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

Americans under the age of 30 are particularly fed up with politics, and are significantly less likely than their parents to say participating in politics is a worthwhile expenditure of their time. Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University, told USA Today, added that among the students he teaches, he sees “a general sense that politics is for losers, for ne’er-do-wells, for the corrupt and for the under-motivated and greedy.”   read more

XTO Energy is accused of polluting groundwater with fracking waste from its natural gas well pad and storage facility in Hughesville, Lycoming County, according to the lawsuit. The U.S. Department of Justice claims XTO Energy allowed flowback fluid and wastewater byproduct to reach water supplies.   read more

Tim Reed of Health Action International added: “It underlines the fact that patient groups who are in the pay of the pharmaceutical industry will go into battle for them. There’s a hidden agenda here. The patient groups will say they think it’s a great idea to keep clinical trials data secret. Why would they do that? They would do that because they are fronts for the pharmaceutical industry.”   read more

At least 147 of the dead were civilians, including 94 children. The figures run contrary to what the U.S. government has said about the strikes. Officials in the Obama administration have insisted that no more than 50 to 60 ‘non-combatants’ have been killed in the Central Intelligence Agency missions during nine years of bombings.   read more

Naval commanders insisted the unexploded weapons—which weighed a total of 1.8 tons and included two unarmed laser-guided bombs and two inert practice bombs—were not a danger to the reef’s fragile ecosystem. But members of environmental organizations and the Australian government demanded answers about the incident, and for the U.S. to remove the bombs.   read more

Last year, Corey prosecuted Marissa Alexander, an African-American woman who fired a warning shot at her abusive husband. Alexander had never been arrested before the incident, but that didn’t stop Corey from going after the domestic abuse victim. Alexander was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison.   read more

Analyzing data from Florida, the Post found that “If the AMA time estimates are correct, then 41 percent of gastroenterologists, 23 percent of ophthalmologists and 17 percent of orthopedic surgeons were typically performing 12 hours or more of procedures in a day, which is longer than the typical outpatient surgery center is open.”   read more

By shuffling the aluminum around, it increases the storage time and thus the amount Goldman charges manufacturers that use the metal, such as for soda cans or beer cans. According to the Times report, since Goldman bought Metro in 2010, the average wait time for customers to have their purchases located and delivered has grown from six weeks to sixteen months.   read more

The researchers identified three other factors that contributed to economic mobility besides geography: “upward mobility tended to be higher in metropolitan areas where poor families were more dispersed among mixed-income neighborhoods;” income mobility was higher in areas with more two-parent households; and areas with better schools and more involvement in religious groups and community groups.   read more

When he signed the bill, Gov. Perry said the law “was designed...to protect the market share of the Big Tobacco manufacturers.” The plaintiffs agree, saying Big Tobacco’s lobbyists pushed lawmakers into adopting the legislation.   read more

Privacy advocates welcomed a rare win last week, as the New Jersey Supreme Court expanded privacy rights in the state, becoming the nation’s first state supreme court to rule that police must first obtain a search warrant if they want to track a suspect by tracing their cell phone signals, unless an emergency or other generally recognized exception to the warrant requirement applies.   read more

When Barack Obama promised during the 2008 presidential campaign to unite Americans from both left and right, he surely did not intend to unite them in opposition to his policies, but that has certainly happened when it comes to his administration’s indiscriminate snooping on telephone records. Nineteen groups from across the political spectrum last Tuesday sued the NSA in federal court for its “Associational Tracking Program” dragnet collection of telephone records.   read more

The Obama administration won a major court victory in its fight against investigative journalism last week, convincing two judges on a sharply divided federal appeals court panel to rule that reporters can be ordered to testify about their confidential sources and jailed for refusing. If the case survives an inevitable appeal, it will almost surely inhibit reporters from pursuing stories based on confidential government informants, according to both the dissenting judge and journalism experts.   read more

That elicited a sharp response from Judge Collyer. “No, no, no,” she said. “The executive is not an effective check on the executive.” Rejecting the claim that judges are incapable of weighing complex national security issues, she pointed out that the Constitution prescribes three separate branches of government, insisting that “You’d be surprised at the amount of understanding other parts of the government think judges have.”   read more

Ron Dermer, an ex-American who has been a close political advisor to Netanyahu for the past four years, once called the “two-state solution”—for decades Washington’s preferred outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse—“childish.”   read more

Since 2010, FEMA has had to make do with less money for mapmaking. Congress, with the support of the White House, has trimmed this funding for the map updating service by more than half in the last three years, from $221 million down to $100 million.   read more