The majority of voters did not vote for Donald Trump for president; the majority of voters did not vote for Republican candidates for the Senate; and fewer than 51% of voters cast their ballots for Republican candidates for the House of Representatives. The Republican Party now controls the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, no matter how that came to be. I believe it is worth bearing in mind that a majority of U.S. citizens did not support the Republican winners.   read more

The program with the most improper payments was Medicare, with nearly $60 billion paid out to undeserving recipients. The next largest category of improper payments, and the one with the highest error rate, is in the Earned Income Tax Credit program (EITC), with $17.7 billion and an error rate of 27.2%. This program is meant to reduce taxes for low- and moderate income Americans.   read more

Ronald J. Brockmeyer, a judge in the city where a policeman, Darren Wilson, shot and killed unarmed Michael Brown last year, has a string of unpaid taxes going back to 2007, according to The Guardian. The newspaper said he owes $172,646 to the IRS. Yet he has no compunction about sentencing a poor defendant to jail for not being able to pay a fine. Brockmeyer developed a series of fees to raise revenue for the city on the backs of its poor residents.   read more

The illegal trade as a whole is worth somewhere between $7 billion and $23 billion. In just one three-year period, about 100,000 elephants were killed, largely for their ivory tusks sold on the black market throughout the world. More than 1,200 rhinos were poached in South Africa last year. The UNEP report says the illegal trade was responsible for the killing of 643 chimpanzees, 48 bonobos, 98 gorillas and 1,019 orangutans from 2005 to 2011.   read more

San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis is attempting to prosecute 15 individuals on charges of conspiracy for belonging to a gang from the Lincoln Park neighborhood of San Diego, even though none of them participated in the actual murder. The men are facing life in prison if they’re found guilty by association.   read more

The NSA collects all emails, phones and social media messages from Tuvalu, Nauru, Kiribati, Samoa, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Fiji and Tonga and the French territories of New Caledonia and French Polynesia. The NSA has been able to gather these communications through its spying relationship with New Zealand and its version of the NSA called the Government Communications Security Bureau.   read more

Since the Department of Justice announced the sentencing-review initiative more than a year ago, the administration has received more than 35,000 requests from inmates across the country—about 16% of the federal prison population. With so many petitions to review, the agency has failed to issue any clemency decisions based on requests filed since the announcement.   read more

The night before the crash, Holly, Valens and Richardson had performed at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa. The aircraft had been in flight for only four minutes when it crashed into a farm field five miles north of the municipal airport.   read more

The state government of Maharashtra has banned the slaughter of cows and the sale and consumption of beef. Anyone found breaking the law could face a fine and up to five years in prison. President Pranab Mukherjee approved the Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Bill that has taken 19 years to become law.   read more

The vault, which was opened in 2008, is designed to be a storage site of last resort for millions of species of plants. Seed banks from around the world store seeds there, until now mostly for food crops, in the event that a cataclysmic event destroys a crop elsewhere. The Svalbard seeds then could be used to restart the plant species. There are 840,000 varieties of food crops in the vault.   read more

Why is it that lower-level officers are sent to prison for shedding light on CIA torture and missteps while the former director is getting off with a slap on the wrist? “I don’t think General Petraeus should have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act, just as I don’t think I should have been...” said John Kiriakou. “Yet only one of us was. Both Petraeus and I disclosed undercover identities...that were never published. I spent two years in prison; he gets two years’ probation.”   read more

Holland joined USGS in issuing an official statement stating that fracking may be responsible for the increasing risk of earthquakes in Oklahoma. Within a week, Holland was called in to a meeting at the Oklahoma Commission with Continental oil executive Jack Stark, where displeasure was expressed about Holland’s statement. Holland later insisted he wasn’t pressured to alter his scientific findings.   read more

One theory is that his advisers don’t want Bush to collect too much money too soon and risk being perceived as being in the pocket of the uber wealthy. Another theory says Bush may be playing mind games with his GOP rivals. “I don’t want to say it’s a bluff, but he may be trying to kind of bolster up his support, and make it appear as though he’s going to be far and away the frontrunner and the leader,” said professor Lara Brown.   read more

Fort really needed to use the restroom. He told Republican committee chairman Josh McKoon that he was stepping out for a bathroom break and asked him to put committee work on hold until he got back. McKoon agreed. But as soon as Fort left, the Republicans hurriedly brought the bill back up for a vote. A staffer quickly alerted absent Democratic senators of what was happening, and they raced to the committee room to prevent the vote but were too late. The committee had already passed the bill.   read more

JPMorgan Chase has earned the distinction of being the largest bank among those deemed too-big-to-fail for the sake of the U.S. financial and economic systems, according to a new government report. The federal Office of Financial Research ranked 12 U.S. financial institutions based on their “total exposures.” Rounding out the first half dozen banks were Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.   read more

“I’m thrilled that President Obama owned up to his promise to veto the Keystone XL pipeline bill today. But in the same breath I’m spittin’ mad,” said Julia Crawford, whose land was taken by TransCanada. “Nearly three years ago, with the exact same data in front of him he decided to ‘cut through the red tape and fast track’ the southern leg of this project. Where was his ‘climate test’ then? President Obama owes all of us in Texas and Oklahoma an explanation. Better yet, an apology,”   read more

Some police departments have invested in Taser’s cameras after their chiefs forged “financial ties” with Taser, “raising conflict-of-interest questions.” “Taser [covers expenses] for police chiefs who speak at promotional conferences and is hiring recently retired chiefs as consultants, sometimes months after their cities signed contracts" with Taser, said AP. The police chief in Fort Worth even told Taser that he deserved “a raise” for lobbying his department to sign a contract with Taser.   read more