U.S.
Supporters of Proposition 36 framed it as a path to accountability. Its uneven rollout instead exposes how justice in California remains divided by geography and resources. Photo by Damian Dovarganes.
In California, justice has never been a single system—it’s fifty-eight. Each county enforces its own interpretation of the law, shaped as much by local budgets and poli...
U.S.
The United States Supreme Court may be on the verge of rolling back another major piece of legal precedent. The case Louisiana v. Callais presents the Court with a clear opportunity to gut key provisions of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, primarily targeting Section 2, which, along with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, has functioned as a ban on racial gerrymandering for the past s...
U.S.
In October 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump commuted former Congressman George Santos’s (R-NY) criminal sentence. After pleading guilty to counts of both aggravated identity theft and wire fraud, Santos was due for a seven-year prison sentence [1]. Just three months in, after being arrested in July, Trump granted him clemency on controversial grounds. The ...
U.S.
In 2024, over 60 million people in the U.S. reported experiencing a mental illness in the past year [1]. 25 percent of these people reported an unmet need for mental health treatment [2]. Despite the rising number of people seeking mental health treatment, the number of people receiving care has failed to increase due to the lack of providers and the difficulty for patients and prov...
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U.S.
Every era of technological upheaval reopens the question of who governs when Washington does not. California has answered before. The state’s auto-emission standards reshaped national environmental law, and its privacy statutes influenced federal digital policy. Now, with frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models developing faster than federal oversight, California has again stepped into the ...
World
On October 20, 2025, many UCLA students woke up to realize that Canvas, the software for accessing and submitting homework, was offline. This was caused by an outage of Amazon Web Services, the largest of the three main cloud computing companies. The outage temporarily disabled many of the websites and platforms hosted on the cloud. This highlights an issue with the internet as a whole: an overrel...
World
Haiti - A Background
Haiti is a small country located in the Caribbean that shares an island with the Dominican Republic [1]. The capital of the country is Port-au-Prince. Haiti has a population of around 11.5 million. It is a semi-presidential republic in which the president acts as the country’s leader and the prime minister reports to the president [4]. However, Haiti has a deep histor...
World
As of 2025, there are 30.5 million people worldwide who are refugees or have refugee-like status according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (U.N.H.C.R.). The top five countries of origin are Syria, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Sudan, and South Sudan, comprising around two-thirds of the total number of refugees worldwide [1]. While the most common cause of displacement for refugees fro...
World
Increased awareness of abuses and inequalities has recently shifted public attention towards international human rights. The United Nations (U.N.) defines human rights as “rights inherent to all human beings [to which] everyone is entitled…without discrimination” [1]. However, this absolute declaration morphs into an abstract ideal when contras...
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World
Since its creation in 1993, the European Union (EU) has portrayed itself as a global leader in democracy, transparency, and human rights [1]. Yet, the Union’s position inside today’s deeply interconnected digital world is increasingly at odds with these values. Modern global networks, from financial markets to data routing systems, are dominated by a few powerful states that control cr...