Trump said, “We need people to be afraid. Right now many Americans are surprised when protestors are killed, but they’ll get used to it.” Trump did add one suggestion: “Try not to kill white people. That gets too much attention. Stick to protestors of other colors.”   read more

When big campaign donors are rewarded with plum ambassadorships—a practice engaged in by presidents of both parties—they are usually sent either to a tropical paradise like the Bahamas or a wealthy ally like Belgium. Not so Robert C. Barber, an attorney who raised more than $2.9 million for President Obama’s election campaigns. He was nominated October 30 to be the next ambassador to the North Atlantic island nation of Iceland.   read more

“Despite being a member of Congress possessing security clearance, I've learned far more about government spying on me and my fellow citizens from reading media reports than I have from ‘intelligence’ briefings,” Grayson wrote in The Guardian. Grayson says that when he has asked for classified information and meetings with the NSA, the House intelligence committee has refused to provide either.   read more

The agreement between Staples and USPS allows the retailer to use its own employees. This decision didn’t come as a surprise to outsiders, considering that 78% of the Postal Service’s costs are employee-related (salaries and benefits). APWU says it will first meet with Staples store managers by January 18 to express its concerns. If a solution cannot be reached, union officials intend to proceed with the demonstrations.   read more

A key problem discussed by the IG involves medical professionals’ use of cloning, which is a copy-and-paste function that helps speed up the converting of records from paper to electronic. But this process also can be abused to allow doctors to indicate a procedure was more expensive than it actually was, resulting in overcharges to Medicare.   read more

“Among the supporters of almost any group—whether it be a band, sports team, university, political organization or religion—there will be some people who violate the law,” the plaintiffs say. “However, it is wrong to designate the entire group of supporters as a criminal gang based on the acts of a few. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened here.”   read more

The Central Jersey Courier News and Home News Tribune reviewed hundreds of citizen complaints from 2008 to 2012 claiming excessive force, bias and civil rights violations by officers in more than seven dozen police departments in Central New Jersey. It found that only 1% of complaints alleging police brutality were sustained by internal affairs units. The national average is 8%, according to a 2007 Bureau of Justice Statistics report.   read more

According to a Guantánamo “Detainee Assessment” prepared by the Department of Defense in 2005, Qumu “poses a MEDIUM to HIGH risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies.” He was also deemed to be “of HIGH intelligence value.” This may be the reason that the Bush administration, thinking Qumu would act as an ally, released him from Guantánamo two years later.   read more

Gallup says 42% of Americans identified as political independents in 2013. That’s the highest rate since the longtime survey company switched to phone interviews in 1989. The GOP’s popularity declined last year, with only 25% of respondents claiming to be Republican. Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones wrote that the last time the party’s ID was lower was 1983, when it dipped to 24% amid President Ronald Reagan’s struggle to bring the country out of recession.   read more

FBI agents referred 10,000 white-collar crime cases to prosecutors in 2000. By 2005, the total had plummeted to 3,500 cases. “I think they’re trying to rebrand,” Kel McClanahan, a Washington-based national security lawyer, told Foreign Policy. “So many good things happen to your agency when you tie it to national security.”   read more

For that, JPMorgan Chase received a deferred prosecution agreement from Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan. It will pay a $2.6 billion penalty. Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets said, "once again, not a single individual working for JPMorgan Chase has been held accountable. Banks do not commit crimes; bankers do."   read more

Goodwin says the three-term incumbent, who was unanimously chosen speaker of the city council on Wednesday, won the election after she put a Caribbean curse on the building in which Goodwin lives. Goodwin insisted that it was the mural painted on her apartment building that cost her the election, she claims in a lawsuit.   read more

Funding includes $8.4 billion allocated to Project Bioshield, created in 2004, which purchases vaccines for use following an attack involving smallpox, anthrax, and other weaponized pathogens. Meanwhile, critical resources are being diverted away from public health initiatives designed to protect Americans against natural outbreaks of serious viruses. The result has been failures to fully respond to life-threatening pandemics, such as the 2009 swine flu.   read more

In January 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued a memorandum stating that officials could collect calling records of phone company customers without first obtaining a subpoena or any other authorization from a judge. Neither the FBI nor the OLC released a copy of the memo, whose existence only came to light after the Justice Department’s inspector general issued a report in 2010 discussing its legal ramifications.   read more

As part of the $1.6 billion settlement Toyota initially reached with members of the class action lawsuit, more than $100 million in unclaimed funds was going to help a research and education fund focused on driver error. Clarence Ditlow of The Center for Auto Safety objected to this provision, saying it would strengthen Toyota’s original contention that drivers were to blame for the accidents, not the cars’ electronic control systems.   read more

Some the highlights from 2013 included the $23 billion deal between H. J. Heinz and 3G Capital, and Berkshire Hathaway/General Electric selling the remainder of NBCUniversal to Comcast for $16.7 billion. Some of Wall Street’s biggest banks helped advise these deals, earning them billion- dollar paydays. Goldman Sachs made $1.5 billion and JPMorgan Chase $1.3 billion in fees for their advisory work on 395 and 295 deals respectively.   read more

These two scandals and others have drawn attention to the fact that no uniform standards or regulations for forensic labs exist in the United States. Labs are accredited, but by only one organization: the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board (ASCLD/LAB). Accreditation is good for five years, and is supposed to include yearly, planned inspections.   read more