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

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

Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project, said, “The government’s willingness to admit error and accept its duty to correct those errors in an extraordinarily large number of cases is truly unprecedented. It signals a new era in this country that values science and recognizes that truth and justice should triumph over procedural obstacles.”   read more

The issue comes down to this: Should the graves of those who actively committed treason against the United States by taking up arms against it be decorated by the government they tried to overthrow? The federal government does not pay to maintain the memories of Loyalists who fought for the British during the American Revolution, nor for the Irish-Americans who formed St. Patrick’s Battalion to defend Mexico during the Mexican-American War.   read more

Malinowski repeatedly criticized various aspects of President Obama’s policies, which should prove interesting once he finds himself a member of the Obama administration. For example, Malinowski had opposed indefinite imprisonment without trial, supported the acknowledgment of Uzbekistan’s dictator is a dictator, praised the honesty of State Department officials regarding Tunisia’s dictator as revealed in cables published by WikiLeaks—but not spoken in public.   read more

Pearce’s stint in Algeria coincided with increased cooperation between the Algerian government and the U.S. government in the battle against al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a partnership that included providing the Algerians with military radios and fingerprint identification kits, not to mention Boeing-made airplanes and gas-powered turbines. In exchange, the U.S. imported billions of dollars worth of Algerian oil and natural gas.   read more

On Friday, one day after Snyder’s declaration, Ingham County Judge Rosemarie Aquilina ruled that his action was unconstitutional because it automatically cut the pension benefits of retired state employees, which are protected by state law. Snyder’s administration immediately appealed Aquilina’s decision.   read more

This information can include bank account details, email records, photographs and videos, passwords, shopping accounts and even music playlists. Facebook limits requests to either removing a person’s account or converting it to memorial site. Twitter will at most deactivate an account, but won’t allow relatives to access the deceased’s account.   read more

Experts at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) say the discrepancy is due to higher death rates caused by heart disease, cancer, homicide, diabetes, and problems occurring during childbirth or early childhood. All of these factors combined accounted for about 60% of the black population disadvantage. Heart disease alone is responsible for trimming slightly more than one year off the lives of blacks, according to the NCHS).   read more