News & Features

Critics, including Martin’s parents, have called Stand Your Ground laws (contained in Section 776 of Florida Statutes) an invitation for vigilante violence and civilian racial profiling. Despite widespread outrage over Martin’s slaying, a 19-member task force assembled by Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) has found no grounds to overturn the law. The findings of the Task Force on Citizen Safety and Protection report released on February 22nd boil down to this: The problem doesn’t lay with the law but with some people who have tried to use it. 

More than three dozen national security officials, members of Congress and military leaders are warning of the threat climate change poses to U.S. national security, the latest in an indicator that U.S. intelligence and national security circles are increasingly worried about a warming planet. In a new bipartisan open letter, they stress the need for urgent action and call on both public and private support to address issues that included forced migration and the displacement of vulnerable communities, as well as the dangers related to food production during extreme weather events.

Like most second-year law students, Shon Hopwood will be spending most of the winter huddled over casebooks, frantically typing notes in lecture halls, and scrambling to balance academic, family, and extracurricular obligations. This juggling act may not be easy, but he is used to hard times. Less than five years ago, Shon Hopwood was an inmate in FCI Pekin, a federal prison in Illinois, serving a sentence for armed bank robbery.

Just over a year after the Cuban government permitted the first sale of real estate between private parties, a housing boom is emerging in Havana. Fueled by an influx of foreign capital, much of it from Mexico, for Cuban exiles the boom is proving to be a major draw. It also comes amid signs that the Castro regime, which has ruled Cuba since 1959, may be nearing its end. Since November of 2011, when the country saw its first real estate deal in half a century, there has been a sustained rise in housing prices, particularly in Havana. 

Despite Bloomberg Businnessweek's accusation that the Chinese army is spying on Americans, the report that led to the charges has serious flaws. These raise troubling questions about a repetition of  the "China spy syndrome." Beginning with The New York Times January 30 disclosure of Chinese hacking, every publication of note or of little note has since run one or more stories on cyber attacks emanating from China. 

The GOP’s hoped-for trump card to stave that off as long as possible is the Supreme Court. The conservatives on the court read the election tea leaves and three days after President Obama’s re-election announced that they would take up a challenge to the Act. They dropped strong hints that they may well vote to gut the Act. Justice Anthony Kennedy said he was troubled by the provisions. Chief Justice John Roberts bluntly said that things have changed in the South and that blacks supposedly vote everywhere in the South without any barriers or prohibitions. 

Following North Korea’s latest test of a nuclear device on Feb. 12, protestors gathered in a public park in the southern Chinese province of Guangzhou. While most were there to voice frustration over the North’s intransigence, many also denounced Beijing’s inability to control its recalcitrant ally. According to reports, similar scenes played out across the country, a growing public chorus that echoes international frustration over North Korea.

The economic crisis in Spain, with a crippling jobless rate at 26 percent and labor strikes growing violent, has unleashed a brutal turf war between rival Latin American drug cartels. Spain’s rapid economic and social collapse in the second half of 2012 created compelling opportunities for drug cartels from Mexico to “relocate” their operations. The conflict between rival Colombian and Mexican drug cartels for domination of Spain is producing an unprecedented “turf” war.