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

In spending $236 million, Freedom Partners finished No. 2 in helping conservative causes, behind only Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which together spent about $300 million. Tax filings by the group revealed it has about 200 donors, each of whom pay at least $100,000 in annual dues. Among the donors are Charles G. and David H. Koch.   read more

San Francisco was forced to spend its own resources (about $500,000) to care for the patients.The city claims “virtually all” of the patients dumped in California required continuing medical care, something the Nevada hospital failed to arrange for. The complaint also notes that “many of these patients were not California residents” at the time they were discharged and put on buses.   read more

Caroline Kennedy’s financial-disclosure forms, filed as part of her nomination, show her net worth to be between $67 million and $278 million, including family trusts, government bonds, commercial property, and eight Cayman Island partnerships, with a combined value ranging from $542,000 to $1.2 million. She also owns her mother’s 375-acre estate, “Red Gate Farm,” in Aquinnah on Martha's Vineyard.   read more

To draw attention to the problem of illegal poaching, the U.S. government has decided to destroy more than six tons of confiscated ivory that’s been collecting in a federal warehouse northeast of Denver. The move is part of an initiative launched in July by the Obama administration to combat the killing of protected wildlife and end the trafficking of products derived from poaching.   read more

Another fact hard to comprehend is that it is still working and sending back data (which takes about 17 hours to reach earth). Consider this: It stores readings about cosmic rays, ionized gas and magnetic fields on an 8-track tape recorder, and its computers can process only about 8,000 instructions per second. In comparison, a typical smartphone can manage 14 billion instructions a second.   read more

Garcia was brought to the United States from Mexico by his parents when he was an infant. He returned to Mexico with them at age 9 and came back to the U.S. at 17. The 36-year-old put himself through college and Cal Northern School of Law. Garcia was working as a paralegal when he applied to the bar. He passed the examination on his first try in 2009. Garcia applied for admittance to the bar in 2011 and is applying for U.S. citizenship, which could take up to 15 years.   read more

As President Obama’s drug czar, Kerlikowske supported the continued federal crackdown on marijuana. On the other hand, after three years on the job, he admitted to Congress that he had failed to notice the “national crisis” of prescription drug abuse even though more Americans were dying from overdoses of prescription pain killers than from heroin and cocaine combined.   read more

In 2010 alone, 16,651 overdose deaths were attributed to overuse of these painkillers, according to a report this year from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number—a 300% increase from about a decade earlier—amounted to enough opioid painkillers to medicate every American every four hours for a month, claimed the Center.   read more

Israel can pretty much do whatever it likes with the “raw Sigint” (signal intelligence) it gets from the NSA. The raw Sigint includes “unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content,” and possibly more. Also, the NSA does not filter out any of the data before forwarding it, which means Americans’ emails and phone calls could be sent to Israel.   read more

In 1996, 34% of public college grants went to low-income students, while only 16% was given to higher-income students. By 2012, low-income students were still receiving a larger percentage of grants than wealthier students, but just barely. That’s because the share of aid going to poorer students had declined to 25%, while the portion going to higher income students rose to 23%.   read more

There’s still plenty of helium in the ground at this reserve, about 370 billion liters of it. But Congress will have to reauthorize the reserve in order for it to sell helium next month and beyond. Helium is essential for all kinds of industries, including aerospace, the military, electronics manufacturing, medical imaging and others.   read more

Some IRS videos made for agency employees have been in a humorous vein, such as parodies of “The Apprentice” and “Gilligan’s Island.” But budget-cutting GOP lawmakers haven’t found anything funny with the IRS spending money on these videos, leading to repeated criticisms. The four-minute takeoff of “The Apprentice” reportedly cost $10,000.   read more

A report issued by the USDA Inspector General shows that the program has proven to be a disaster for the health and safety of American and foreign consumers alike. Among the five U.S. facilities participating in the test program, three of them landed on the government’s list of the 10 worst offenders in the country for health and safety violations, including failures to remove fecal matter from meat In addition, the plant with the worst record was one of the five in the pilot program.   read more

The United States has some seriously “dirty” power plants that contribute more towards the problem of global warming than the vast majority of countries in the world. A report by Environment America concluded 50 American power plants—mostly those burning coal—produce more greenhouse gases than all but six nations (China, the U.S., India, Russia, Japan and Germany). The “50 dirtiest power plants” generated nearly 33% of the U.S. power sector’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2011.   read more

The National Security Agency (NSA) during the last years of the George W. Bush administration committed “flagrant” violations of Americans’ privacy rights by conducting illegal searches of phone records, according to newly disclosed government documents. The Obama administration released 14 documents that showed a judge serving on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court reprimanded the NSA four years ago for going through the phone records of Americans without proper authorization.   read more

Wealth disparity between the rich and everyone else in the United States has reached a new extreme, according to an economic study out of the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). Last year, the top 10% of American society received more than half of the country’s total income, which was the highest level on record, economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty reported in their study. They also found that the top 1% of earners collected more than 20% of all U.S. income in 2012.   read more