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

Marmei was transferred to his country’s Washington embassy in 2000 as charge d’affaires. While there, he took a familiarization flight in a Blackhawk helicopter assigned to the Maryland National Guard. The craft had an emergency and was forced to land in the infield at Pimlico race track—a half hour before post time.   read more

The Cornucopia Institute says it has uncovered “one of the largest fraud investigations in the history of the organic industry.” Using aerial photography, the institute found 14 factory farms that have produced milk, meat and eggs under the organic label. Photographs showed the cattle and chickens on these farms were confined to “industrial-scale confinement livestock facilities” and cows were not given access to fields for grazing, which is required under federal rules for organic farming.   read more

On page 213 of the spending plan, there is language barring the U.S. Department of Justice from taking actions against states that have approved marijuana for medicinal use. This prohibition would apply to operations by the DEA. But the news is not all good from the halls of Congress. One House member, Republican Andy Harris of Maryland, wants to prohibit the District of Columbia from implementing its new law legalizing recreational medical marijuana.   read more

His father, Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke, was Somalia’s prime minister, and then president and was assassinated on October 15, 1969, by his bodyguards in the run-up to a military coup. In 2009, Sharmarke was chosen to be prime minister by President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed as part of a Western-backed unity government.   read more

The Coniglios had fallen behind on their mortgage, prompting the bank to unleash their robocaller—the computer system that routinely (if not maniacally) will call customers multiple times a day about bank debts. In the Coniglios’ case, the calls were relentless … upwards of five a day over a period of four years. The total reached 700. Even after the couple won rulings in court ordering B of A to stop the calls, they just kept coming.   read more

Condé signed a treaty with South Korea, initiating ambassador-level relations between the nations for the first time, the last African nation to do so. Guinea had exchanged ambassadors with North Korea as early as 1960. In 2013, Condé was named Guinea’s ambassador to Italy, serving until early 2014. He then came home briefly to be deputy head of administration, with control over major projects.   read more

While the media poured over the Senate's CIA torture report, the Obama administration was fighting to keep the lid on another torture report.The Justice Dept. probe into the CIA program was conducted by prosecutor John H. Durham, who spent four years delving into the controversy but ultimately recommended to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. to not file charges against the agency or any of its employees or contractors. Holder followed Durham’s suggestion and refrained from going after the CIA.   read more

The new provision was generated behind closed doors, wasn’t disclosed for public debate, and was a surprise when it was found buried in the spending bill. “The impetus for the measure appears to have been driven by the Republican National Committee, which has aggressively sought ways to shake off its fundraising limitations,” wrote the Post. “[It] will create the opportunity for the wealthiest Americans to buy — and federal officeholders to sell — government influence,” said Wertheimer.   read more

The U.S. is obligated under the International Convention on Torture to investigate any U.S. citizen accused of torturing someone, and the U.N. high commissioner for human rights said he welcomes the prosecution of CIA personnel who either ordered or carried out the torture against detainees. “The convention lets no one off the hook — neither the torturers themselves, nor the policy-makers, nor the public officials who define the policy or give the orders,” said the commissioner.   read more

Dr. Marcus Erikson, who led the study, told the Huffington Post one way to visualize that amount of plastic is to imagine a line of 2-liter plastic bottles running between the earth and the moon … twice. He also said the numbers he and his colleagues produced are on the conservative side. That’s because countries produce 300 million tons of plastic every year, of which 0.1% is discarded in the ocean, according to an estimate from the National Academy of Sciences.   read more

The man known as the “20th hijacker” of the 9/11 terrorist attacks wants to join other conspirators and detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Moussaoui has spent the past nine years at the federal super-maximum prison in Florence, Colorado. There, he claims he has been subjected to assaults, threats of murder, and harassment by guards and even other inmates, including Ramzi Yousef, who organized the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.   read more

In fact, 26 of the 119 detainees held by the CIA were individuals who did nothing wrong and were not involved with al Qaeda. One was Abu Hudhaifa, who endured ice water baths and more than 60 hours of standing without being allowed to sleep. Gul Rahman, a “suspected Islamic terrorist,” died of hypothermia after being forced to sleep without pants on a cold concrete floor. Other detainees were subjected to “rectal feeding and rectal rehydration,” even when cooperating with normal feedings.   read more

The key to the debate is a man named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who served as bin Laden’s personal courier. The CIA, with the help of the “Zero Dark Thirty” filmmakers, have pushed the story that the torture program resulted in information about Kuwaiti, who ultimately led them to bin Laden. However, the Senate report says the “vast majority of the intelligence acquired on Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti was originally acquired from sources unrelated to the [torture] program."   read more

Jessen was a specialist in the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance Escape training program designed to help soldiers endure torture by foreign captors. The firm he and Mitchell founded only came about after they started talking to the CIA about leaving the Pentagon and going into business for themselves. Nonetheless, they helped the CIA develop 20 methods of torture to use on suspected terrorists. That list was cut to 10 after some of the procedures were deemed too severe.   read more

After reviewing 31,000 bank “incidents” from 2007 to 2011, CIR determined “guards with guns” were “the strongest factor in whether the situation turned violent, and this held true even when controlling for other factors.” Most of the violence was focused on the guards themselves as those carrying firearms had an injury rate of 64 for every 1,000 incidents, “compared with less than 1 injury per 1,000 incidents when they were unarmed.”   read more

Winning isn’t always pretty, as 10 governors who won their races last month can attest. Five Democrats, four Republicans and one independent were victorious in their gubernatorial campaigns without the support of a majority of voters in their states. This group in 2014 represented only the third time in the last 100 years that 10 or more governors came out on top with a plurality of the vote.   read more