National News at a Glance

The EPA Says It Wants Research Transparency. Scientists See an Attack on Science.

The Environmental Protection Agency is considering a major change to the way it assesses scientific work, a move that would severely restrict the research available to it. Under the proposed policy, the agency would no longer consider scientific research unless the underlying raw data can be made public. But these fields of research often require personal health information for thousands of individuals, who typically agree to participate only if the details of their lives are kept confidential. As a result, regulators crafting future rules would quite likely find themselves restricted from using some of the most consequential environmental research.

Trump Can’t Stop Tweeting, but Goes Silent on Stormy Daniels

President Donald Trump has found two people he won’t attack on Twitter: Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal. He has been uncharacteristically silent in recent days — to the relief of his advisers — as Stephanie Clifford, a pornographic film star, and McDougal, a Playboy model, described intimate details of sexual encounters with Trump. The fact that the president has not given oxygen to the headlines, however, does not mean that he is content. On Monday, Clifford’s lawyer filed suit against Trump’s lawyer for defamation.

Trump’s New Judicial Litmus Test: Shrinking ‘the Administrative State’

The Trump administration has a new litmus test for federal judgeships: reining in what conservatives call “the administrative state.” With surprising frankness, the White House has laid out a plan to fill the courts with judges devoted to a legal doctrine that challenges the broad power federal agencies have to interpret laws and enforce regulations, often without being subject to judicial oversight. Weeding out judicial candidates based on an ideological checklist is something Democratic and Republican presidents have long done. But it is rare for a White House to be so open about what it considers disqualifying.

Fighting for Change, and Paying the Price

As the 50th anniversary of the premature death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. approaches, dying young continues to rock social justice activists today. But where he died from an assassin’s bullet at the age of 39, over the last two years, at least five young activists who gained national prominence amid the Black Lives Matter movement have died. The causes range from suicide to homicide to natural causes. But with each fallen comrade, activists are left to ponder their own mortality and whether the many pressures of the movement contributed to the shortened lives of their colleagues.

Linda Brown, Symbol of Landmark Desegregation Case, Dies

Linda Brown, whose father objected when she was not allowed to attend an all-white school in her neighborhood and who thus came to symbolize one of the most transformative court proceedings in American history, the school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, died Sunday in Topeka, Kansas. Her death was confirmed Monday by a funeral home spokesman in Topeka. It is Brown’s father, Oliver, whose name is attached to the famous case, although the suit that ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court represented a number of families. In 1954, the court ruled that segregated schools were inherently unequal.

China’s Space Station May Crash to Earth on April Fools’ Day

The sky is falling. Again. China’s first space station, Tiangong-1, abandoned and out of control, is expected to drop out of orbit around this weekend, with pieces of it likely to survive the fiery re-entry and crash somewhere on Earth. Don’t worry. According to space debris experts, the chances that you personally will be hit by of a chunk of space metal are essentially zero — less than one in a trillion. The European Space Agency just updated its forecast is for Tiangong-1’s demise, pinpointing its fall anytime from this Friday to next Monday.