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By BILL NEWMAN

Warning: The case from the Supreme Court of Alabama, discussed here, may cause severe nausea. Proceed with caution. The Supreme Court of Alabama recently decided a case about frozen embryos created, kept, and later accidentally destroyed at a...

By BILL NEWMAN

Are you on the outside looking in? Or the inside looking out?This question, important in many spheres of life, took center stage in federal court this past week in Roman Catholic Bishop of Springfield v. City of Northampton. Let’s back up for a...

By BILL NEWMAN

This past week Alabama continued our country’s experiment with different ways to kill people. It executed Kenneth Smith.A brief history. In the American colonies, death sentences, imported from Great Britain, were by hanging. Hanging could be...

By BILL NEWMAN

This is scary. The number of books being banned in school libraries is spiraling upward. Nationwide, for the 2022-2023 school year, PEN America substantiated 3,362 school book bans that targeted 1,557 unique titles. That’s a 33% increase from the...

By BILL NEWMAN

In November, the United States Supreme Court adopted a Code of Conduct. It’s a list of suggested, not required, ethical dos and don’ts for the Justices.The justices issued this document because they want the klieg lights that the news media has been...

By BILL NEWMAN

When the sun rose over the Capitol on Oct. 25, 2023, Mike Johnson was a backbencher, an unknown-to-most-people congressman from Louisiana. By that afternoon, he was the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.Since then, many of us have been...

By BILL NEWMAN

The facts are startling. In December 2019, after Zackey Rahimi and his girlfriend, identified in court papers as “CM,” got into an argument in a parking lot, Rahimi grabbed her, knocked her to the ground, dragged her back to his car and threw her...

By BILL NEWMAN

This time it really matters.I’m not saying that the federal indictment in Florida that accuses Trump of absconding with and hiding national security documents and lying to federal law enforcement about possessing those papers and, additionally,...

By BILL NEWMAN

Here we go again. Last June the Supreme Court overruled a half-century of precedent and repealed the right to abortion. This June, the court again jettisoned a half-century of precedent, this time to gut affirmative action.Let’s be clear. This is not...

By BILL NEWMAN

In March, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts struck down as unconstitutional the town of Southborough’s Civility Code, which required that comments made by members of the public to town boards and committees be “respectful and courteous.”...

By BILL NEWMAN

Last year for my birthday my brother, Jeff, gave me “Once More Around the Park,” a collection of stories by Roger Angell, who has been described as “baseball’s finest, fondest chronicler.” Jeffrey, no doubt, came upon the book, published in 1991,...

By BILL NEWMAN

This is a story of sadness and punishment compounding tragedy and pain.On Oct. 4, 2013, Eric Sinacori, a 20-year-old kinesiology major at the University of Massachusetts, was found dead in his apartment at Puffton Village in Amherst. He died from a...

By BILL NEWMAN

People with pre-existing conditions fear that they “are going to die because of a vote we might be taking.”Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Florida) said that earlier this week. He added, “(A) lot of people … call my office … daily who are extremely angry … because...

By BILL NEWMAN

The Preamble begins, “We the People.” The evening of March 26, a large group gathered at the Haymarket Café in Northampton to read the United States Constitution and its amendments. The thought was, we talk about the Constitution a lot but we actually...

By BILL NEWMAN

A year ago I could not have imagined asking or being asked the question, is fascism at America’s door? Now I find it critical to contemplate the answer.The question takes me back to my senior year at Antioch College in 1972 when I was taking a course...