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

Elisse B. Walter is following Mary L. Schapiro again. In the wake of Schapiro’s resignation as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Walter, who has twice taken new jobs in order to follow Schapiro, was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as acting chair, which she also did, albeit briefly, in January 2009.   read more

Rice holds stock valued between $300,000 and $600,000 in TransCanada, the company hoping to transport tar sands crude 1,700 miles to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. Additionally, Rice and her husband own at least $1.25 million worth of stock in four of Canada’s eight leading oil producers, including Enbridge, which caused the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history.   read more

there are more than 100 prisons in the United States capable of handling the detainees, according to congressional researchers. In fact, hundreds of prisoners convicted of terror-related offenses are already housed in U.S. prisons. Late Thursday, the Senate, in another insult to American prison guards and administrators, voted 54-41 to prevent the Guantánamo prisoners from being transferred to the United States.   read more

Only 20 House Republicans are female, five are Latino and one is African-American. By contrast, of the 201 Democrats in the House of Representatives, 61 are women, 42 are African-Americans, 23 are Latinos, 13 are Asian or Pacific Islanders, and four are Arab-Americans.   read more

All the ban has done is to prevent women from receiving the accolades or opportunities for promotion afforded men who are given combat assignments, they argue. Women currently make up 14.5% of the 1.4 million troops serving on active duty and 20% of new recruits. About 280,000 women were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, with about 150 dying in these wars.   read more

The NYPD was surprised because officials couldn’t remember the last time that the city didn’t record at least one violent crime on a given day. The city’s violence-free streak ended after 37 hours when a man was shot in Brooklyn at 11:20 Tuesday morning.   read more

Lazzaric T. Caldwell admitted to his superiors that he slit his wrists in January 2010 while stationed in Okinawa, Japan. He pleaded guilty to attempting suicide and was sentenced to 180 days in the brig. He also received a bad-conduct discharge, which bars him from receiving mental health benefits. His lawyers contend that his guilty plea be thrown out, on grounds that it is wrong to punish troops whose mental problems cause them to attempt suicide.   read more

Suha Arafat refused to permit an autopsy at the time her husband died in a French hospital following a stroke, said to have been caused by a blood disorder, in 2004. She then gave some of Yasser Arafat’s personal items to Al Jazeera television. The network forwarded them to the Institut de Radiophysique, which discovered abnormal levels of polonium-210. The radioactive element is extremely rare, but became widely known after it was used to kill Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.   read more

At an October gathering, Humboldt County Sheriff Mike Downey, District Attorney Paul Gallegos, two county supervisors and a state Department of Fish and Game biologist talked about the environmental impacts of marijuana production, and possible policy changes. Future lecture subjects include an examination of Dutch drug policy and the impacts of legalization on local economies.   read more

The idea is based on a misinterpretation of the 12th Amendment. The amendment states that when no candidate receives a majority in the Electoral College, the decision moves to the House, where each state would have one vote and a quorum of two-thirds of the states would be required. The two-thirds reference in the 12th Amendment is a reference not to the Electoral College but rather to the establishment of a quorum in the House of Representatives.   read more

Edamaruku, who is known for explaining away religious myths, spoiled the religious excitement by declaring the water was coming from a leaky pipe in the wall behind the statue. The remark got Edamaruku indicted on charges of violating India’s blasphemy law, which can result in a three-year prison sentence. This, coupled with death threats, prompted him to seek exile in Finland.   read more

Within the administration there are disagreements over how often drones should be utilized. The Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency favor “greater latitude to carry out strikes,” wrote Scott Shane in the Times, while the Department of Justice and the State Department, as well as the president’s counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, prefer more restraint.   read more

“The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates,” Greer said. “It’s done for one reason and one reason only.…‘We’ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us.’” Former Republican Governor Charlie Crist said party leaders approached him while he was in office from 2007 to 2011 about changing early voting. Again, the intent was to suppress Democrat turnout.   read more

Three of the seven DHS agencies whose morale is below the DHS average are ones whose employees engage in substantial contact with the public: the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).   read more

Three experts from the fields of philosophy, science and computer engineering have come together in the United Kingdom to study the possible threat that robots may pose for the human race. “At some point, this century or next, we may well be facing one of the major shifts in human history–perhaps even cosmic history–when intelligence escapes the constraints of biology,” Huw Price said.   read more

According to the flight manifests, a Syrian transport plane made eight round-trip flights between Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport and Damascus International Airport, with each trip involving 30 tons of bank notes. The logs do not specify the type of currency that was shipped.   read more