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

What is the reason for the improved homicide numbers? City officials credit reform of the court system that allows more cases to go to trial, as well as policies that combine “data-driven law enforcement and old-school, shoe-leather police work,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was also noted that fewer gunshot victims are dying in the city’s emergency rooms—only 20% succumbed to bullet wounds this year, compared to 28% in 2012.   read more

Khobragade was dropping one of her daughters off at school when U.S. Diplomatic Security agents apprehended her in the street, handcuffed her and took her away. But what really created a furor was Khobragade being strip-searched and allegedly subjected to multiple cavity searches by U.S. marshals. She was also placed in a cell with drug addicts before being released on $250,000 bail.   read more

Health economists estimate that the nonprofit tax exemptions benefiting hospitals amount to more than $12 billion a year. In turn, however, these institutions are not giving back nearly that same amount to the needy. The New England Journal of Medicine reported earlier this year that hospitals spent an average of 7.5% of their operating costs on charity care and community benefit. Some spent less than 1%, while others about 20%.   read more

Border Patrol agents and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers have killed at least 42 people, including at least 13 Americans, since 2005. In none of these instances was the officer publicly known to have faced consequences from any government agency or court. Of the 24 people killed by Border Patrol agents in the last four years, eight were shot for throwing rocks, which the agency considers grounds for using lethal force.   read more

Things took a turn for the truly ugly during the government shutdown in October, when Chinese hackers took advantage of federal employees being furloughed, leaving no one around at the FEC to mind its computer network. Indeed, every one of its 339 employees had been sent home. The cyber-attack—possibly the worst act of sabotage in its four-decade history—reportedly crippled the commission’s systems.   read more

Six years ago, federal regulators tried to delist Yellowstone grizzlies, but a federal judge, Don Molloy, stopped the process after ruling that it was unclear from a scientific perspective how dependent grizzlies were on whitebark pine nuts as a food source. Whitebark pine trees in and around Yellowstone have been devastated by disease, which has killed nearly 75% of them.   read more

“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying it and analyzing it without judicial approval,” Leon wrote. He described the agency’s spy technology as “Orwellian,” and added that “the author of the Constitution, James Madison...would be aghast” by the NSA’s work.   read more

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) shocked the soap industry this week when it demanded that manufacturers prove that antibacterial chemicals in their products are safe, or prepare to remove them. The decision comes after years of concerns by public health experts who warned that the chemicals may do more harm than good by negatively impacting human hormones and expanding the risk of drug-resistant infections.   read more

In Colorado, where lawmakers adopted several new gun bills in the wake of mass shootings in Aurora and in Newtown, Connecticut, many county sheriffs say they will not enforce them. In fact, all but seven of the 62 elected sheriffs in Colorado support a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the statutes. The new laws require background checks for private gun transfers and ban magazines of more than 15 rounds.   read more

The equipment, manufactured and supplied by International Home Finance & Development, was purchased so that soldiers at Forward Operating Base Sharana in Paktika Province could safely dispose of their solid waste. But the incinerators’ bad wiring—which wasn’t checked by the Corps of Engineers—left them useless. That, coupled with construction delays, forced base personnel to use open-air burn pits to get rid of the waste.   read more

Most of the 36 casualties were members of a wedding party. It has variously been reported that between 14 and 17 of them died, while the rest were wounded, many critically. Only two of the dead—Saleh al-Tays and Abdullah al-Tays—had at one time been identified as al-Qaeda suspects by the Yemeni government, according to AFP.   read more

For 2013, representatives in the U.S. House were in session for only 942 hours. That comes out to about a 28-hour work week in Washington. Regardless of how many hours they worked, or how few bills they adopted, lawmakers received $174,000 in salary. It wasn’t always this cushy for congressional members. Six years ago, the House logged 1,700 hours in session, nearly double the amount of this year’s total.   read more

The statute will lie dormant because of two key provisions: Four other states must enact similar legislation—and any combination of northeastern states (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey) with a combined population of at least 20 million must adopt GMO labeling laws.   read more

Waddoups said bigamy is illegal only if a family fraudulently acquires multiple marriage licenses. A family with one husband and multiple wives cannot be considered a violation of the law on its own. Brown has four wives, but is only legally married to his first wife, Meri. The judge took exception to Utah’s law making cohabitation illegal, ruling the phrase “or cohabits with another person” represented a violation of both the First and 14th amendments.   read more

Last year, sales of stimulant medication intended to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) reached $9 billion—a fivefold increase from a decade ago. Today, 15% of high school students have been diagnosed with ADHD, with about 3.5 million of them on some sort of drug marketed to treat the disorder.   read more

Levinson himself doubted the wisdom of his final mission. “I guess as I approach my fifty-ninth birthday on the 10th of March, and after having done quite a few other crazy things in my life,” he wrote to a friend, “I am questioning just why, at this point, with seven kids and a great wife, why would I put myself in such jeopardy,” adding presciently that he wanted some assurance that “I’m not going to wind up someplace where I really don’t want to be at this stage of my life.”   read more