In an attempt to end the war caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. President Donald Trump has offered to return Alaska to Russia in exchange for Russia pulling its troops from Eastern Ukraine. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin said he would agree to the proposal if Trump also returned Fort Ross and the Russian River in California, Russia sold Fort Ross to Mexican citizen John Sutter in 1841.   read more

University of Wisconsin researchers are planning to take newborns from their mothers, keep them isolated for six weeks except for feeding and cleaning, then put them with one other six-week-old and torture the pair with live snakes and intruders. If those newborns were human, people would be going to jail. Instead the subjects are rhesus monkeys, chosen because they’ll act and feel pretty much like a human would when subjected to those stresses.   read more

Clancy moved up to special agent in charge of presidential protection in February 2009 when Barack Obama assumed office. Under his watch, in November 2009, a couple famously crashed a White House dinner honoring Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Clancy offered his resignation to then-Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan because of the security breach, but Sullivan declined to accept it.   read more

The United States looks a little better if you add in the number of senators. Twenty of the 100 senators are women, giving the U.S. 18.6% female representation overall. But adding in upper chambers for all legislatures allows Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Ireland and Bahrain to vault over the United States in the rankings and puts 103 nations ahead of the United States on the list.   read more

Sherri Ybarra isn’t clear on how long she’s been married, figured she’d be able to get a Ph.D. in education in one semester and hasn’t voted in a general election since moving to Idaho 18 years ago. But she has a good chance of being elected the state’s superintendent of schools. Ybarra has also plagiarized material from the website of her competitor and has claimed endorsements from elected officials who are not supporting her.   read more

A woman Chicago police detectives accused of killing her son was jailed for almost two years before being freed because a defense attorney learned the defendant had been in prison at the time of her son’s death. Yesenia Santiago was accused by detectives Carlos Cortez and Roger Sandoval of killing her son Ismael Santana in 2007. They questioned her for 11 hours, feeding her information about the crime, then read Santiago her Miranda rights and videotaped her making a “confession.”   read more

Verma was appointed assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs under Hillary Clinton in 2009. His appointment appeared to violate Obama’s self-imposed ban on putting former lobbyists in the government as Verma had lobbied the State Department on behalf of the U.S.-India Business Council. Nonetheless, he was confirmed in the post and subsequently led negotiations with Congress on Iran sanctions and the New START treaty.   read more

In 2000 Alonzo was named senior vice president of the National Foreign Trade Council, a post she held for seven years. Alonzo jumped at the chance to return to her hometown in 2007 when she was offered the post of vice president for global public policy and corporate affairs for Kraft Foods. She handled issues of tariffs; tax and trade; and sustainability. While at Kraft, Alonzo in 2010 was named chair of the World Cocoa Foundation.   read more

Acting Inspector General Michael Carroll got into trouble when he censored portions of an investigation involving pro-democracy groups in Egypt. A confidential draft of the report included a $4.6 million payoff to the Egyptian government. But the final version of the report contained nothing about it. Reportedly the State Department had wanted to keep the entire audit from public view. Some auditors claimed that Carroll didn’t want to rock the boat as he awaited Senate confirmation.   read more

In the fight for control of the U.S. Senate, the battle between incumbent Democrat Kay Hagan and Thom Tillis, Republican Speaker of the North Carolina House, has become ground zero for an onslaught of negative commercials. In one week, North Carolinians were subjected to an average of one attack ad for every minute of TV time. “Congratulations, North Carolina: You’ve become the year’s great state of political hate,” wrote Dave Levinthal.   read more

Reynolds American, maker of Camel, Kool and other cigarettes, has decided to bar the smoking of tobacco products at its corporate headquarters. “We’re well aware that there will be folks who see this as an irony, but we believe it’s the right thing to do and the right time to do it,” said a Reynolds spokesman. The firm has put a big marketing effort behind its electronic cigarettes, and those have been excluded from the smoking ban.   read more

Holloway has spent the vast majority of his career in Central and South America. In August 2009 he was named deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Asuncion, Paraguay and returned to Bogota in a similar post a year later, remaining in that position for four years. His one assignment outside Latin America came in 2013 when he was a political-military counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.   read more

Yamate was sent to Geneva as a minister counselor for management at the U.S. mission to the United Nations. He was brought back to Washington in 2008 as a multifunctional officer in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. In 2010, Yamate returned to Africa as the deputy chief of mission in Dakar, Senegal, acting as charge d’affaires for a time in 2012. He has served since 2013 as an assessor on the Department of State Board of Examiners.   read more

Private security guards employed by Blackwater Worldwide, in 2007, opened fire in the middle of a busy Baghdad intersection, killing 17 Iraqis. This week four of the security guards were convicted in a U.S. federal court on charges ranging from murder to use of an automatic weapon. “This verdict is a resounding affirmation of the commitment of the American people to the rule of law, even in times of war,” said U.S. attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr.   read more

Every year, feeding the homeless is getting a little bit harder to do in the U.S. Since 2010 there has been close to a 50% increase in the number of American cities that have passed or introduced laws restricting the sharing of food with homeless people. Fort Lauderdale has become the latest to do so--the 22nd city since January 2013 to restrict such practices through community pressures. Another 10 U.S. cities are in the process of passing such legislation.   read more

Judge Hellerstein found the government’s declaration to be overreaching. “I have reviewed some of these photographs and I know that many…are relatively innocuous while others need more serious consideration,” he wrote. The judge rejected the Obama administration’s sweeping suppression of the 2,100 images and ordered the government to provide a written explanation for each photograph that justifies it being withheld from public disclosure.   read more

It's getting harder for criminal defendants to win their cases due to judges looking over their shoulders and worrying about political accusations of being soft on crime. This development stems from increases in campaign spending on races for judicial seats. “[State] justices, already the targets of sensationalist ads labeling them ‘soft on crime,’ are under increasing pressure to allow electoral politics to influence their decisions, even when fundamental rights are at stake.”   read more