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

The report says renewables are now the fastest-growing types of power generation and will comprise almost 25% of global energy by 2018. Only two years ago, renewables made up about 20% of the planet’s power sources. The amount of non-hydro energy generated by wind, solar, bioenergy and geothermal is expected to double, from 4% in 2011 to 8% by 2018.   read more

Castillo never went to war. He sustained a foot injury while training to play football at the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School (USMAPS) and didn’t even apply for veterans’ disability payments until 27 years later. In fact, after the injury he went on to play quarterback and linebacker at the University of San Diego. His injury during his one year at USMAPS qualified him as a veteran and made his company eligible for contracts set aside for disabled veterans.   read more

Archuleta served as a senior advisor on policy and initiatives from October 2005 to May 2009, working closely with Mayor John Hickenlooper. After the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Archuleta served as chief of staff to Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis from 2009 to 2011. She was then appointed national political director for Obama for America, i.e., the President’s re-election campaign, a position she held from 2011 to 2012.   read more

The next ambassador to Australia will be a longtime federal administrator and Barack Obama supporter, who will also be the first openly gay envoy to the land down under. If confirmed by the Senate, Morrell John Berry, who goes by his middle name, would succeed Jeffrey Bleich, who served in Canberra starting in November 2009. Berry has been director of the Office of Personnel Management since April 2009.   read more

Judge Carlos Samour, who will preside over the case of accused shooter James Holmes, plans to call 5,000 potential jurors. By comparison, the ongoing trial of George Zimmerman in Florida for the killing of Trayvon Martin required a jury pool of only 500 and the current trial of mobster Whitey Bulger in Massachusetts started with a pool of 858 potential jurors.   read more

Nelson worked for dentist James Knight for 10 years until he fired her in 2010 because of her looks. Knight claimed that she was too attractive to keep around, lest he be tempted to sleep with her and endanger his marriage. The ordeal and court ruling of the “irresistible employee” became a national story on news shows and comedy programs. Nelson asked the court to reconsider its decision, and this week it agreed to do so.   read more

Hackett was named executive director of CRS in July 1993, and was appointed president in 2003. During his tenure, he started a division focusing on outreach to Catholic dioceses, parishes, organizations, and colleges, and laypeople were first appointed to the CRS board of directors. The organization’s budget—which despite the word “Catholic” comes not from the Church but from governments and private donors—nearly doubled under Hackett, who retired in December 2011.   read more

President Barack Obama has nominated one of his top fundraisers to serve as the next ambassador to Denmark. Rufus Gifford, who most recently served as finance chair of the Presidential Inaugural Committee, raised millions for Obama’s two presidential runs, especially among the gay community, where he and his former partner were dubbed “Obama's Gay Gold Mine” in 2008.   read more

“Do not use any electronic device,” Francis says, “such as the telephone, cell or smartphone, BlackBerry, iPhone, PDA computer, the Internet, email, any text or instant message service, any Internet chat room, blog or website such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or Twitter to communicate to anyone any information about the case.”   read more

What made this legal event noteworthy was the fact that the defendant wasn’t even allowed to attend because prosecutors insisted the information being revealed was so secret that the hearing had to be completely closed. After concluding the hearing, the military revealed only one thing to the media: that it lasted 78 minutes. A Saudi millionaire, Nashiri has been in U.S. custody for 11 years.   read more

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will begin separating out arrests involving Latinos in their annual crime reports, doing for this ethnic group what the FBI has already done for whites, blacks and Asians. Until now, it was impossible to know just how many Latinos were arrested and for what types of crimes because FBI tabulations only revealed numbers by race, which factored in Caucasians, African-Americans, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans or Alaska Natives.   read more

West claims supplier CF Industries sold two 100-ton shipments of agricultural-grade ammonium nitrate to Adair Grain dba West Fertilizer Company prior to the explosion that killed 15 people and flattened part of the town. At the time of the explosion, the second shipment of chemicals was still in a railcar parked just outside Adair’s fertilizer mixing building. Inside that building was 30 tons of the ammonium nitrate not yet sold—which ignited after the building caught fire.   read more

The controversy began after the developers of a mall in Ariel (population: 18,000), located ten miles beyond the Green Line that has divided Israel and its neighbors between 1949 and 1967, offered McDonald’s a spot in the new retail project. The owner of McDonald’s Israel, which has 180 franchises, said no thanks, citing the company’s policy of avoiding the West Bank.   read more

Residents reportedly found about 1,000 pieces of material on their own, according to the Detroit Free Press. Some of them were almost a century old. Also in the dumpster were bank and tax documents with personal information.   read more

For the first time, the federal government has exercised its authority to approve and reject tobacco products, which it had been granted under a 2009 law. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced this week that it had authorized the sale of two new makes of cigarettes, both of them by the Lorillard Tobacco Company. The FDA also rejected four other new tobacco products, but was prevented from releasing any information about them due to the law’s guidelines.   read more

At the Department of Defense, workers were told to “hammer this fact home…leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States,” according to a June 2012 Pentagon document obtained by McClatchy. The zero-tolerance policy demands that employees turn themselves and others in for failing to report observed security breaches. Any person who does otherwise must be reprimanded or have his security clearance revoked by his manager.   read more