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

In Yakima, Washington, which is one-third Latino, officials will have to create voting districts for city council elections. The change is expected to finally bring a Latino to office after nearly 40 years. The city of Grand Prairie has been accused of violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and denying fair representation to Hispanic voters. Currently, all of the city’s council members are white, despite the population being nearly 43% Hispanic.   read more

Three men are charged with stealing email addresses from email service providers (ESP) and then using those companies’ computers to send out massive amounts of spam directing recipients to the defendants’ sites. Nguyen and Vu used “phishing” schemes to gain access to some of the ESPs. Employees there were sent legitimate looking emails. Once they clicked on a link within the emails, malware was installed on their computers that allowed the defendants to gain access to their company’s network.   read more

By most measures, the economy is in far better shape than it was when President Barack Obama took office. In February, 295,000 jobs were added, the 12th month in a row that at least 200,000 jobs were added, the longest such period since 1994. The unemployment rate, 5.5%, is the lowest since May 2008. The stock market is high and gas prices are relatively low. The outlier is wage growth, which has been stagnant.   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