President Donald Trump invited the Dodgers to the White House. Many of their fans feared that the team, by accepting, would humiliate themselves and betray the team’s large Latino, Asian and African-American fan base. Dodgers controlling owner Mark Walter, along with co-owner Magic Johnson, have proposed a solution. Trump has promised that if he can keep the championship trophy, the Commissioner’s Trophy, he will end all seizures and deportations of immigrants.   read more

Alexis Davis was found not guilty on two counts after jurors agreed with the defense that ATF entrapped the man with a second-grade reading level and an IQ of 59. “To me, this was not about fighting crime,” said juror Michael Lehman of St. Petersburg Beach. “There is a lot of crime going on in the world, you don’t need to manipulate the circumstances in order to encourage people to do bad things that they might or might not otherwise do.”   read more

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism says Islamic jihadists were considered the No. 1 threat when law enforcement officers were surveyed in 2006-2007. But as of 2013-2014, Islamic extremists had fallen to No. 2 because of the leap in concern about sovereign citizens. Defined as those individuals who believe federal, state, and local governments have no legal authority over them, sovereign citizens now occupy the top spot.   read more

It is estimated that 35% of Americans nationwide are in collections, according to Delinquent Debt in America, a new report from the Urban Institute. Debts in collection can include medical bills and traffic fines, as well as consumer credit accounts. In some states, nearly half of those with credit files are being hounded by debt collectors. Nevada, “which was hard hit by the housing crisis,” the report says, has a 47% rate, the highest in the country.   read more

Initiatives 88 and 89 are being pushed by Coloradans for Safe and Clean Energy, which wants to give local governments more control over where drillers can operate. The measures would also keep new oil and gas wells at least 2,000 feet from homes and schools. A recent poll showed that a majority of Coloradans support both initiatives.   read more

The steady increase in female incarceration can be attributed in large part to drug-related convictions. In the federal prison system, 57% of female inmates have a drug offense as their most serious offense, while the rate for male prisoners is 47%. Ohio officials say much of the increase they’ve seen in female inmates has been due to a rise in opioid use, with women also often used as drug mules.   read more

Murkowski was responsible for adding language last year to the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. The reauthorization allowed tribal courts to prosecute non-Native Americans for domestic violence against Native partners in certain cases. Murkowski’s amendment exempted Alaska Native communities from that rule.   read more

If some of the youth are required to wear monitoring systems, Geo would win again—a subsidiary of that company is the sole provider of ankle monitor bracelets to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Airlines are also getting a piece of the pie. ICE contracts with charter company CSI Aviation for deportation flights. And as children are flown from detention centers to their families around the country, American Airlines has been the carrier of choice.   read more

The CIA denied the spying. But the agency’s inspector general (IG), David Buckley, revealed on Thursday that the CIA, indeed, had spied on the committee while it carried out its probe. The IG also reported that when the CIA requested the Department of Justice to prosecute some of Feinstein’s staffers for allegedly removing classified information from the agency’s possession, it did so based on false information.   read more

In adopting the misleadingly named legislation, the Transparent Airfares Act of 2014, the House of Representatives wants to give U.S. carriers the power to advertise just the base cost of airline tickets, minus extras like taxes and airline fees. Airlines used to market their flights this way, until the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) approved a 2012 regulation, the Full Fare Advertising Rule, which mandated the industry advertise the total price consumers will pay for their flights.   read more

Ken Kopocis was nominated by President Barack Obama to head the EPA’s Water Office in February 2011 and has been waiting for confirmation ever since. Now, Nancy Stoner, who has been acting as chief of the Water Office since then, is leaving the EPA because the law limits how long a temporary leader can hold office…and no one will be in charge.   read more

Tefft retired as ambassador, and from the State Department, in 2013. He was named executive director of the RAND Business Leaders Forum, described by Lynnley Browning of Newsweek as “a clubby lobbying group” which considers strategic issues facing the United States, Russia and Europe. However he was called out of retirement less than a year later by President Barack Obama to serve in Moscow. Although Russia signed off on Tefft’s nomination, he’s not popular with the government there.   read more

We’re told that the Great Recession that kicked off in 2008 is finally over, but to many Americans it doesn’t seem as though they’re back where they were before the crash. They’re probably right: the net worth of average Americans is only 57% of what it was in 2007, according to a new report. By mid-2013 the average value of a single-family home was still 20% less than it had been in 2007.   read more

The Justice Department Office of the Inspector General has released a report blasting a DEA supervisor for violating the DEA’s own policy by beginning the investigation locally instead of reporting it to the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. The actions of the supervisor, who was not named in the report, included having the two case officers responsible for Chong’s imprisonment gather evidence from his cell.   read more

With wildfire season here, California taxpayers will be glad to know that they’ve got a hard-working corps of firefighters they can call on day or night, who don’t take vacations and work cheap. Really cheap. California employs about 4,000 inmate firefighters. They’re “low-level” offenders who earn $2 a day in canteen credits, as well as two days off their sentences for each day they spend at fire camps.   read more

In 2010, Baily was named director of the Office of Southeast European Affairs, where he managed bilateral relations between the United States and Turkey, Greece and Cyprus. Baily returned to Turkey as deputy chief of mission in Ankara in 2011, where he has worked since.   read more

Pettit returned to Moscow in 2003 as consul general. Much of his time was spent working with American companies who had difficulties getting permission for their employees to travel to the United States. Pettit moved to Kyiv, Ukraine in 2007 as deputy chief of mission in the U.S. Embassy. He returned to Washington in 2010 as deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, where he has served since.   read more