Constitution placed no term limits on the service of federal judges, including the men and (much later) women who would make up the Supreme Court. More than two centuries later, the United States stands alone in its handling of lifetime appointments to its highest court, and the drawbacks of a “superannuated bench” have become ever more clear. Last Friday, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the third member of the Supreme Court to die in office in the past 15 years. Her death injects a partisan fight over the judiciary into the tempest of a presidential election, and it has brought about a nightmare scenario for Democrats, who have long feared the possibility that a conservative would replace her progressive vote on the Supreme Court and shift the nation’s jurisprudence dramatically to the right. But it also serves as a reminder that only in the U.S. does the balance of so much national power hang on the ability of an 87-year-old jurist to hold out for a few more months against the ravages of disease and the inevitability of life’s natural course... “Everybody who’s thought about designing a constitutional court since 1900 has thought that a retirement age was a good thing. There’s no reason to think that they were wrong,” Mark Tushnet, a Harvard law professor and legal historian, told me. “The existence of tenure until death or choice is extremely rare around the world.” There’s a fairly simple explanation for why the Framers decided against a mandatory retirement age, Tushnet and other legal historians told me: People didn’t live as long back then, and, as Hamilton wrote, few “outlived the season of intellectual rigor.”

Joseph R. Biden Jr. was trying to demonstrate the lasting power of the federal judiciary. So he did the math. Addressing a Michigan law school audience in April 1991, then-Senator Biden said that if trends in life expectancy held, a justice freshly confirmed around that time would “be making landmark decisions in the year 2020.” “I’ll be dead and gone, in all probability,” Mr. Biden told the crowd. He was half right: Nearly three decades later, the man whom the Senate confirmed that year, Justice Clarence Thomas, is still rendering decisions — the eldest jurist, if President Trump has his way, of a soon-to-be 6-to-3 conservative majority. But Mr. Biden is indeed alive, left to consider what the court’s emerging tilt would mean for the Democratic agenda if he wins the White House — and for his own attachment to the Capitol’s bygone harmony and mores. After a half-century in public life, with a lead role in several indelible confirmation dramas through the years, Mr. Biden could, if elected, be saddled with a Supreme Court primed to counteract his policy aims on health care, abortion and other defining issues. Many Democrats now believe that adding seats to the court is the urgent remedy, an extraordinary step that has not been seriously contemplated since the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. They argue that the court’s legitimacy has already eroded amid the Republican confirmation maneuvers of the last four years. Yet for Mr. Biden, a proud man of the Senate, such an effort would amount to the sort of norm-razing exercise that might strike him as an escalation too many...Laurence H. Tribe, the Harvard Law School professor who helped prepare Mr. Biden for the Bork hearings, said Mr. Biden had tended to resist pressure to subject nominees to explicit partisan screening, even after the process had grown more openly ideological. “I don’t think he ever came close to articulating a ‘Biden test’ for what’s acceptable,” Mr. Tribe said. But, he added, Mr. Biden was concerned about nominees who would lead to the court’s “being way out of kilter and out of sync with the country as a whole.”

Google parent Alphabet has agreed to commit $310 million to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as part of a settlement for a series of sexual harassment and misconduct lawsuits filed against some of the company’s officers and directors. As part of the settlement, filed on Friday in California Superior Court, Alphabet will establish a diversity, equity, and inclusion advisory council featuring outside experts, which include retired judge and Harvard Law School professor Nancy Gertner and former member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Fred Alvarez, as well as company executives including CEO Sundar Pichai and Google chief legal officer Kent Walker. The settlement also ends Alphabet’s mandatory arbitration for harassment, discrimination, and retaliation-related disputes between employees or contractors and the company. It limits Google’s use of nondisclosure agreements and ensures that the recommended consequences for misconduct are equal across business units. “This settlement will not only change and improve the culture at Google, but it will set the standard for culture change at tech companies throughout Silicon Valley,” Ann Ravel, an attorney from Renne Public Law Group who led parts of the settlement negotiation, said in a release. "Recent years have involved a lot of introspection and work to make sure we’re providing a safe and inclusive workplace for every employee," said Google vice president of people operations Eileen Naughton in a blog post Friday. "That doesn’t stop here and you’ll receive reports on our progress as we move forward."

President Trump intends to nominate Amy Coney Barrett to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Supreme Court seat. The nomination process has sparked some questions, and the Verify team exists to get those answers. QUESTION: Who is eligible to be nominated to the Supreme Court? Are there any restrictions? ANSWER: There is essentially only one restriction: A person impeached and convicted by Congress in a verdict that bars you from federal office. PROCESS: Questions about the Supreme Court nomination process have started popping up online since the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We took this question to the experts: What are the qualifications for becoming a Supreme Court Justice? ...Our experts told us there is essentially one restriction that bars someone from being nominated to the Supreme Court — impeachment. Law Professor Laurence Tribe told us in an email that someone who is impeached and convicted by Congress in a verdict that bars that person from holding federal office in the future cannot be nominated to the Supreme Court.

Firms love to talk about “culture” when it comes to distinguishing themselves, but while it can be key to attracting lateral partners, it can also be a critical factor in limiting associate development. That’s particularly true when firms are adopting special measures as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of which have hit associates hard. If firms don’t pay attention to key characteristics like transparency and feedback, they run the risk of losing younger talent, industry observers said. Experts agree that competition for talent is growing more fierce as more junior attorneys realize they have options outside of their current firms or even away from Big Law, and culture plays a larger role than ever in firms attracting and retaining the talent that can push them ahead of their competitors. Culture is often a reflection of leadership. Scott Westfahl, professor of practice and director of executive education at Harvard Law School, has an interesting definition of what leadership means. “Leadership is about disappointing people,” he said. “That is the lens on it, and it is such a critical thing to understand. You are going to need to make changes as the world changes. The better your articulate who you are, why you are, the better you will be able to make principled decisions.” Westfahl said he has worked with firms in the past that have clear, defined culture and values, many times embedded in the firm’s strategic plan, literally written down for all to see. But he has worked with many more that have a looser, more ambiguous approach to defining their firm culture, and that can create a problem. “A lot of law firms haven’t been specific about defining their culture and their values,” Westfahl said. “The Big Four have been much more deliberate. When you have an inspiring mission, people can rally around it. When you have to make hard decisions, you at least have the framework around how to make those decisions, and you can explain to those who aren’t happy why the decisions were made.” Westfahl said that absent that, you can create a situation where there can be the perception of favoritism or unfairness when it comes to difficult decisions like salary cuts or layoffs, work allotment or promotion.

Earlier this summer, thousands of Americans spilled into the streets in anger and anguish over the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, whose killings at the hands of police and vigilantes sparked an outcry against racism not seen in this country since the peak of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Donations were made. Petitions were signed. Books like “How to Be an Antiracist" and “White Fragility" climbed to the top of bestseller lists. Protests spread from cities to suburbs, denouncing police brutality and demanding justice. More white Americans seemed willing to admit that deep-seated, structural racism did not end with the banishment of Jim Crow. But recent polling suggests white support for the Black Lives Matter movement has slipped. According to a new survey from the Pew Research Center, support for the movement fell from 67 percent in June to 55 percent in September. The decline was driven largely by white adults, whose support dropped from 60 percent earlier this summer to 45 percent this month...In the context of US racial history, it is not surprising that support among non-Black groups, and white adults in particular, has fallen, experts said. Historians drew parallels between the current moment and the 1960s, a decade that saw sharp peaks and valleys in white support for the civil rights movement... “Importantly, that groundswell of support . . . followed white perpetrators attacking nonviolent demonstrators,” said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, a legal historian and dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. “That’s the scenario in which whites are likely to support civil rights movements because there are two clear sides” representing “good" and "evil,” she said... Krugler and Brown-Nagin said white backlash to the civil rights movement was intensified by the “law and order” rhetoric Richard Nixon deployed in his 1968 presidential campaign, which Trump and other political figures have echoed in their derision of protesters today.

During her first year as the sole woman on the US Supreme Court in 2006, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a foreword for a biography of the 19th-century lawyer Belva Ann Lockwood and presented the book to a new law clerk in her chambers. On Thursday, the clerk, Daphna Renan, now a professor at Harvard Law School, highlighted the foreword as an example of how Ginsburg broke barriers for women while simultaneously honoring her predecessors in the fight for equality. “Justice Ginsburg was a giant in the law, a luminary, and a leader, as you’ve heard, but she was always ... keenly aware of those who paved the way for her even as she trained her sights on how she could better pave it for others,” Renan said. She delivered the remarks during a virtual Harvard Law School event honoring Ginsburg, who died last Friday...Harvard Law’s current dean, John F. Manning, said the institution regrets the discrimination Ginsburg endured on campus. “It is hard to imagine a more consequential life, a life of greater meaning, and more lasting impact. And Justice Ginsburg did all of this while carrying the heavy weight imposed by discrimination,” he said. “To our eternal regret, she encountered it here at Harvard Law School.” The virtual event included tributes from Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard Law professors Vicki Jackson, Martha Minow, and Michael Klarman...Brown-Nagin’s remarks explored what Ginsburg’s death means to the civil rights movement and comparisons between Ginsburg and the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black man to serve on the Supreme Court. Beyond fighting for women’s rights, Brown-Nagin said, Ginsburg had a deep understanding of racial discrimination and poured that insight into cases dealing with race. She cited Ginsburg’s dissent in a 1995 school desegregation case in Missouri in which the justice wrote it was too soon to curtail efforts to combat racial segregation given the state’s history of racial inequality. “The Court stresses that the present remedial programs have been in place for seven years,” Ginsburg wrote. “But compared to more than two centuries of firmly entrenched official discrimination, the experience with the desegregation remedies ordered by the [lower court] has been evanescent.” Ginsburg was, Brown-Nagin said, a “tremendous intellect, a courageous human being, and a giant of the law.”

President Trump has initiated the most aggressive environmental deregulation agenda in modern history, but as his first term drives to a close, many of his policies are being cut down by the courts — even by Republican-appointed jurists who the administration had hoped would be friendly. Those losses have actually heightened the stakes in the election and the fight over a replacement on the Supreme Court for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A second term, coupled with a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court, could save some of his biggest environmental rollbacks. Since January courts have dealt a series of blows to the Trump administration’s plans to ramp up fossil fuel development and undo decades of environmental protections. This month, a federal appeals court temporarily blocked implementation of a major rollback of methane emissions standards for the oil and gas industry while it considers permanent action... if Joseph R. Biden Jr. gets into the White House in January, he will have to provide a written explanation of the reasons he wants to roll back each Trump administration action. Eliminating Trump’s executive orders will be relatively easy, but going through the regulatory process all over again on issues like fuel efficiency...James E. Tierney, a former Maine attorney general who now teaches courses at Harvard Law School on the role of attorneys general, said that they are “institutionally designed to be independent watchdogs, independent brakes on power.” Their relative independence from executive power, whether in their own state or the federal government, goes back to the thirteen original colonies, and, before that, English common law. “If there’s a Democratic president, roll up your sleeves and wait for Texas to file lawsuits against President Biden,” he said.

Amy Coney Barrett has been a federal judge for just three years, but one thing is already certain: She’d mark a sharp turn from Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. At just 48 years old, the former clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia would lock in a long-term conservative legacy for President Donald Trump, who is expected to nominate her officially this afternoon. Democrats are already anxious enough about the looming 6-3 conservative majority that they’re openly considering expanding court-packing to counter it. But what do we really know about her judicial philosophy, and how she’d rule on major issues? Politico Magazine asked top constitutional law experts and Supreme Court watchers to weigh in...Tomiko Brown-Nagin: “If confirmed, Judge Amy Coney Barrett will consolidate the conservative majority and shift the balance of power on the court decidedly to the right. She has called abortion “immoral” and written that judges are not always bound by precedent. And, consistent with the anti-abortion movement’s current strategy, she has expressed openness to hollowing out Roe v. Wade through state regulations. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a mark as a strong supporter of reproductive freedom; she consistently voted against state encroachments on Roe v. Wade. A critic of Chief Justice John Roberts’ role in the blockbuster case that upheld the Affordable Care Act in 2012, Judge Barrett is likely to give the law’s opponents a sympathetic hearing in the case pending before the court. By contrast, Justice Ginsburg, a strong voice and critical vote in support of the ACA, would almost certainly have again sustained the federal law. On the question of gun rights, Ginsburg sustained regulations, whereas Barrett has questioned the constitutionality of a categorical ban on gun ownership by felons. The contrast between the two jurists is evident on numerous other issues. Given the stark differences between Justice Ginsburg’s voting record and that of her presumed replacement, Judge Barrett’s nomination promises to transform the Supreme Court. That said, it would be a mistake to dismiss Judge Barrett as a mere partisan or a zealot; her writings bear the mark of a scholar who reasons carefully about legal cases and controversies.”

Much has been written about the historic Yalta Conference in February 1945, when Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt met to decide the future of the postwar world. Little, however, is known about the role played behind the scenes by three young women. In “The Daughters of Yalta,” Catherine Grace Katz ‘22 tells the story through the eyes of Sarah Churchill, Anna Roosevelt and Kathleen Harriman, the daughter of W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. Skillfully written and meticulously researched, it’s an extraordinary work that reveals the human side underlying the politics. “The continued success of the alliance of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin,” Ms. Katz writes, “was precariously balanced on the strong personal relationship among the three men.” They came to Yalta with very different agendas. Stalin was planning a Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe but Roosevelt, less concerned about Europe, wanted to enlist his help against Japan. Churchill thought Roosevelt was naive about Stalin, especially when it came to the Soviet leader’s designs on Poland. To get to Yalta the delegates made a hazardous daylong drive from Saki airfield through barren country and razed villages. “Nearly all the buildings lay in scorched ruins,” Ms. Katz reports, “alongside charred remains of trains, tanks, and other instruments of war, as if General Sherman had risen from the dead for an encore march to the sea halfway across the world.” The destruction was not only the work of the Nazis but of Stalin, too, a vestige of the state-sponsored famine that killed millions long before the Germans arrived.

Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law professor emeritus, and Ken Starr, former Independent Counsel, join 'Fox News Sunday.'

California Gov. Gavin Newsom's executive order phasing out new gas-powered car sales further inflames a fight with the Trump administration over vehicle emissions policy and is a big bet on a potential Joe Biden presidency endorsing the Golden State's bold move, experts say. California and the federal government are slugging it out in the D.C. Circuit over the revocation of the state's Clean Air Act waiver that allowed it to set its own vehicle emissions standards and run a zero-emission vehicle, or ZEV, program. Newsom on Wednesday reiterated California's defense of its CAA authority with his order directing the California Air Resources Board to craft regulations that lead to zero-emission vehicles making up all new car and light truck sales in the state by 2035. California's first-in-the-nation policy would also require for ZEVs to make up all new in-state sales of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, including trucks and buses, by 2045. Experts say it's a policy shift that hinges on Biden defeating President Donald Trump in the November election, since there's no chance the Trump administration would reinstate California's CAA waiver or grant a new waiver for the state to carry out an even more ambitious vehicle emissions program than the one covered by the revoked waiver. "California is acting in line with its legal interpretations and in defiance of the Trump administration's interpretations," said Caitlin McCoy, a staff attorney with Harvard Law School's Environmental and Energy Law Program. "The governor's order is a bet on either the courts agreeing with California or a potential Biden administration agreeing with California."

On Tuesday morning, Merlene Sanborn was at work on an alteration at her small stitchery. Near her sewing machine, a radio was playing an endless stream of campaign ads from both Sen. Susan Collins and her Democratic challenger, Sara Gideon. Sanborn said she has supported Collins in the past, but this election cycle seems different. “There’s such an atmosphere of disrespect in the campaigning,” she told me, flicking off the station. “I feel like both candidates have forgotten about what matters to Maine.” Chief among those issues, she said, are financial opportunities for small-business owners and access to health care. She said she is worried the Supreme Court will rule in ways that jeopardize both, which is why the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday and the fight over how quickly to fill her vacancy has suddenly become an issue of consequence in a part of Maine that will play an important role in deciding the reelection of both Collins and President Donald Trump...Peter Brann is a practicing attorney in the state and a visiting lecturer at Harvard Law School. He represented Golden in the 2018 Poliquin suit. He said the prospect of Collins appealing to the Supreme Court is possible, but the court would probably agree to hear the case only if a lower court was divided in its ruling or if enough justices see ranked-choice voting as a potential infringement of voters’ equal protection. Collins’ office did not respond to questions about whether she would appeal November’s election results if she lost. Regardless, Brann said, he’s hopeful that decision will stand and there will be no further Republican attempts to challenge it at any level—and particularly not at the Supreme Court. “Constitutional arguments aren’t like wine,” he said. “They don’t improve with age.”

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic, pointing to over 3 million cases and 207,973 deaths in 213 countries and territories. As the spread of the virus is likely to continue disrupting economic activity and negatively impact manufacturing and service industries, especially in developed countries and it is expected that the financial markets will continue to be erratic. Early and stringent state and local restrictions led to higher rates of unemployment in the months following lockdowns. Reopening businesses and recovering jobs depend on more than federal and local policies. Researchers at the Harvard Business School studied factors in reopening, from features of the business such as whether it involves physical proximity to others or serves older customers to external factors such as local COVID-19 case rates and prevalent political preference...What role has the fiscal stimulus had on job loss and recovery? What impact has it had on states, businesses and individuals? ... "The stimulus kept spending going when it might have collapsed, but it was too short term and focused on the wrong problem," said Richard B. Freeman, Faculty Co-Director, Labor and Worklife Program, Harvard Law School; Co-Director, Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities; and Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics, Harvard University. "If we could have had a fast recovery by conquering the disease, almost all furloughed workers would be back at work, and the stimulus would have tied people and small businesses over for two to three months. But without something else, I would expect a slow, seven to ten year regaining of jobs."

Many associates at top firms are ecstatic to see that they will receive thousands of dollars in the form of special fall bonuses. But given the precariousness of the COVID economy, and the damage it has wreaked, are there other ways firms can show appreciation for their associates when bonuses are out of the question? Big Law has constantly turned to money as the go-to lever for recognizing good performance. This trend is perhaps best evidenced by the annual year-end bonus wars, where Big Law firms attempt to one-up each other in who can dole out bigger bonuses to their associates—even when experts denounce the practice as short-sighted and fiscally irresponsible. So it should come as no surprise that this year, many Big Law firms announced special fall bonuses to associates as gestures of appreciation for their work during the pandemic...But given the uneven effect the pandemic has on firm finances, bonuses may not be possible at some firms without finding extra money through layoffs of staff and associates, leaving firms in a tricky situation. Can firms show appreciation through other means? “At the associate level, associates should understand that in the long run across their careers… minor variations in bonuses are a small rounding error and reading too much into them or getting upset about perceived inequity is not helpful,” said Scott Westfahl, director of Harvard Law School’s executive education program. Westfahl acknowledges that associates host an “automatic, primal” sense of frustration when they hear of bonuses at peer firms. Still, there are many ways to show appreciation for associates: enhanced professional development, coaching, mentoring and training; interesting work and “stretch” assignments; more flexibility; internal leadership opportunities; and recognition internally and externally, to name a few.

With the recent deaths of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Massachusetts Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants, legal experts say Bay State Gov. Charlie Baker faces added pressure to appoint progressive state justices to fill Justice Gants' seat and another vacancy to offset a rightward shift on the nation's highest court. Baker, a moderate Republican with high favorability ratings in deep-blue Massachusetts, was already in the process of filling one state Supreme Judicial Court position due to the impending retirement of Justice Barbara A. Lenk when Justice Gants died Sept. 14 at age 65 following a heart attack. Justice Gants' legacy includes a keen focus on individual liberties, criminal justice reform and access to justice. Bay State court watchers say replacing him with someone who shares similar values will be even more critical if President Donald Trump succeeds in appointing a conservative to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace Justice Ginsburg, who died Sept. 18. "It's crucial that Governor Baker reclaim the leadership role of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in having a Supreme Judicial Court that leads rather than follows its sister states and the federal courts when it comes to protecting human rights and the dignity and equality of all residents of the Commonwealth," said Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, adding that Baker must find "a brilliant and progressive jurist" to replace Justice Gants. "Anything less would be an abdication of Baker's responsibility to be governor for the entire Commonwealth and not just a right-leaning fringe that might have provided at best a sliver of his support in the last general election," Tribe told Law360 in an email.

An article by Sean Quirk ‘21: China fired ballistic missiles into the South China Sea while the United States hosted a multinational naval exercise in August, as security tensions between the two countries persist. The U.S. Pacific Fleet hosted the biennial Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) naval exercise from Aug. 17 to Aug. 31 near the Hawaiian islands. Ten nations, 22 surface ships, one submarine and around 5,300 personnel participated in the exercise—the 27th RIMPAC since its inception in 1971. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the Pacific Fleet had planned to host 30 nations for the exercise. The scaled-down RIMPAC 2020 included South China Sea claimants Brunei and the Philippines, but the People’s Republic of China was not invited. The United States invited and then disinvited China from RIMPAC 2018, citing Beijing’s militarization of its occupied features in the South China Sea. Unlike previous RIMPACs, China and Russia reportedly did not crash the 2020 exercise by sending surveillance ships to collect intelligence from RIMPAC participating units. Instead, China held its own naval exercise in the Bohai Gulf and Yellow Sea, and the United States sent its own uninvited representative to observe. A U.S. U-2 reconnaissance plane purportedly entered a no-fly zone over Chinese live-fire military drills on Aug. 25. The U.S. Pacific Air Forces confirmed a U-2 flight but said it operated in accordance with internationally recognized rules and regulations. China Daily, the English-language newspaper operated by the Chinese Communist Party, quoted Chinese military experts as saying the U-2 was a “ghost of the Cold War” and that the U.S. military is “walking on thin ice.” Another Chinese analyst claimed Washington hoped to “artificially manufacture a China crisis” so that “people [can] rally around the American flag.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death leaves an opening in the court’s four-strong liberal bloc, which could be filled by Donald Trump and the Republican Senate majority. Democrats and women’s rights advocates are once again sounding the alarm about the damage that could be wrought by a 6-3 conservative majority in the Supreme Court. Partisanship and heated political rhetoric have accompanied nearly every Supreme Court confirmation since the Senate’s 1987 vote to reject Judge — and Watergate villain — Robert Bork, concealing what legal experts and political insiders say is a pattern of Trump nominees declining to support one of the highest court’s bedrock civil rights rulings. The Supreme Court first affirmed a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy in the 1973 case Roe v. Wade. Ever since then, Republicans and their religious fundamentalist allies have made packing the judiciary with like-minded jurists a high priority. They have redoubled their efforts in the 18 years since George H W Bush appointee David Souter joined Justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor in upholding Roe’s “essential holding” in Planned Parenthood v. Casey...Another veteran observer of the judicial confirmation process, Harvard Law School Emeritus Professor Laurence Tribe, said the trend of judicial nominees refusing to endorse Brown is both unprecedented and troubling because of what it could signal about those jurists’ views on other significant constitutional questions. “No federal court nominee, other than these Trump nominees, in the 66 years since 1954 of whom I’m aware — and certainly none who was confirmed — has declined to endorse that landmark ruling as correctly decided,” Tribe said. “That Trump nominees have routinely done so is simply jaw-dropping, and it’s a short step from that refusal to an insistence on being agnostic about whether the Bill of Rights binds the states by virtue of the 14th Amendment or whether the Equal Protection Clause applies to women.”

The long-awaited Facebook Oversight Board, empowered to overrule some of the platform’s content moderation decisions, plans to launch in October, just in time for the US election. The board will be ready to hear appeals from Facebook users as well as cases referred by the company itself “as soon as mid- or late-October at the very latest, unless there are some major technical issues that come up”, said Julie Owono, one of the 20 initial members of the committee who were named in May, in an interview on Wednesday...The limits of the oversight board’s mandate have been a key point of controversy since the independent institution was proposed by Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, in 2018. The board’s initial bylaws only allowed it to consider appeals from users who believe that individual pieces of content were unfairly removed, prompting criticism from experts, including Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School who studies online speech regulation. “We were told this was going to be the supreme court of Facebook, but then it came out more like a local district court, and now it’s more of a traffic court,” Douek told the Guardian. “It’s just been steadily narrowed over time.” Crucial areas where Facebook exercises editorial control include the algorithms that shape what content receives the most distribution; decisions to take down or leave up Facebook groups, pages and events; and decisions to leave certain pieces of content up. The board would be considering “leave up” decisions as soon as it launched, Owono said, but only if Facebook referred a case to it. She said technical and privacy challenges had delayed the launch of a system for Facebook users to appeal “leave up” decisions, but that one would be available “as soon as possible”.