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

The database used by the system has primarily data on known criminals, but information on others, including government employees and contractors, is also there. That increases the possibility of an innocent person being tagged as a suspect because of an error. The system may also be able to access other databases, such as DMV and Department of State records, which would increase the chances of a law-abiding citizen being caught up in a criminal investigation.   read more

U.S. District Judge David Sam in Utah has ruled that a member of a polygamist group can cite religious freedom as a reason to not give testimony in a criminal probe. Sam, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan, ruled Steed could refuse to talk about FLDS business based on his religious oath to not discuss internal matters.   read more

The average American household made more money last year, new federal data shows. But don’t go shopping for Beverly Hills real estate quite yet—the boost amounted to only 50 cents a day. Of course, that’s just an average. Corporate CEOs are doing much better than last year, while economic gains haven’t made their way to the middle class because of such developments as the decline in union membership and the number of workers being replaced by machines.   read more

The number of federal prisoners actually decreased by 1,900, the first census drop in federal institutions since 1980. That number was outweighed by an increase in the population of state prisons. • The states with the highest imprisonment rate were Louisiana (1,114 per 100,000 population), Mississippi (918 per 100,000) and Oklahoma (872 per 100,000).   read more

The Center for Public Integrity found that an “aggressive” marketing campaign by Comerica and the Treasury Department resulted in a million Americans being sent “Direct Express” benefit cards—used to distribute Social Security and disability payments—to people who didn’t need or request them. This resulted in a financial gain for the bank, given that card fees are much higher than direct deposit into an account, which many of the card recipients already had.   read more

In the U.S. House of Representatives, nearly 90% of the GOP caucus is made up of white men. Not exactly representative of the U.S. population, which is less than a third Caucasian and male. For anyone wondering, more than half (53%) of the House Democratic caucus are not white men.   read more

Researchers say cases of advanced black lung (progressive massive fibrosis) have soared in number, reaching levels not seen since the early 1970s. The deadly version of the disease had all but disappeared by the dawn of the new millennium. Wes Addington, deputy director at the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, told The Louisville Courier-Journal. “We have broken our promise to protect our miners.”   read more

The Burlington Electric Department gets its power from three sources, according to Ari Phillips at ThinkProgress: One-third comes from wind energy operators, another third from the Winooski One and Hydro-Québec hydroelectric stations, and a final third from the Joseph C. McNeil Generating Station, which is a biomass installation that uses logging residue wood chips in its processing.   read more

Being a singles-majority nation marks quite a change from what the U.S. looked like during its bicentennial year, 1976, when only 37.4% were single. Those states with the highest percentages of single adults are Louisiana and Rhode Island (both 55.7%), New York (55.4%), Mississippi (54.9%), and New Mexico (53.6%).   read more

Five years ago, Republican-appointed judges dominated the federal appeals courts, with 99 seats compared to 65 held by those selected during Democratic administrations. Now, those numbers have flipped. Judges nominated by Democrats total 95, thanks in significant part to Obama’s selections since taking office in 2009. Republican-appointed circuit judges total 77, according to the Brookings Institution. The last time Democratic appointees were in the majority was in 2000.   read more

The administration’s move has been described as unprecedented, because United Against Nuclear Iran is a private group and not a government agency. Ben Wizner, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who has fought the government in other cases involving classified information, said he had never seen anything like that. “If there’s something in their files that would disclose a state secret, is there any reason it should be in their files?” Wizner asked.   read more

The Obama administration left open the possibility that the sanctions could be halted if Moscow sticks with the current cease-fire agreement and pulls its troops from Ukraine. But even if they are imposed, at least one oil analyst dismissed their importance on the Kara Sea project. Fadel Gheit at Oppenheimer & Co. told the Post that the sanctions’ “bark is worse than its bite,” considering commercial oil production out of the Arctic is a decade away.   read more

First, the good news: The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported Thursday that there were 4,405 fatal work injuries in 2013. That’s down from the previous year’s mark of 4,628 deaths. But the news was bad for Hispanic workers. In 2012, 708 Latinos died on the job. By the following year, the total jumped to 797.   read more

Cotton responded with his own misleading commercial that warned that Pryor wanted to give undocumented workers Social Security benefits for their employment while working under “forged identities.” The claim was based on a 2006 vote Pryor cast in the Senate “that has been repeatedly debunked by fact checkers,” The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler wrote, noting that FactCheck.org made the lie one of the “Whoppers of 2006.”   read more

Obama is the fourth president in a row to go on television and tell his fellow Americans that the skies over Iraq will soon be filled with U.S. warplanes laden with enough ordnance to turn some village into kindling. This announcement was different though. Obama was somewhat vague on the details of how this campaign would work.   read more

Many have taken issue with the president’s claim of success in Yemen and Somalia. “Very few people who are not part of the administration consider either of those cases a success,” Spencer Ackerman wrote at the Guardian. “Less subjectively, neither has finished, years later, and it is unclear what success in Yemen and Somalia even is.”   read more