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Researchers study effect of marijuana on policing

The long-time controversy over marijuana legalization in Washington finally came to an end in 2012 when the state legislature passed Initiative 502. Four years later, WSU researchers are studying how it affected police operations.

Mary Stohr
Stohr

WSU criminal justice and criminology professor Mary Stohr will lead a $1 million three-year study beginning January 1, 2017, to research the effects that the legalization has had on law enforcement and policing. The grant, from the National Institute of Justice, will look at policing in the state and how the criminal justice organization adjusted to this policy change.

Stohr said they are curious about how police changed their practices since the legalization and how it affected crime rate statistics.

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Daily Sun News

Daily Evergreen

WSU News

Opinion: Donald Trump, the herald of evangelicals’ end times

Matthew Sutton
Matthew Sutton

Matthew Avery Sutton, a history professor at Washington State University, is a Guggenheim Fellow and author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism. In his recent op-ed for the Seattle Times, Sutton examines the views of many evangelical Americans who see Donald Trump’s candidacy as a harbinger of the second coming of Jesus Christ.

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Seattle Times

Panel tackles police-involved violence, race

In the wake of police-involved shootings that left two black men dead in two cities, Washington State University hosted an expert panel discussion on race and policing in America.

The event, held Tuesday afternoon in the CUB auditorium, drew a large crowd of students and community members. Put on by WSU’s Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service, the panel addressed the growing outrage over police use of force against minority members.

Cornell Clayton
Clayton
Even the two presidential candidates are daring to speak out on the issue, said institute director and professor of political science Cornell Clayton.

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WSU News

WSU professor explores use of missionaries and religious leaders as spies in World War II

If the name John Birch sounds familiar, it’s probably because of the John Birch Society, a far-right group founded more than a decade after his death in 1945. Less has been written about the man himself: a missionary-turned-spy who built a formidable intelligence network in China during World War II.

Matthew Sutton
Matthew Sutton

“He actually flew with the bombers so he could visually point out where to drop the bombs,” said Matthew Sutton, a history professor at Washington State University. “He hated the Japanese. They had destroyed the churches he had built. They were punishing the Chinese Christians. So he was doing everything he could to support the war.”

According to Sutton, Birch was one in “a small army” of Christian missionaries who were aggressively recruited to conduct clandestine operations during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. This little-known practice, Sutton said, “made Americans aware of the importance of religion” in gathering intelligence.

The professor recently won a $50,000 federal grant to research and write a book on the topic, tentatively titled “(Un)Holy Spies: Religion and Espionage in World War II.”

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Spokesman-Review

 

Unknown sponsors behind one-third of U.S. Senate campaign ads

A study by the campaign finance watchdog Center for Responsive Politics and Wesleyan University’s Media Project finds that a type of political group that does not have to disclose its donors is responsible for $80 million in ads nationally—35.8 percent of all advertising in Senate races.

Travis Ridout
Travis Ridout

Without knowing who is paying for the ads, voters are robbed of “an important clue” that allows them “to take a claim made in an ad with a grain of salt,” said Travis Ridout, a Washington State University political science professor who works with the Wesleyan University project that analyzes campaign donations.

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McLeansboro Times Leader

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