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

Kant’s categorical imperative rules out torture, which can never be moral or ethical; in contrast, utilitarian ethics says that torture might be acceptable when its goal is important enough. In rejecting this idea that “the end justifies the means,” Kant urged that human beings are ends in themselves. In contemporary terms, in debating the U.S. use of torture in the years after 2001, Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) is a Kantian, while Vice President Dick Cheney (R) is a utilitarian.   read more

A new study published in the Journal of Patient Safety estimates that between 210,000 and 440,000 patients annually don’t make it out of hospitals because of some kind of preventable harm. This means hospital deaths are now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., behind only heart disease (No. 1) and cancer (No. 2).   read more

The researchers concluded that differences in levels of sanitation, infectious disease and urbanization accounted statistically for about a third of the discrepancy in Alzheimer’s rates between countries. In other words, people need to be exposed to enough bacteria so their immune systems can fully develop and fight off disease, which doesn’t happen in countries obsessed with hand sanitizers and other germ-killing methods.   read more

U.S. military veterans who fought in Vietnam decades ago are entitled today to government-paid disability benefits and health care if they suffer from exposure to Agent Orange, an herbicide widely used during the conflict. But the same coverage is not available to the Vietnamese enduring the same effects from Agent Orange after fighting alongside American soldiers, and who later immigrated to the U.S.   read more

The latest ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo is a State Department Africa specialist who has served as the U.S. Special Representative for Somalia since August 2011. James C. Swan previously served as the number two official at the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa, and he is well acquainted with the situation in war-torn central Africa.   read more

These workers, who assist seniors and disabled with everyday living, have been exempt from federal wage laws since 1974. At that time the government categorized home care aides as doing work similar to babysitting, which was Washington’s way of saying they didn’t deserve the same rights as most other types of employees. But with America’s senior population rapidly growing because of aging Baby Boomers, demand for home health care has increased dramatically.   read more

Obama appeared on Telemundo, a Spanish-language network, claiming it was “not an option” to freeze deportations, estimated at more than 1,000 per day, because to do so “would be ignoring the law in a way that would be very difficult to defend legally.” Immigration reform leaders soundly rejected Obama’s remarks.   read more

On Capitol Hill, which was only 1.5 miles from the Washington Navy Yard slaughter, lawmakers don’t plan to introduce new bills or revive those that failed following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December. Many Democrats say they would like to take another try at adopting tougher gun-control measures. But they add that there’s no point in trying right now because support in Congress hasn’t changed, even after 12 people were gunned down on Monday.   read more

“[Liking] is the Internet equivalent of displaying a political sign in one’s front yard, which the Supreme Court has held is substantive speech,” the three-judge panel wrote in their opinion. The case centered on a Hampton sheriff’s deputy, Daniel Ray Carter, who claimed he was fired for liking the campaign Facebook page of his boss’s opponent.   read more

In the Brazilian case, a group of hackers upset over the recent revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) had spied on their country decided to infiltrate a U.S. government website. Only it wasn’t the NSA’s website that got hacked—it was NASA’s (short for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration). Among the pages hit were those for the Center for Astrobiology and the Office of Planetary Protection.   read more

The surfacing of the report follows the deadly attack at the DC Navy Yard, where contractor Aaron Alexis used his access card to enter a building and kill 12 civilians and injure many more. He was in the employ of The Experts, a Hewlett-Packard IT subcontractor, whose job was to perform maintenance on the Navy Marine Corps Intranet, the department’s in-house system. Alexis had a history of gun-related arrests and mental health issues before the attack.   read more

The largest store of chemical munitions exists at Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado, which has 2,611 tons of mustard gas. Officials there expect to finish dismantling this collection by 2019. Another 523 tons of VX and sarin remain at Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky. The government is still building a facility at the depot for disposing the weapons, which should be destroyed by 2023.   read more

Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives considered a bill last year that would require more transparency and evaluation of all foreign aid programs, including military assistance. But administration officials lobbied the bill’s authors to exempt security assistance from the mandate. The U.S. spends about $25 billion annually on security assistance.   read more

The building in question, located at 650 Fifth Ave. in Manhattan, is owned by the Alavi Foundation and Assa Corp. The U.S. Attorney based in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, argued before a federal judge that Assa Corp. was nothing more than a front for Bank Melli, which was said to be a front for the government of Iran.   read more

Eagan’s ruling is the first to be written on this matter since the secret NSA program was disclosed in June by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Whereas previous secret FISC rulings routinely re-authorized the program with little more than a minor reference to its legal underpinning, Eagan’s opinion was written with its eventual public disclosure in mind.   read more

This situation has existed for decades since the country closed down many large psychiatric hospitals in the 1970s. Community-based care was supposed to take the place of the hospitals, but that didn’t develop as planned. The result: thousands of mentally ill wound up on the streets, where they got into trouble and landed in the only place that could take them: jails. The U.S. Department of Justice says up to 64% of inmates at local jails have mental health problems.   read more