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

Among the factors deemed worthy of further research were: • Alcohol intake • Insufficient physical activity • Weight gain in adulthood • Night shift work • Exposure to pesticides • Exposure to industrial pollutants • Radiation from medical and non-medical sources • Exposure to light at night • Family, community and social influences.   read more

Niccolò Pollari was sentenced to 10 years in prison for complicity in the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) abduction of Abu Omar (Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr). His former deputy, Marco Mancini, received nine years, and three Italian secret service officials were sentenced to six years each.   read more

There isn’t much to like about President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, says Dick Cheney, except for when it comes to killing terrorists with drones. In an interview with CBS, the former vice president said that Obama’s drone program was the only part of Obama’s overseas strategy that he agrees with. Cheney went so far as to say it was a “good policy.”   read more

Since February 2009, he has been professor of National Governance at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He published a book in 2008, America: Our Next Chapter: Tough Questions, Straight Answers, in which he called the Iraq War one of the five biggest blunders in U.S. history and criticized George W. Bush's foreign policy as “reckless,” and “a ping pong game with American lives.” Hagel is co-chairman of President Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board.   read more

Three years ago, the EPA seemed poised to act against hexavalent chromium after experts concluded that even trace amounts in tap water could cause cancer. But then the American Chemistry Council (ACC)—the chemical industry’s trade association and chief lobbyist—urged the EPA to wait for more research, which the agency ultimately decided to do, delaying any decision another four years.   read more

It has been five years since the State Department had a permanent IG, leaving the office in the hands of deputy inspector general Harold W. Geisel. No other agency in the federal government has had an inspector general vacancy as long as the State Department has. The last State Department IG, Howard Krongard, resigned effective January 15, 2008, after allegations that he had blocked investigations into Iraq-related contract fraud and alleged arms smuggling by Blackwater Worldwide (now Academi).   read more

The FTC found that about 20% of consumers have an error on at least one of their three credit reports. The consumer credit rating business is dominated by three players: Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. Federal regulators also found that 5% of consumers have credit-report errors that could result in them having to pay more for financial products, such as auto loans and insurance.   read more

Navy Captain Thomas J. Welsh, Guantánamo’s staff judge advocate, told The Washington Post that the microphones were placed inside devices that look like smoke detectors in rooms where attorney-client meetings take place. In addition, Maurice Elkins, director of courtroom technology at the base, testified that 32 mikes were used to monitor legal hearings even when public microphones were muted.   read more

Perhaps the most high-profile concern in this arena is President Obama’s nomination of Mary Jo White to become the new SEC chief. During her most recent job at the firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, White’s clients included JPMorgan Chase, General Electric, Verizon Communications, former Bank of America chief executive Kenneth Lewis, and Rajat Gupta, the former Goldman Sachs board member convicted of insider trading.   read more

Of the 12,000 students taken from school to jail by police in 2012, 67% were accused of misdemeanors, such as disorderly conduct. Oftentimes, disorderly conduct amounts to little more than a student disobeying a teacher’s order to put away a cell phone or stop talking in class. It was also found that African-American and disabled students were arrested disproportionately in number.   read more

The researchers said two organizations most identified with the modern tea party, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, received large amounts of money from Big Tobacco. In fact, before they became separate organizations, they were part of a single entity called Citizens for a Sound Economy, which was co-founded in the 1980s by billionaire David Koch.   read more

The community recently gained the distinction of being the most impoverished in the United States, with 42% of its population living in poverty. The city also suffers from 18.6% unemployment. In addition to its terrible economic situation, Camden was listed as the “most dangerous” urban setting in the country by CQ Press. Last year, 67 murders occurred in the city of 77,000. It also had the highest rate of rape and, perhaps not surprisingly, robbery.   read more

Bowman was accused by Monsanto of infringing on its rights regarding its Roundup Ready soybean seeds, which were engineered to withstand its Roundup herbicide. The 75-year-old farmer never bought Monsanto’s seeds. But he did find soybean seeds in a local grain elevator used for feed and then planted them. Monsanto insists that regardless of where or how Bowman got the seeds, he owes the company for using them. It sued him in district court and won an $84,456 settlement.   read more

Among the useful tools exploited by Riot are the encoding of latitude and longitude embedded in photos taken by Smartphones and GPS locations posted on Foursquare. Raytheon has received approval from the U.S. government to export the software. Put in the hands of dictatorships, Riot could become what some have dubbed the “Google for spies” and others have characterized as “stalking technology.”   read more

State law includes a “failure to vacate” statute that allows landlords to demand police evict renters for falling behind on their rent without local prosecutors first investigating the matter. Once in court, tenants are not allowed to enter evidence, for example that they withheld rent in order to persuade a landlord to make needed repairs. Many landlord-friendly, tenant-unlikely provisions were added to Arkansas law with passage of the Residential Landlord and Tenant Act of 2007.   read more

New wind farms can supply electricity at a cost of AU$80 per megawatt hour (MWh), compared to AU$143/MWh for new coal-fired power plants and AU$116/MWh for new gas-fired generation, according to research by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The calculations included the cost of carbon emissions. But even without a carbon price, wind energy still was 14% cheaper than new coal plants and 18% cheaper than new gas plants.   read more