President Donald Trump invited the Dodgers to the White House. Many of their fans feared that the team, by accepting, would humiliate themselves and betray the team’s large Latino, Asian and African-American fan base. Dodgers controlling owner Mark Walter, along with co-owner Magic Johnson, have proposed a solution. Trump has promised that if he can keep the championship trophy, the Commissioner’s Trophy, he will end all seizures and deportations of immigrants.   read more

Unlike many Foreign Service officers, Alsup did not go immediately to work for the State Department after college. She worked for the aerospace division of Ling-Temco-Vought, and she opened a franchised art store in her hometown of St. Petersburg. Alsup went overseas in 2005 for her first assignment to The Gambia. Since 2012, she has served as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Accra, Ghana.   read more

“The U.K. and U.S. are both insisting that the wording for any mandate about autonomous weapons should discuss only emerging technologies," said Noel Sharkey. Such a development would undermine the intent of the agreement, and result in autonomous weapons systems becoming a part of modern warfare. “If there is not a pre-emptive ban on the high-level autonomous weapons then once the genie is out of the bottle it will be extremely difficult to get it back in,” said the U.N.'s Christof Heyns.   read more

The United States has lost nearly 60 rural hospitals over the past five years, leaving communities across the country looking for health care services and enduring the fallout from the closures. One rural hospital lobbyist says there are no simple answers for stopping this trend. “If it were just one silver bullet, it would have been easier to attack it legislatively and figure it out,” said chief NRHA lobbyist Maggie Elehwany. “But it’s really death by a thousand different knives.”   read more

U.S. officials using the Global Forecast System (GFS) warned for two days that Joaquin would strike the East Coast around the Mid-Atlantic region. Instead, it remained out at sea—which is what the European Center for Medium-Range Forecasts forecast. “Eventually, the GFS model forecast shifted to the correct solution, but the European model had the correct forecast about 24 hours before the GFS, emerging victorious,” Jason Samenow wrote at The Washington Post.   read more

It’s no contest when comparing the grammar skills of Democrats and Republican. Republican supporters made more than twice as many mistakes as Democratic supporters. For every 100 words written, the average Democratic supporter made 4.2 mistakes, while the average Republican backer made 8.7 errors. Among the candidates, supporters of Democrat Lincoln Chafee had the lowest rate of mistakes (3.1 per 100 words), while those backing Donald Trump had the highest rate of mistakes (12.6).   read more

Scott’s early State Dept. postings included Croatia, Israel, and Switzerland. He stepped away from the diplomatic world for a bit in 1994 as a national security fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. When he returned to active duty with the Foreign Service in 1996, it was as a political counselor at the embassy in Moscow. In 1999, Scott was moved to a similar role at the embassy in Budapest, Hungary.   read more

Oxfam singled out the U.S., Iran, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey for “fueling violence and violations of war in Syria through arms and ammunition transfers to parties to the conflict.” Along with the U.K. and Kuwait, the U.S. also was criticized for its “less than generous” offers “to welcome the most vulnerable refugees.” Oxfam claims the U.S. has resettled only 8% of its “fair share” of refugees. Since 2011, only 1,500 Syrian refugees have been admitted into the country.   read more

There are those—including members of Congress who should know better—who believe those now imprisoned at Guantánamo, some of whom have not been convicted of any crimes, have some kind of powers that would allow them to escape from the most secure facility that the U.S. can devise. Or it might be that they just want to deny President Obama one of his original goals when he took office—to close the expensive Guantánamo camp, which is a focus of anti-American sentiment around the world.   read more

Last year’s total of opioid overdoses was 1,263, up 97 over the total in 2013, according to The Tennessean. Opioids are found in prescription painkillers such as Hydrocodone and Oxycodone, nicknamed “hillbilly heroin.” “It’s an epidemic sweeping across the state, affecting people in both small towns and big cities,” The Tennessean’s Holly Fletcher wrote. The death toll was highest among men and women ages 45 to 55.   read more

The environmental organization says this amount of greenhouse pollution is equivalent to the emissions of 6.8 million cars and is 10 to 40 times as much pollution as the cars were supposed to emit. “What Volkswagen did wasn’t just consumer fraud, it was a crime against our climate and against future generations relying on us for a livable planet,” said Peter Galvin of the Center for Biological Diversity. “This will have a far-reaching effect on our clean air and climate.”   read more

The majority of charter schools still open scored in the bottom 16% on the 2014 Ohio Performance Index, which measures student performance on state assessments. “Ohio has a real quality control problem,” said Alex Medler. “Ohio’s more broken than the Wild West.” Charter schools in that state spend more than twice as much of their revenue on administrative costs than public schools. That leaves less to spend on teachers and students.   read more

The European Court has invalidated an international agreement that allows the sharing of online data between the U.S. and Europe by Internet companies like Google and Facebook. The ruling could affect the flow of digital information such as users’ web search histories and social media updates. “The court said leaks from Edward J. Snowden...made it clear that American intelligence agencies had almost unfettered access to the data, infringing on Europeans’ rights to privacy,” said the Times.   read more

Valeant’s corporate strategy has nothing to do with finding cures for disease. Instead, it buys other drug firms that own older medicines. Then it jacks up the price. If “products are sort of mispriced and there’s an opportunity, we will act appropriately in terms of doing what I assume our shareholders would like us to do,” Valeant CEO J. Michael Pearson told analysts. In other words, he’s happy to squeeze money out of patients for the sake of his shareholders.   read more

When Virginia’s GOP-dominated legislature was found to have drawn congressional district maps that were racially discriminatory, the districts were ordered to be redrawn. However, the Republicans say their intent was not to discriminate, but to unfairly draw districts that favored candidates from their party, and any remapping should reflect that. Now they’ve admitted in court filings that the gerrymander was intentional, and may they please keep it.   read more

Researchers found that patients with less education, who were unemployed and who were black, Hispanic or another minority tended to have longer wait times. Hispanic patients, for example, spent 105 minutes at a clinic, while white patients spent an average of 80 minutes. When it came to travel time, black patients spent an average of 45 minutes, while white patients traveled an average of 36 minutes getting to a clinic.   read more

The chemical safety board has been rocked by chaos and coup, thanks to poor leadership, which makes you wonder what has gone on at the African Development Foundation to generate such a bottom-of-the-barrel score. Other agencies scoring below 50% were the Federal Election Commission (43%), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (46%), Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (47%), and Commission on Civil Rights (49%). DHS had the lowest mark among large federal agencies.   read more