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

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

David Hale, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service who has served in Beirut twice before, has been special envoy for Middle East peace since June 2011, having served as deputy special envoy under his predecessor, former Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Maine), from 2009 to 2011.   read more

Hammer served as political aide to ambassador Phillip Goldberg in La Paz, Bolivia, from 2007 to September 2008, when Goldberg was expelled after a series of incidents suggested that the embassy was engaged in espionage and fomenting discontent against the government. Back in Washington, Hammer was again detailed to the National Security Council, serving at the White House as special assistant to President Obama, senior director for press and communications, and NSC spokesman.   read more

In firearm-related killings in which the shooter and the victim are strangers, such as the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin case, Roman notes that “a little less than 3 percent of black-on-white homicides are ruled to be justified. When the races are reversed, the percentage of cases that are ruled to be justified climbs to more than 29 percent in non-SYG states and almost 36 percent in SYG states.”   read more

License plate data is captured by small cameras mounted to police vehicles, on light poles, bridges, street signs and buildings, allowing police or others to know someone’s whereabouts down to the second, the ACLU says. This information “is being placed into databases, and is sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems. As a result, enormous databases of motorists’ location information are being created. All too frequently, these data are retained permanently and shared widely."   read more

Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News wrote: “One of the implications of aggregating spies, terrorists and leakers in a single category is that the nation’s spy-hunters and counterterrorism specialists can now be trained upon those who are suspected of leaking classified information.” The policy instructs agency directors to grant insider threat program personnel access to “all relevant databases and files” needed to identify, analyze, and resolve insider threat matters.   read more

The FBI said the reason for holding up the autopsy report was due to the bureau’s active internal investigation into the shooting of Ibragim Todashev, who was killed on May 22 in his Orlando apartment while being interrogated about his connection to Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev.   read more

Prosecutor Kaycee Jones, who was in court as an observer, wrote down Coker’s suggested line of questioning to the defendant and passed it on to Beverly Armstrong, the prosecutor. The message from Coker to Jones read: “Judge says … baby pooped on (Reeves) — if he threw a dog off the bed because the dog peed on bed what would he do if baby pooped on him?”   read more

It has been established by the highest court in the United States that corporations possess the same rights as humans. But does that mean they bare the same legal responsibilities? If a human murders another human, they face criminal proceedings for homicide. Can, or should, the same occur for companies that are responsible for someone’s death? The reality today is that prosecutors rarely bring criminal charges against a corporation for the death of a worker.   read more

Ioannidis did not go so far as to accuse researchers of committing fraud in their animal studies. Instead, he blamed institutional practices that favor reports with “positive” findings. An inclination to produce positive reports is driven by such influences as the need for study funding, the desired outcome of peer review boards and publishers that examine studies, and the prestige sought by universities and researchers who rely on positive findings.   read more