The majority of voters did not vote for Donald Trump for president; the majority of voters did not vote for Republican candidates for the Senate; and fewer than 51% of voters cast their ballots for Republican candidates for the House of Representatives. The Republican Party now controls the White House, both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, no matter how that came to be. I believe it is worth bearing in mind that a majority of U.S. citizens did not support the Republican winners.   read more

It’s not hard to imagine how Raytheon could market its more lethal products to countries struggling to deal with instabilities exacerbated or brought on by global warming. Pretty much any government with an army, navy or air force could become a customer for the arms manufacturer’s large and varied missile inventory that includes the Maverick, the Advanced Cruise Missile, the Sparrow, the Sidewinder, the AMRAAM, the TOW, the Tomahawk, the Javelin, the Stinger, and others.   read more

75% of panelists who propose changes in disease definitions and diagnostic criteria had been paid by drug companies either as consultants, advisers or speakers. Among those serving as chairs of these panels, 12 out of 14 were financially connected to the drug industry.   read more

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that two rich men from Latin America, Edgar René Córdoba and Antonio Medina-González, can seek asylum because they had been targeted for extortion and kidnapping by a drug cartel and anti-government rebels.   read more

The next top diplomat for arms control will be a foreign policy and defense expert with longstanding ties to Secretary of State John Kerry. Frank A. Rose, who worked in Kerry’s Senate office after graduating college, joined the State Department in June 2009 as deputy assistant secretary for space and defense policy.   read more

Until its 2012 guilty plea, BP continued to do business with the U.S. government since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up on April 20, 2010, killing 11 workers, and dumping millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. As one of the U.S. government’s largest suppliers of fuel, BP currently has $1.34 billion in existing federal contracts. However, its profits have nonetheless taken a hit.   read more

“Unbeknown to millions of people, on a daily basis and for years, Google has systematically and intentionally crossed the ‘creepy line’ to read private email messages containing information you don’t want anyone to know, and to acquire, collect, or mine valuable information from that mail,” the complaint says. Google has defended its actions by claiming the plaintiffs are trying to criminalize “ordinary business practices” that have been part of Gmail since the beginning.   read more

CACI convinced a judge last month to throw out the lawsuit by four Iraqis after it was determined that the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, lacked jurisdiction because the alleged abuse occurred overseas. The contractor now wants the plaintiffs to pay for $15,580 of its legal expenses, which largely relate to depositions CACI took.   read more

“If they aren’t placed in a juvenile detention facility, the child could run back to the prostitution scenario.” What often happens is police will charge the children with prostitution, just so they can be detained until some kind of social welfare housing becomes available.   read more

One of the large corporations that the DOE contracts for work, Lockheed Martin, earned $2.6 billion for DOE-contracted projects last year. That is twice as much as all of DOE’s small business contracts combined ($1.3 billion).   read more

Back in New York, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, a Bill Clinton appointee, characterized the stop-and-frisk policy as a form of “indirect racial profiling,” due to the fact it led to an increased number of stops in minority communities. The policy, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg supported, led to officers’ routinely stopping “blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white,” Scheindlin said.   read more

Clapper has already lied to Congress about NSA spying,” wrote Coor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic, referring to when Clapper told lawmakers the government was not collecting phone records of Americans, which was not true, as whistleblower Edward Snowden demonstrated by releasing classified National Security Agency records.   read more

The snafus have forced the Fed to return more than 30 million hundred-dollar notes—the equivalent of $3 billion if legally in circulation—and to demand that BEP refund the Fed’s money. Meanwhile, “another thirty billion dollars’ worth of paper sits in limbo awaiting examination,” according to David Wolman of The New Yorker. The new deadline for BEP to get it right is October 8.   read more

On March 22, about 50 activists set out to block the company’s gates. But some of them didn’t make it that far, as police pulled over their cars. Other officers were waiting at the gates for the rest of the demonstrators who showed up early that morning to begin unloading equipment. The protest was called off, and the group was left dumbfounded over how the police could have known about their plans.   read more

In the past two weeks alone, as many as six civilians died from a recent surge in drone strikes that totaled nine missions. But neither the White House nor the Department of Defense will reveal if American tax dollars are going to survivors of such attacks.   read more

Too often lost in the legal controversy surrounding Manning is the fact that materials he provided included evidence of war crimes, including video footage from a U.S. helicopter showing the unprovoked and indiscriminate killing of more than a dozen civilians in Iraq.   read more

The lone dissenter, Judge Andrew J. Kleinfeld, wrote: “They do not get one cent. They do not even get an injunction against Facebook doing exactly the same thing to them again.” He added: “This settlement perverts the class action into a device for depriving victims of remedies for wrongs, while enriching both the wrongdoers and the lawyers purporting to represent the class.”   read more