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

JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $13 billion to settle its mortgage violations. But nearly $4 billion of this amount will be reclaimed through a tax deduction. BP, responsible for the worst oil spill in U.S. history, received a $10 billion tax break after writing off its settlement. “Americans don’t deduct their parking tickets or library fines from their taxes. Corporations like JPMorgan or BP shouldn’t be able to deduct their settlements for wrongdoing, either,” said Phineas Baxandall.   read more

A small town in Oklahoma has discovered what other communities across the U.S. have found once their hospital is bought by an ever-growing Catholic medical enterprise: Patients can’t get birth control. During the last three years there have been 20 instances in which Catholic medical organizations have joined with smaller secular hospitals, which often results in policies that ban or restrict access to contraception, sterilization and abortion.   read more

The USS Miami nuclear submarine survived military campaigns in the Middle East and the Balkans, but couldn’t overcome the petty sabotage of an American civilian worker who just wanted to go home early. Casey Fury started a blaze on the sub that grew into an inferno which raged for more than 12 hours before 100 firefighters put it out. The reason he set the fire, Fury said, was because he wanted to leave work early due to anxiety caused by heated text messages with his girlfriend.   read more

Font nerds have been upset since a 14-year-old student became a media darling for figuring out that the U.S. government could save half a billion dollars a year if it switched to a different font for printed materials. Suvir Mirchandani compared four different fonts to see if any one of them used less ink. He determined the Garamond font required 24% less. But experts in the world of fonts weren’t convinced. Thomas Phinney said the student’s conclusions were “a bit off-base.”   read more

Researchers in New York and California have concluded that wind-derived electrical power costs an average of 8.7 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh). That’s cheaper than nuclear power (10.8 cents) and coal (12.3 cents), as well as two alternative energy sources: solar (14.4 cents) and biomass (11.1 cents). Only natural gas is cheaper than wind, averaging 6.6 cents per kWh.   read more

Another bad sign for the GOP is that the party is even losing out among young white people. “From 1995 to 2005, young whites consistently identified as or leaned Republican rather than Democratic, by an average of eight points. Since 2006, whites aged 18 to 29 have shown at least a slight Democratic preference in all but one year, with an average advantage of three points.”   read more

Motorola has padded its corporate board with law enforcement and national intelligence chiefs and won friends by using its foundations to donate more than $26 million over a six-year period to nonprofits formed by police and firefighters. In addition, Motorola has spent nearly $60 million over 10 years to lobby Washington and contributed nearly $2 million to the Republican and Democratic governors associations.   read more

The retail company claims price fixing and other antitrust violations occurred from 2004 to 2012, resulting in Visa collecting more than $350 billion, some of that at the expense of Walmart and its customers. Walmart’s move comes after it opted out of a 2012 class action settlement between merchants and Visa and another credit card company, MasterCard.   read more

Texas Governor Rick Perry (R) has informed Washington that he won’t comply with the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). Perry’s decision has puzzled some observers, considering the 2003 law was approved by President George W. Bush, whom Perry replaced as governor. Although PREA was signed 11 years ago, it took the federal government nearly a decade to implement the act.   read more

The president says he wants Congress to adopt new legislation that would terminate the bulk collection of phone records and would institute other means for data to be collected. But if he really wanted this outcome, he could simply ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to not renew the NSA’s authority to carry out this work. That authority was due to expire March 28. But Obama didn’t go this route.   read more

The General Accounting Office (GAO) said that in fiscal 2013, the federal government agreed to $459 billion in contracts to purchase goods and services. Of that total, about $164 billion, or 35.7%, was in noncompetitive contracts. Three percent of Defense’s noncompetitive contracts, amounting to $12.5 billion, fell under the urgency exception. The State Department had 12.5%t of its noncompetitive deals, worth $582 million attributed to urgency.   read more

According to the researchers, “marijuana legalization may lead to a reduction in alcohol use due to individuals substituting marijuana for alcohol. Given the relationship between alcohol and violent crime, it may turn out that substituting marijuana for alcohol leads to minor reductions in violent crimes that can be detected at the state level.”   read more

Citing the principle of “diversity jurisdiction,”—that when a civil case involves residents of different states, the case can be heard by a federal court—the bank had the case removed to federal court, where it was dismissed. McKeown noted “One might think that 150 years after Congress established national banks in 1863, the question of their citizenship for purposes of diversity jurisdiction would be well established. Not so."   read more

By the end of 2010, Massad was acting assistant secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability, which gave him supervision over TARP. He was confirmed as assistant secretary on June 30, 2011. In that post, he started to wind down the program, selling assets the federal government had taken in exchange for funding banks and other financial institutions during the 2008 crisis. Despite its unpopularity with many Americans, the program made money for taxpayers under Massad’s stewardship.   read more

Grandy Lake applied for a permit to clear a 15-acre tract near the plateau’s edge. The proposal was rejected at first, but then DNR approved it after Grandy Lake agreed to harvest half as many trees as it originally intended. But the cutting, which concluded in 2005, wound up bordering the slope that collapsed, and even ventured into a “restricted” zone where no trees were to be removed because of the risk of groundwater eroding the slope. The following year, a large landslide occurred.   read more

The three meat companies filed a $1.2 billion suit in 2012 against ABC, claiming the network, including anchor Diane Sawyer, ran a “disinformation campaign” against the additive. According to the suit, “There is not a more offensive way of describing a food product than to call it ‘slime,’ which is a noxious, repulsive, and filthy fluid not safe for human consumption.”   read more