Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) sent messages to all members of Congress terminating their positions, stating “Your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment.” All Democratic and independent members of Congress, as well as two Republicans, found themselves locked out of their offices after everything inside had been confiscated.   read more

The city agreed to pay Ashley Overbey $63,000 after police used a stun gun on her after she had reported a burglary at her home. But after posting comments about her case on a website, Baltimore officials withheld $31,500 of her settlement. “I was completely devastated,” she said. The restrictions have a “chilling effect” on victims of police misconduct, said lawyer Scott Greenwood. “It kind of defeats the purpose of these types of lawsuits,” said attorney Jeffrey Neslund.   read more

For his efforts, Folta received a $25,000 grant from Monsanto to fund his travel and “outreach.” But once news of the grant became publicized, the University of Florida donated the money to charity. Another expert brought on board by Monsanto was professor Bruce M. Chassy, who received a grant to support “biotechnology outreach and education activities.” Chassy’s activities included efforts to persuade the EPA to abandon a plan to tighten the regulation of certain pesticides.   read more

Last year, 33 departments and independent agencies paid nearly 8,500 workers more than $58.7 million in student loan repayment benefits, according to a report from OPM. That came out to an average of just more than $6,900 per employee. Eighty percent of the money was paid by the Justice, Defense, State and Veterans Affairs departments, along with the SEC. Fifteen percent more workers received this assistance in 2014 than in 2013.   read more

Switching to a high deductible was intended to make people smarter shoppers for their healthcare. “Instead, both healthy and sick patients simply used way less health care,” reported Vox. “This raises a scary possibility: Perhaps higher deductibles don't lead to smarter shoppers but rather, in the long run, sicker patients,” she added. The study also found that it was the sickest of those insured who were least likely to go to the doctor.   read more

Millions of Americans have had their DNA stored at popular genealogy companies Ancestry.com or 23andMe. But doing so comes with the risk that their genetic samples will be turned over to law enforcement conducting investigations, even with no evidence tying them to a crime. Both companies have privacy policies that claim to protect DNA from unauthorized use. But these policies contain exemptions buried within them that state they will deliver DNA samples to police requesting them.   read more

Legal and health experts said they could not think of another modern example of a court ordering offenders to give blood in lieu of payment, or face jail time. “What happened is wrong in about 3,000 ways,” said professor Caplan. “You’re basically sentencing someone to an invasive procedure that doesn’t benefit them and isn’t protecting the public health.” The Southern Poverty Law Center filed an ethics complaint against the judge, saying he had committed “a violation of bodily integrity.”   read more

Rubens and Graves “inappropriately used their positions of authority for personal and financial benefit,” said the VA’s IG. The two senior executives “gamed VA’s moving-expense system for a total of $400,000” using “questionable reimbursements.” The scheming has caught the attention of Congress, which planned to investigate the VA and learn how it allowed Rubens and Graves to pull off what the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs called a “shockingly unethical misuse of funds.”   read more

“It’s exactly what we thought the tax would do,” said professor Barry Popkin. Advocates here have argued that one way to help reduce obesity is to tax sodas, making them more expensive to purchase. The key is to put the tax on the producer, so the price of the drinks is raised, rather than treating it like a sales tax, which is added on to the price. Although it was too soon for the study of Mexico’s tax to draw conclusions about fighting obesity, it did show the effects of the tax on sales.   read more

Laura Pitter of Human Rights Watch, who has investigated torture, said the CIA was being “entirely disingenuous” in claiming it waterboarded only three people. “First, more than three people were waterboarded,” she said. “But second, the CIA used water to torture detainees in a variety of ways that cannot escape classification as torture. ...They induced near suffocation using water. And whether you call it ‘waterboarding’ or ‘water dousing,’ that’s torture – plain and simple.”   read more

"The vast majority of news stories made no mention that Iraqi and Afghan civilians might also have been harmed by the U.S. military’s burning of waste,” wrote Bonds. “When journalists describe the pollution itself, how it billowed over military bases and covered living quarters with ash and soot, such accounts never mention that this pollution would not have stopped at the cement barricades...at base boundaries, but must have also settled over civilians’ homes and the surrounding landscapes.”   read more

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) “quietly published” a list of titles of its restricted reports that have not been publicly released because they contain “classified information or controlled unclassified information.” GAO officials said the list was published in an effort to inform lawmakers, federal agencies and the public about those reports. The list goes back only as far as September 30, 2014, and it does “not cite titles that are themselves classified,” Steven Aftergood wrote.   read more

Gifford said coming out as a teenager was challenging, but that his life has changed completely since then. “I came out when I was 18... It was a huge struggle. I had no gay role models... I was riddled with self-hatred and self-doubt, and a lack of any understanding of what my life would be like in the future. There were many, many days when you didn’t want to wake up the next morning, but you can’t even imagine those days now—they seem like another lifetime.”   read more

The union representing workers at the National Weather Service (NWS) has filed a legal complaint against the agency’s recent introduction of employee nondisclosure agreements, claiming managers are trying to “gag” staff from talking about internal issues. The NWS’ nondisclosure orders forbid disclosing information about activities related to workforce planning, settlement of grievance disputes and the collective bargaining process.   read more

During one year, U.S. drone strikes killed more than 200 people—but only 35 of them were the intended targets. “These eye-opening disclosures make a mockery of U.S. government claims that its lethal force operations are based on reliable intelligence and limited to lawful targets,” said ACLU. “The government often claims successes that are really tragic losses." Said the whistleblower: "Assigning...death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield...was, from the [beginning], wrong.”   read more

Criminal prosecutions of corporations declined by nearly 30% from 2004 to 2014. The hands-off approach by the Obama administration began at the end of the Bush years, when Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip told federal prosecutors in 2008 “take into account the possible substantial consequences to a corporation’s employees, investors, pensioners and customers” when thinking of going after a company. There were 21% fewer corporate prosecutions in the five years after the Filip memo.   read more

The greater numbers of people now experiencing the effects of climate change have contributed to the switch. “The drought issue is affecting big regions of the country,” said Rabe. “Drought is not just a narrow, localized issue now.” Fifty-six percent of Republicans support the evidence behind global warming. That’s the highest that number has been since 2008, just as the GOP establishment began to attack President Barack Obama and his policies, including climate change mitigation.   read more