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

Steven Aftergood wrote. “It cannot possibly perform comprehensive oversight of the broad range of privacy or civil liberties concerns that arise in the national security domain. Expectations to the contrary are bound to be disappointed. At best, the Board may serve as a boutique oversight shop that tackles a couple of discrete policy issues each year.”   read more

Judge Paul Papak said there was “a preponderance” of trial evidence that showed the defendants “knew of [the]…contamination” at the site, “affirmatively misrepresented the extent of the risk posed by sodium dichromate at Qarmat Ali” to the plaintiffs and that the company “failed to disclose the extent of that risk” to them.   read more

Sopko has been busy since taking office last summer, tripling the number of audits and investigations. To date, his office has come up with 73 recommendations to government agencies that would save at least $450 million if enacted, he says. “I am not a cheerleader. I’m a watchdog—it is my job to point out what isn’t working, so it can be fixed."   read more

Despite a federal appeals court ruling that government snooping on emails requires a search warrant, the FBI and other federal law enforcers regularly ignore this constitutional mandate, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act. At the same time that it acts as if it has the authority to violate the privacy of citizens’ emails, the FBI is seeking Congressional authorization for its unlawful activities.   read more

The President did not, however, cancel an April 13, 2006, memo regarding the 2006 revision of the Army Field Manual and its controversial Appendix M on interrogation. That memo justifies the use of isolation, sleep deprivation, and forms of sensory deprivation that have been denounced as torture or abuse by a number of human rights and legal groups—and which sparked the ongoing hunger strike at Guantánamo.   read more

It has already begun in Birmingham, where several hedge funds—including Monarch Alternative Capital, which was a major player in the Hostess bankruptcy and Stone Lion Capital, which was involved in the bankruptcy of Eastman Kodak—have bought more than $600 million of Jefferson County debt. Under pressure after filing the most expensive municipal bankruptcy ever in the US in November 2011, Jefferson County has since cut expenses and laid off more than 700 county workers.   read more

Korman also ridiculed government arguments that allowing full OTC access while the case moves forward in the courts would cause “uncertainty” and “confusion” for women, writing that “this silly argument ignores the fact it is the government’s appeal from the order that sustained the judgment of the commissioner of the FDA that is the cause of any uncertainty. He characterized the contention that women will be confused “largely an insult to the intelligence of women.”   read more

The coal mine methane issue marks at least the fourth category of greenhouse gas emitter the EPA has decided not to regulate, following its rejection of a separate petition last June to reduce emissions from aircraft, ships and off-highway trucks.   read more

At least eight men involved in the New York scheme were indicted by a federal prosecutor, including their suspected ringleader, who was killed in the Dominican Republic last month. Local authorities say the man, Alberto Yusi Lajud-Peña, was gunned down by others involved in the robberies over how to divvy up the stolen money. The “cashers” were allowed to keep 20% of the haul. Authorities have not yet revealed who they think are the masterminds of the international ATM scheme.   read more

From 1996 to 2011, there were 939 accidents at these plants—an average of more than one a week. The accidents, not all of which involved anhydrous ammonia releases, resulted in 19 deaths, 1,651 injuries, and almost $350 million in property damage.   read more

First, Rust Consulting, which has 50 contracts with the federal government, sent out checks to homeowners that bounced. Now, the firm has come under fire for cutting checks with the wrong amounts. At least 100,000 checks were issued for amounts less than what homeowners were owed, potentially cheating them out of millions of dollars.   read more

Wolzfeld served as permanent representative to the U.N. from 1993 to 1998. In 1997, as chairman of the European Union delegations to the U.N., it fell to Wolzfeld to publically chastise the U.S. Congress for voting to refuse to pay a billion dollars in back dues as a protest against abortion.   read more

Returning to Charlotte in 2001, Foxx practiced commercial litigation at the large law firm of Hunton & Williams until 2009, when he joined DesignLine Corporation, a hybrid electric bus manufacturer, as its deputy general counsel. Foxx began his political career in 2004 as campaign manager for Rep. Mel Watt (D-North Carolina), whom President Obama nominated for a different federal post—head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency—just a few days after naming Foxx.   read more

U.S. officials have ordered the company behind a new type of plastic handgun that uses 3D printers to remove its designs from the Internet. But that likely won’t stop the distribution of the information. Defense Distributed, which created the single-shot “Liberator” weapon, put up the designs on its website—which were downloaded 100,000 times in just two days.   read more

If the city council passes the proposal, New York would become the largest city in the U.S. to allow non-citizens to vote. Non-citizen voting in local elections currently exists in six smaller municipalities in Maryland, as well as in at least nine other countries, In the United States, non-citizen voting was actually common in almost forty states until anti-immigrant sentiment put an end to the practice in the 1920s.   read more

When the 9.0 Fukushima earthquake rocked Japan in 2011, crippling nuclear facilities and generating a deadly tsunami, an early warning system conceived at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) 10 years ago and installed in 2007 helped prevent even more destruction. The 60 seconds of advanced warning allowed time to stop 11 bullet trains, disable 16,000 elevators, flash warning signs to motorists and give students a chance to duck under desks.   read more