Agreed, a few states (4-5?) have been able to fully eliminate the biggest issue with civil asset forfeiture (including removing the loophole that allows their state employees from working with the federal govt. to get around those restrictions).
Over half the states have started to do something about it. But as long as that loophole remains and as long as the federal govt. itself can continue to abuse civil asset forfeiture, we'll continue to see problems.
The justices ruled in one case that a law allowing suits for aiding terrorism did not apply to the ordinary activities of social media companies.
An excellent decision. If it had gone the other way we likely would have seen social media websites shutdown entirely and comments disabled from YouTube. This also would have directly affected anyone in the U.S. that wanted to run an instance of Lemmy (or any federated instance that users could post content on).
The rulings were in regards to Section 230 which was a law passed in 1996 aimed at protecting services which allow users to post their own content.
The supreme court tackled 2 different cases concerning this:
- Whether social media platforms can be held liable for what their users have said.
- This was very specific to whether algorithms that refer tailored content to individual users can cause companies to be considered as knowingly aiding and abetting terrorists (if their pro-terrorist content is referred to other users).
Interesting, I didn't realize that Russia was already renting out the base pre-2014. Thank you for that context.
Perhaps an option could be that Ukraine gets their land back, but there's some agreement that Russia can rent out the land around the port at Sevastopol.
Ukraine gets paid for the use of their land (and ultimately they still own it), and Russia gets exclusive access to that part of the port where they can do whatever they need.
This specific case revolved around a 94 yr old woman in Minnesota who owed $15k in taxes. Her home was taken away and sold for $40k and the government kept everything from the auction.
It's hard to believe that this was ever legal, this is a major win for common sense rulings.
