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- Before murdering Molly Ticehurst in April 2024, court documents show Daniel Billings had threatened to exploit the limits of policing in her country town: "I will come in the middle of the night … The police won't stop me. I will get to you quicker than they will."
- The European Union has committed to achieving climate neutrality by 2050, a process that will require rapid and substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions across all economic sectors.
- Legislation that affects or discriminates against transgender and gender-diverse individuals can cause more psychological distress than personal experiences of discrimination, according to new Virginia Commonwealth University research published in the journal American Psychologist. The study also found that individuals with those identities experienced psychological distress from anti-transgender laws even if they lived in a state with legislation that is friendly toward transgender and gender-diverse individuals.
- When a multimillion-dollar masterpiece vanishes from a museum, the public calls for tougher criminal penalties and better-funded police task forces. But research from Wake Forest University suggests that some of these intuitive solutions can backfire, resulting in more art crime, not less.
- A new study sheds light on how Syrian archaeologists risked their lives to rescue approximately 30,000 priceless artifacts from the Deir ez-Zor Museum during the summers of 2014 and 2015 as the city faced the imminent threat of capture by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known as Daesh.
- A study published in Police Quarterly explores how Canadian courts respond when police officers break the law. The research, co-led by Brock University Assistant Professor of Political Science Danielle McNabb and University of Guelph Associate Professor of Political Science Kate Puddister, presents the first large-scale empirical analysis of how Canadian courts sentence police officers convicted of breaching the public's trust.
- A new report from the Brookings Institution presents evidence that increasing the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal could make nuclear crises more likely. This raises an important challenge to arguments that the U.S. must consider increasing its stockpile in response to China's growing nuclear capabilities.
- The ground is shifting beneath the feet of Australian authors and other creatives. A leaked proposal seen by the ABC suggests the government might grant artificial intelligence (AI) companies access to the copyrighted works of Australians under an opt-out system.
- Americans are grappling with artificial intelligence—from its lightning-fast development to the construction of data centers to support it—and are becoming more skeptical of its benefits.
- Immersive boot camps for women could be a way to overcome the stark gender imbalance in political leadership, according to new research that examined how to increase the political ambitions of talented women.
- A new report by the International Bar Association (IBA) has found a significant gap between the importance legal professionals attach to fundamental rule of law principles and their assessment of how effectively those principles are implemented in practice.
- Election officials can build public trust in procedures and results—even among suspicious voters who fear partisan manipulation—by creating videos that factually explain their security safeguards in simple terms. These are the findings of studies co-authored by a UC Riverside scholar, offering strategies for election officials to respond to false claims and conspiracy theories about election fraud and security, as well as suspicions that arise when mail-in ballot counting delays results.
- Most employees aren't discussing the latest political polls during meetings or debating hot-button issues around the coffee maker. But that doesn't mean politics isn't affecting the workplace. A study from Texas A&M University found that the political information employees consume outside of work can influence how they feel and behave on the job.
- As local news organizations continue to disappear across the United States, George Washington University researchers are linking shrinking access to community-based journalism to stronger feelings of isolation and loneliness.
- Allowing petty offenders in South Africa to remain in the community may reduce their risk of committing serious crimes compared with imprisonment, according to a study published in PLOS One by Farai Nyabadza of the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
- Republicans and conservatives are more likely than Democrats or liberals to justify political violence in 17 surveyed situations, according to a study published in PLOS One by Garen J. Wintemute of the University of California, Davis, and colleagues.
- From social media to the streets of Washington, D.C., the organized white nationalist movement has become more visible in the United States over the past few decades. But the extent of this extremist movement's appeal to the broader public is less certain.
- It's annual property tax collection season, and with it may come questions about how those property taxes are used and, if there's a tax increase, why.
- Over a third of U.S. adults (35%) cannot name all three branches of the government, and under half can name four of the five rights protected by the First Amendment, according to the 2026 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania. Of the five First Amendment rights, only freedom of speech is identified by more than half of survey respondents.
- Americans are heading into the 2026 midterm elections with widespread uncertainty about the integrity of the vote, according to a new national survey from the University of California San Diego.
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