The California teens advocating for wider voting rights
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High school students in the Northern California city of Albany are asking older neighbors to grant them suffrage this November, in an effort to offer the broadest voting rights to 16-year-olds on the West Coast.
The question will appear on the ballot in this San Francisco Bay Area city of 20,000 in the form of an amendment that allows 16- and 17-year-olds to participate in all municipal elections, but not run for office.
“We have this situation where there are students who are actively involved in shaping policy on a whole host of issues,” said Alex Li, an 18-year-old recent graduate of Albany High School who with classmate Nirvaan Jaswal lobbied the city council to take up the issue of their voting rights. “So why can’t they vote?”
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The DEI movement in California is crumbling amid attacks
Less Of This
Girls In Tech, a nonprofit dedicated to recruiting women to the tech industry, was a Silicon Valley darling, with major companies eagerly partnering with the group after its 2007 launch.
But in a single week in late 2023, five key donors pulled their funding, citing market turbulence.
To stay afloat, the group’s founder, Adriana Gascoigne, considered merging with Women Who Code, a nonprofit with a similar mission backed by corporate giants including Microsoft, Google and Boeing. Days after she floated the idea to members of her board, Women Who Code shuttered.
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SCOTUS "shadow docket" is back, just in time to break the election
Speaking Of...
Less than a month ago, Justice Elena Kagan suggested the Supreme Court consider dialing back its review of significant cases on its controversial emergency docket.
“Our summers used to be actually summers,” Kagan told a group of judges in California, lamenting the “relentless” filing of emergency appeals. “We’ve gotten into a pattern where we’re doing too many of them.
Since then, the Supreme Court’s emergency caseload has exploded.
In coming days, the high court is expected to tackle short-fuse challenges to President Joe Biden’s latest effort to reduce student debt and to cut planet-warming pollution by limiting power plant emissions. And the court must decide whether Arizona, a presidential battleground, may require thousands of people to prove their US citizenship before voting this year. Also pending is a fight over Biden’s requirement that family planning clinics that receive federal public health funding provide referrals for abortions for patients who request it.
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A mother on a mission for police transparency
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Angela Williams’ life was forever altered on Christmas Eve 2017 when she learned that Troy, Alabama, cops had severely beaten her 17-year-old son, Ulysses Wilkerson.
Law enforcement officials said cops had approached the teen around midnight the day before because he was walking near a closed business. They claimed he fled and then reached for his waistband, prompting the officers to use physical force.
Williams was skeptical of their account, and she posted a picture of her son’s bloodied, bruised and swollen face on Facebook. Despite local and national outcry, a Pike County grand jury failed to indict four cops involved in the incident.
Read the rest on The Marshall Project
