To conclude something is a hate crime, the offender’s intentions must be clear. That of course isn’t always the case. Perpetrators don’t always say racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted slurs before or after committing a crime. For instance, if a gay club is vandalized, it’s not always clear why. “The problem is not all hate-mongers are stupid,” Jack […]

Thanks to the U.S. Department of Justice, AT&T’s monopolistic dreams may not come true after all. According to media reports, the government may block AT&T’s proposed $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. Even if the deal is approved, AT&T may be required to sell off CNN, one of Time Warner’s crown jewels.

“Providing better care for people with addiction is commendable and I applaud the investment,” said Northeastern University law professor Leo Beletsky. But “that investment cuts at total cross purposes with simultaneous efforts to ramp up the criminal justice approaches.”

Northeastern professor James Alan Fox argues that well-meaning experts risk their credibility by asserting a link between domestic abuse and mass shootings. But the statistics simply don’t back it up.

In 2016 there were 6,100 reported instances of people targeted based on their race, religion, sexuality, disability or national origin, an increase of 300 over 2015, and like last year the overwhelming majority of those victims were targeted because of their race or religion. “I’m not surprised,” said Dr. Jeff McDevitt, an associate dean and […]

Col. McKeon has said it is department policy for troopers to only included relevant information and to extract any embarrassing details because arrest reports are considered public records. However, WGBH’s legal analyst Daniel Medwed says McKeon’s claim that he was following standard practice appears suspicious because of his connections to the Worcester County District Attorney’s […]

The robots are coming. They’re coming for my job, for your job, quite frankly for a whole lot of jobs in the very near future. Long story short: anything that can be automated probably will. So how do we really prepare young people for that future? Well, Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University, says it’s […]

Services like Twitter and Snapchat gained favor because they were different from the incumbent powerhouse Facebook: Twitter enabled the broadcast of short messages without requiring two-way interaction, while Snapchat allowed millennials to share their lives with those closest to them without the pressure of gaining shares and likes, noted Koen Pauwels, a professor of marketing […]

Over the next three years, Northeastern University professor Timothy Bickmore and Boston Medical Center doctor Michael Paasche-Orlow will distribute Microsoft Surface tablets preloaded with a chatbot to about 360 patients who have been told they have less than a year to live.

If the group emerges from the crisis unscathed, then its chief, Hassan Nasrallah, “will win by not losing,” said Denis Sullivan, co-director of the Middle East Center at Northeastern University in Boston. It’s too late to counter Hezbollah at least not in a “one fell swoop,” said Sullivan. “The cat is out of the bag […]

“It could be an act of trespassing or vandalism. It could be a violent crime, like rape or murder,” Jack Levin, an expert on hate crimes at Northeastern University, previously told me. “But when the motive involves targeting someone because of a difference, then it becomes a hate crime.”

Jennie C. Stephens, the dean’s professor of sustainability science and policy at Northeastern University and associate director of Northeastern’s Global Resilience Institute, argues for greater regulation to strengthen the grid.