Month: June 2019

The Espionage Act and a Growing Threat to Press Freedom

The Justice Department’s recent indictment of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has alarmed press-freedom advocates, with even some of Assange’s fiercest critics warning that the government has crossed a perilous new frontier by using the Espionage Act to target a publisher. Another recent Espionage Act indictment has generated less controversy, presumably because its target…

By JohnValbyNation June 26, 2019 0

What Should Democrats Do to Help Children at the Border?

On Tuesday, as the Trump Administration returned a hundred children to dangerously neglectful conditions at a Border Patrol facility in Clint, Texas, and announced the resignation of the acting head of Customs and Border Protection, House Democrats prepared to vote for a four-and-a-half-billion-dollar humanitarian-aid package to help immigrants at the border. But supporting the aid…

By JohnValbyNation June 26, 2019 0

The Theory That Justified Anti-Gay Crime

In the bad old days, newspapers rarely mentioned gay men except in a certain kind of true-crime story. The first clue in the cases was often a body discovered in a hotel room. In 1920, the forty-seven-year-old scion of a New England piano-making family was found in New York’s Plymouth Hotel with “a fractured jaw…

By JohnValbyNation June 26, 2019 0