Author: TheConversation

Governing from jail: Constitution unclear about a candidate running for president while indicted

By Stefanie Lindquist, Foundation Professor of Law and Political Science, Arizona State University A Manhattan grand jury has voted to indict former President Donald Trump. The specific state charges “remain a mystery” but will be related to the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation of Trump for making hush money payments to a porn star just before the 2016 presidential election. It is the first time a U.S. president or former president has been indicted. At the same time, Trump is expected to continue his campaign for the presidency, seeking to regain in 2024 the position he lost in 2020 to...

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Deepfakes are calling: How to avoid phone scams with AI-generated voice clones

By Matthew Wright, Professor of Computing Security, Rochester Institute of Technology; and Christopher Schwartz, Postdoctoral Research Associate of Computing Security, Rochester Institute of Technology You have just returned home after a long day at work and are about to sit down for dinner when suddenly your phone starts buzzing. On the other end is a loved one, perhaps a parent, a child or a childhood friend, begging you to send them money immediately. You ask them questions, attempting to understand. There is something off about their answers, which are either vague or out of character, and sometimes there is...

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Affordable Mobility: Boosting public transit in an auto-centric America depends on improved bus service

By Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Professor of Urban Policy and Planning, Hunter College Public transit in the U.S. is in a sorry state, with aging, underfunded and losing riders, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Many proposed solutions focus on new technologies, like self-driving cars and flying taxis. But as a researcher in urban policy and planning, I see more near-term promise in a mode that is been around for a century: the city bus. Today, buses in many parts of the U.S. are old and do not run often enough or serve all the places where people need to go....

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A relic of the car craze: City planners finally questioning the worth of parking garages

By Kevin J. Krizek, Professor of Environmental Design, University of Colorado Boulder; and John Hersey, Teaching Assistant Professor of Environmental Design, University of Colorado Boulder For the past century, the public and private sector appear to have agreed on one thing: the more parking, the better. As a result, cities were built up in ways that devoted valuable space to storing cars, did little to accommodate people who don’t own cars and forced developers to build expensive parking structures that increased the cost of living. Two assumptions undergird urban parking policy: Without convenient parking, car owners would be reluctant...

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Bombed-out hospitals from Syria’s civil war make disaster recovery difficult for earthquake survivors

By Ora Szekely, Associate Professor of Political Science, Clark University After a pair of devastating earthquakes struck southern Türkiye and northwestern Syria, the number of confirmed deaths continues to rise, surpassing 52,000 as of March 23. The United Nations estimates that millions of people on both sides of the border have been affected, including 9 million in Syria alone. Many across northwest Syria are enduring winter conditions without adequate shelter or access to food, drinking water, electricity, or heating fuel. Indian economist Amartya Sen famously argued that famines must be understood as problems with human origins rather than merely...

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Aid groups play vital role in helping Syria’s quake-devastated areas that were already disaster zones

By Kimberly Howe, University of Virginia Humanitarian Collaborative Practitioner Fellow; Assistant Research Professor of International Relations, Tufts University Three weeks after the February 2023 earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria, I stood amid the rubble in Jindires, a devastated Syrian village. An estimated 50,000 people had lost their lives in the two countries by that point, with the number of casualties still climbing. Around me, heaps of concrete and twisted metal mixed with bursts of color — fragments of furniture, children’s toys, clothing — that served as reminders of the lives that crumbled when homes crumbled, trapping people inside and...

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