But no: What you find instead in the case of Larry Bushart is one of the most plain and egregious examples of police overreach and punishment of free speech you'll hopefully ever encounter. The injustice of it is both frightening and deeply relevant to our current sociopolitical landscape ... as is the curious indifference of national news, who seemed to largely miss the story entirely.
We examine whether the increased concentration of media ownership will create a more restrictive narrative. Recent developments in United States tech and media have prompted concerns about media consolidation and its impact on free speech. The US government is pushing ByteDance to reduce its control over TikTok, with Oracle proposed to oversee the platform's algorithm for national security reasons. Meanwhile, Skydance Media's $8bn merger with Paramount Global raises further concerns about media ownership centralisation.
Our family is overjoyed that, after four long years, our father, Saad Almadi, is finally on his way home to the United States! This day would not have been possible without President Donald Trump and the tireless efforts of his administration. We are deeply grateful to Dr. Sebastian Gorka and the team at the National Security Council, as well as everyone at the State Department. We also extend our thanks to the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh for keeping our father safe these past four years.
"It was not meant to call him a paedophile. It was a bad, dark, juvenile joke," he said. "I have not at any point tried to cause distress or anxiety or risk his life or his daughters' lives. "I don't want people to fear for their lives, I'm a dad. "I cannot believe I'm on trial for this. Words on a social media site."
Everyone's a critic, and that should be fine. Unless you happen to have said something about Taylor Swift. It might seem obvious, but it's OK not to like things. It's fine not to like a presidential candidate or the last Mission Impossible movie (bit slow to kick off, I felt). What is not OK is the way people nowadays reach for their digital pitchforks and torches if you don't like what they like.
I spent more than 20 years leading U.S. government-sponsored justice projects in countries with weak to nonexistent democracies, including Albania, Mongolia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Republic of Georgia, and Armenia. Those of us who have worked in nations like these don't have to imagine what it looks like when a place's leaders demonstrate no regard for the rule of law. What we've seen overseas looks a lot like what we've started to watch unfold in this country over the course of the past 10 months.
This is not what America's about. We have a president that is proclaiming executive orders trying to erase trans people from existence, and you say that the American flag includes everyone. For over 100 years, the American flag stood for slavery, and we had a war to fix that. For 90 years after that, it stood for segregation, and people took to the streets to get rid of that.
On Wednesday, Larry Bushart was released from Perry County Jail, where he had spent weeks unable to make bail, which a judge set at $2 million. Prosecutors have not explained why the charges against him were dropped, according to The Intercept, which has been tracking the case closely. However, officials faced mounting pressure following media coverage and a social media campaign called "Free Larry Bushart," which stoked widespread concern over suspected police censorship of a US citizen over his political views.
Christians can critique the State of Israel without being anti-Semitic, and of course, anti-Semitism should be condemned, said Roberts in a video after the Heritage Foundation received calls from some social media users to cut ties with Carlson: My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always. When it serves the interests of the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so with partnerships on security, intelligence, and technology.
Wolff, who has penned four best-selling books about President Trump, accuses Melania Trump of launching a campaign of threats to intimidate him from digging deeper into the first couple's friendship with Epstein, according to legal papers obtained by The News. These threatened legal actions are designed to create a climate of fear in the nation so that people cannot freely or confidently exercise their First Amendment rights, Wolff's 17-page claim reads. The threats are also intended to shut down legitimate inquiry into the Epstein matter.
Harrison Grant Randall, 40, was charged in March with six felony counts of defacing property. He was accused of tagging the Teslas with stickers of Elon Musk, the automaker's billionaire CEO who worked closely with President Donald Trump earlier this year. He was arrested by Brookline police after several Tesla drivers reported acts of vandalism, including one driver who sent in a video of them confronting Randall.
This is more than a legal win, it's a cultural stand. Public schools cannot bully employees into silence because they dare to express their faith or conservative values.
Maryland will not be able to enforce part of a 2021 law that allowed it to obscure the costs of a digital ad tax from consumers who were paying it. The order - which will not be appealed by the state - strikes down one portion of the first-of-its-kind tax on digital advertising within the state. That provision prohibited online companies from alerting consumers to the tax, by passing it on to them as a surcharge, fee or line item on their bills.
So many thoughts ... For obvious reasons, I've been reflecting a lot lately on my old constitutional law coursework. As long as the Supreme Court holds that money is speech-and the Supreme Court retains enough legitimacy to be taken seriously-I foresee major free speech issues around restricting advertising. If I were a betting man, I'd bet that the court's legitimacy will have a shorter shelf life than its view on the "marketplace of ideas," given how aggressively it's shedding any pretense of respect for precedent.
A reasonable listener would conclude that rapper Kendrick Lamar was "rapping hyperbolic vituperations" when he called rapper and singer Drake a "certified pedophile" in his 2024 song "Not Like Us," a federal judge said last week in an order tossing Drake's defamation lawsuit over the statement. In an Oct. 9 order, U.S. District Judge Jeannette A. Vargas of the Southern District of New York called Lamar's lyrics "nonactionable opinion," written amid "a heated rap battle, with incendiary language and offensive accusations hurled by both participants."
In a joint statement between the AI company and the King Estate, the parties wrote that they "have worked together to address how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s likeness is represented in Sora generations. Some users generated disrespectful depictions of Dr. King's image. So at King, Inc.'s request, OpenAI has paused generations depicting Dr. King as it strengthens guardrails for historical figures."
