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

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

When it was first proposed, the project was expected to cost a total of $1.1 billion to complete. Now, that figure has soared to $6.5 billion, and the cost might increase further because the roof revision burned through nearly half of NNSA “contingency” funds, the GAO found.   read more

The military took no action against 187 individuals, according to the IG, while 141 subjects were categorized as either unknown, or accused of “unfounded offenses.” Only 11% (59 individuals) were convicted for either sexual assault offenses or lesser non-sexual assault offenses in 2010. About 40% of suspects received some form of “adverse action,” the IG report said.   read more

Food wasn’t listed in the budget, so perhaps McDonald’s assumed that cost would come out of the $27 for daily living it recommended. Daniel Gross at The Daily Beast noted that if a McDonald’s employee is a teenager living at home, the budget might make sense. “And time was, people in such a situation comprised a big chunk of McDonald’s workforce,” he wrote.“But that’s no longer the case."   read more

Companies such as Exxon Mobil and Sempra Energy have asked the Obama administration for permission to export as much as 29 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day. These efforts represent quite a turnaround for the industry. Less than a decade ago, domestic production of natural gas was so low that facilities were being built in U.S. ports to import foreign natural gas.   read more

The execution of Warren Hill, 52, was blocked for the time being by Superior Court Judge Gail Tusan after Hill’s attorney claimed in a court filing that his client’s rights were violated by the Lethal Injection Secrecy Law, which makes the identity of the suppliers of the sedative pentobarbital a “state secret” to thwart protesters from boycotting such businesses.   read more

What is that is unspoken Snowden would appear to be using the “blueprint” material as a backup to be released should the Obama administration attempt to do him harm. In addition, his possession of such material might explain why the Obama Justice Department is charging Snowden with espionage.   read more

Autumn Katz, the lead attorney for the CRR, told The Guardian that the decision will not affect anti-abortion laws in other states, but it adds to “a growing list of court cases that are striking down totally unnecessary and restrictive laws.” “The only reasons these laws are passed is to restrict women's access to abortion care,” she added.   read more