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 judges said the public has some right to know how police using the surveillance technology. Police officials insist they are bound by a confidentiality agreement with the FBI, which provided the equipment, to not say anything about it. Judge Boner said: “I can’t think of a justification” to keep the records secret. The judges’ “comments are significant because national privacy groups have tried unsuccessfully for years to learn how police use the device," said the Observer.   read more

Hyundai Motor Co. and Kia Motors Corp. have reached a settlement with the U.S. government to pay a total of $300 million for misleading consumers about the fuel efficiency of their cars. The deal is said to represent the largest penalty ever for violating the Clean Air Act. The carmakers got into trouble when their engineers “chose favorable results rather than average results from a large number of tests,” said the EPA.   read more

Nearly 300 cities and counties have informed the Department of Homeland Security that they won’t cooperate with immigration requests to hold someone for deportation consideration. In addition, officials in three states—California, Colorado and Connecticut—have adopted the same policy of noncompliance. More than half of the nation’s 22 million immigrants live in the 300 jurisdictions defying DHS. These include the cities of New York, Los Angeles and Miami.   read more

Judge Frucci backed the argument of attorney James Broccoletti, who said the pass code was protected under the Fifth Amendment. Frucci agreed, ruling that the pass code is abstract knowledge and is protected. He did say that Baust’s fingerprint, like his DNA, is subject to use by law enforcement. Police were unsure whether a fingerprint would unlock the phone, however. Rulings such as this could cause those who want to move from password to biometric file protection to rethink their stand.   read more

Adoption of Proposition 47 could have national ramifications, given the history of California being a bellwether state for others to follow on political issues. If the state approves the initiative, California would become the first state to de-felonize all drug use. “We hope we’re setting a precedent for the nation,” said supporter Lynne Lyman. “We are hoping it will signal that we don’t need to be so tough on crime all the time.”   read more

A no-fly zone put up by the FAA was intended in part to keep television cameras from recording street violence and the police response in the wake of Brown’s killing. Law enforcement had insisted at the time that the no-fly zone was created for safety purposes only. Civil libertarians expressed serious concerns over the revelations, calling it an "extraordinarily troubling and a blatant violation of the press’s First Amendment rights.”   read more

To help make cars and driving safer for larger Americans, manufacturers are now making obese-sized crash test dummies. “We’re still testing with a dummy that was created in the ’80s that weighs 170 pounds. It’s not representative of the population, and obviously it’s a much different load on the system,” said Chris O’Connor. “Obese people are 78% more likely to die in a crash. The reason is the way we get fat. We get fat in our middle range. And we get out of position in a typical seat.”   read more

The next case of school overreaction happened at Strong Elementary School in Maine. One of its teachers attended a conference in Dallas, which was the site of a U.S. Ebola case. Of course, the conference was about 10 miles from the hospital where the Ebola victim was treated and the teacher had no contact with anyone who’d been near the victim. That didn’t matter to the staff at Strong, who sent home the teacher for 21 days.   read more

The provision that would allow a judge in one district to authorize searches of computers in another would allow the bureau to go “judge shopping” for one who might be most likely to grant a warrant. Some civil rights activists are concerned that such a significant rule change is being decided by such an obscure panel with little public notice.   read more

It’s a measure of how House of Representatives districts have been drawn to ensure safe seats that only 25 races in this week’s election account for 80% of the outside spending in House races. Most House districts that aren’t competitive see little spending. In fact, 193 of them have less than $10,000 in outside spending.   read more

Forty-three years after President Richard Nixon declared that marijuana was a Schedule I drug, cannabis has gotten its day in court thanks to a U.S. District judge trying defendants in a cultivation case. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Schedule I drugs have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse” and “are the most dangerous drugs.” Other Schedule I drugs are heroin, LSD, ecstasy, methaqualone, and peyote.   read more

Beginning when she was eight years old, with her parents and her siblings, she harvested cotton, grapes, figs, peaches, tomatoes, strawberries and carrots. In 1992, Echaveste was named a national Latino coordinator for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. After the election, she was deputy to Warren Christopher, the head of Clinton’s transition team and then in June she was named administrator of the Wage and Hour Division in the Department of Labor.   read more

The United States’ high rate of child poverty earned it a poor ranking by UNICEF, which listed it at 36th out of 41 wealthy nations. Thirty-two percent of all U.S. children reside in households that have annual incomes below 60% of the national median income for 2008, or $31,000, UNICEF reported (pdf). In some states, the rate is even higher. New Mexico’s is 41.9%, the worst in the country. New Hampshire has the best rate, at 12.5%.   read more

The snooping by Britain’s leading spy agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), means the Internet and phone data of Americans is being handled by another country without legal oversight. This was set up under agreements between the British government and Washington, as well as other foreign governments sharing data with GCHQ.   read more

The Postal Service came under fire last year for releasing a series of stamps featuring the characters from the “Harry Potter” movies. In that instance the USPS went around the committee to release the series. Some members of the panel were upset, not in the least because the character isn’t even American.   read more

Audrey Rowe became the administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service on April 1, 2011, after serving as deputy administrator for the department’s Special Nutrition Program since the start of President Barack Obama’s administration. Since taking over the Food and Nutrition Service, Rowe has helped institute menu changes in school lunches that emphasize healthier foods, including more fruits and vegetables and less whole milk.   read more