Attorney General Scott Pruitt on Friday said a federal appeals court granted a request by his office and 17 other states to block the implementation of the EPA’s “waters of the United States” rule nationwide.

In a published decision, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Oklahoma and the other states proved they were likely to succeed on the merits of their various lawsuits challenging the rule, known as the WOTUS rule. The court said staying enforcement of the rule “temporarily silences the whirlwind of confusion” caused by the WOTUS rule and “honors the policy of cooperative federalism” by returning power to the states. This is the second federal court to decide that the WOTUS rule is likely unlawful; no court has decided otherwise.

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A new study based on the open-source, open-standards, StreetCred® Police Killings in Context (PKIC) data project reveals that the number of unarmed civilians killed in confrontations with police is substantially lower than commonly stated in the media.

At the same time, 11 officers have been arrested and indicted in five cases that appeared to prosecutors to be unjustified. The non-partisan PKIC project seeks to provide objective data and contextual facts on deadly force incidents to researchers, communities, activists, journalists and law enforcement advocacy groups.

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