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

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

Of the $586,000 in contributions, the largest amount went to the Democratic National Committee, which received more than $245,000 in “dead money.” In second place, the Libertarian Party received $163,200, followed by the Green Party ($96,329), the Obama Victory Fund ($31,203) and the National Committee for Effective Congress ($25,000), a pro-Democrat PAC.   read more

The children are forbidden to utter certain “illegal words”—forever. In court, James Swett, representing Range Resources, made it clear that the gag order applied to the whole family, not just the parents, and that his client intended to enforce the gag order. Jessie Allen, an assistant professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that applying the non-disclosure agreement to kids was “strange” and “over the top.”   read more

Cell phone “information is, by and large, of a highly personal nature: photographs, videos, written and audio messages (text, email and voicemail), contacts, calendar appointments, web search and browsing history, purchases and financial and medical records.” Stahl also wrote: “It is the kind of information one would previously have stored in one’s home,” and accessing that by police has historically involved getting a warrant first.   read more

“One by one, the tools and attitudes of the war on terror, of a world in which the “gloves” are eternally off, have come home,” Van Buren wrote. “The comic strip character Pogo’s classic warning—“We have met the enemy and he is us”—seems ever less like a metaphor. According to the government, increasingly we are now indeed their enemy.”   read more

Up until about a decade ago, the FBI didn’t even bother to keep track what crimes its informants were committing. But the bureau had to change its ways after it was revealed that FBI agents allowed Boston mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger to run his illegal operations in exchange for information about the Mafia.   read more

The U.S. still holds 67 non-Afghan detainees at the facility. The question now is what to do with these individuals, most of whom are from Pakistan and deemed too dangerous to release by the administration. This despite the fact that informal military review boards cleared many of them, the newspaper reported. None of them have been put on trial. Unlike the prisoners at Guantánamo, those at Bagram do not have habeas corpus rights.   read more

Inflating the credit-worthiness of dicey Wall Street financial securities was a winning strategy for the nation’s top ratings agencies before the financial collapse of 2008 put a crimp in their style. But despite multiple multi-billion-dollar lawsuits filed by the federal government and more than a dozen states, Standard & Poor’s is revisiting those discredited practices, according to a study commissioned by the New York Times.   read more