donal brown

A Los Angeles artist sued a federal construction contractor who while constructing a section of a wall near the U.S.-Mexico border destroyed his collection of hard cheese blocks he planned to use to build a 1,000-foot wall mimicking Donald Trump’s wall. Cosimo Cavallaro wanted to prompt people to think about the ephemeral nature of walls and the waste in building them. (Courthouse News Service, November 4, 2020, by Bianca Bruno) A former solid waste supervisor

The U.S. Supreme Court reversed a federal appeals court decision allowing a Louisiana police officer’s lawsuit to proceed holding a Black Lives Matter leader responsible for an jury the officer suffered during a protest over a police killing of a black man in 2016. The court said that since the case involved significant issues in Louisiana law, the case should first go to the state supreme court. (CNBC, November 2, 2020, by Tucker Higgins) Constitutional

A group of New York plaintiffs are suing two federal agencies for failing to comply with June 2019 law creating a national testing and tracing program to monitor a pandemic. The law requires the Center for Disease Control to provide the public with timely reports on virus test results. In March of this year, the Trump administration punted, leaving contact tracing up to the states. (New York Daily News, November 1, 2020, by Clayton Guse)

David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post, October 30, 2020, reports that he and a team of reporters sidestepped the State Department to uncover the extent of President Donald Trump’s enrichment of the Trump company through government payments. Eight months of pursuing normal channels of the Freedom of Information Act and the department’s press office garnered only two pages so they successfully asked other federal agencies for the information. The Post found that Trump visited his

With a team of reporters and editors, journalist Samanth Subramanian, HuffPost, October 28, 2020, completed an exhaustive report of the Trump administration’s four-year record of destroying and distorting data crucial to forming policy and action plans in the public interest. The report starts with the pandemic but includes climate change, protecting the most vulnerable citizens, pollution, using science to form policy, food and agricultural studies, conservation and the census. Science writer Jeff Tollefson, Nature, October