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

Paul Fronczak told the Chicago Tribune. “I think that the perfect ending would be to find the real Paul, see that he's doing well and then on the same day find my real family. It would also be nice to have an actual birth date that I could believe in.”   read more

David Johnson, 32, is running as a Republican. He was nominated at the Waterville Republican City Committee caucus, where only six voters showed up. Jennifer Johnson, 36, says she decided only at the last minute to run for the same seat, but as a Democrat, after no one else at the Democratic caucus volunteered to do it. “It’s kind of a pride thing between the two of us, for bragging rights for the rest of our lives,” Jennifer Johnson told the Maine Today.   read more

Joining USDA circa 1977, Garcia eventually worked his way up to be the manager of agricultural programs for Texas and assistant state executive director for FSA. In June 2009 he was named Texas state executive director, having served as acting director since January of that year.   read more

Members of the U.S. House introduced an amendment that would have dismantled the NSA’s bulk phone records collection program—a plan that the Obama White House condemned. But five years ago, Senator Obama cosponsored a bill that would have limited bulk records collection by the NSA. That bill died in committee, as did a similar measure introduced in 2005, which Senator Obama also backed.   read more

Civil forfeitures were first set up to deny convicted drug dealers, embezzlers, racketeers and other offenders from keeping property obtained with tainted money. While this is still the case in many instances, other people not accused of committing a crime are also having their homes and other possessions taken away by law enforcement. In 2000, officials seized $500 million in forfeitures. By 2012, that amount rose to $4.2 billion, an eightfold increase.   read more

In order to extract oil from tar sands, oil companies use super-heated water to carry out this separation process. Two years ago, these operations sucked about 370 million cubic meters of water (or 2.3 billion barrels) from the Athabasca River, which is more that the amount of water that the city of Toronto, with a population 2.8 million people, uses annually. Tar sands companies get this water for free, needing only a license from the province of Alberta.   read more

The San Mateo Union High School District is now suing ETS and the College Board on behalf of 286 students at Mills High School whose exam scores were thrown out. ETS and College Board take the position that because students were facing each other, they had the opportunity to cheat, even if there was no evidence that they had actually done so.   read more

On August 3, 2012, a wooded area around Bayou Corne, south of Baton Rouge, dissolved into liquefied muck from oil and natural gas that was 422 feet deep and 372 feet wide. Now, the sinkhole has grown to 24 acres. The state of Louisiana and local residents are suing Texas Brine Company LLC for the environmental damage caused by the massive sinkhole, which materialized after a salt dome cavern operated by the company collapsed.   read more

Seeking to evade even the weak limits placed on its spying by U.S. law, the National Security Agency (NSA) has paid at least £100 million ($155 million) to the British spy agency known as GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) over the last three years to conduct operations NSA legally cannot. In light of ongoing revelations regarding NSA domestic spying on Americans, the arrangement suggests that NSA is using GCHQ to break U.S. law.   read more

The civil complaint claims Bank of America (BofA) defrauded investors who purchased more than $850 million in residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) contained in a particular bond (BOAMS 2008-A). The fraud occurred when BofA failed to tell investors that more than 70% of the mortgages backing the bond were bad, and that they came from mortgage brokers that weren't affiliated with the bank.   read more

The case began three years ago after two students at Easton Area Middle School, Brianna Hawk and Kayla Martinez, were suspended from the school and banned from a school dance for wearing the bracelets on campus to honor family members who had died of breast cancer. The Keep a Breast Foundation, a non-profit group based in Carlsbad, California, distributes the bracelets as part of its national campaign to make young people aware of the disease.   read more

Stumpf-Biro said the cost of American medical care is a big reason, “but the main driving factor is quality and a common background.” Michael Shopenn went to Belgium in 2007 for hip replacement surgery. If he elected to have the surgery in the U.S., the cost would have approached $100,000. But in Belgium he paid only $13,660, which included all medicine, doctors’ fees and round-trip airfare.   read more

The DEA requires police who receive the agency’s help to cover up the fact that they were given the tips—and not even tell defense lawyers, prosecutors and judges that their investigations began with the DEA. Also, Reuters obtained DEA documents showing that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail in order to conceal the agency’s involvement in the arrests.   read more

Adding to the agencies’ frustration is the fact that the NSA’s stonewalling flies in the face of a 2008 executive order modification intended to facilitate NSA’s sharing of surveillance data with other agencies that submitted requests deemed “relevant” to its own investigations. The NSA also has been less than forthcoming with lawmakers about the agency’s work.   read more

Although the BND and NSA have been working hand-in-hand—with American agents providing German agents with training as well as its secret surveillance technology—the issue as to whether it is Germany or the U.S. that is the primary director of this intelligence gathering remains murky. The BND took over NSA-operated surveillance sites controlled by the BND on German soil and has been passing along its collected data to the NSA.   read more

William Lietzau, who is stepping down as the Pentagon’s deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs, told the British newspaper The Daily Mail that Guantánamo should never have been created. He added that the detainees should have been legally designated as prisoners of war and held in Afghanistan, or charged with crimes and taken to U.S. federal prisons. Lietzau also recommended that Obama announce that the war with al-Qaeda is over in order to shutter Guantánamo.   read more