Zelenskyy explained, “I told him that if he gave us the weapons we need and stopped supporting Putin, we would let him build Trump-branded hotels and other Trump-branded buildings in Ukraine’s ten largest cities, as well as Trump golf courses in the countryside. He was quite excited.”   read more

Though the public remains divided on taxes, often seen as a nanny-state intrusion, more and more Americans are turning away from the beverages. Sales are down, and many people say they are actively avoiding the products. Anti-soft drink advertising is likely to appear in major American cities. The declining public image of the beverages will create new challenges for the industry, even if it does not keep losing soda tax fights.   read more

Advocates say the president-elect is "unpredictable," and they are unsure where he stands on marijuana issues, though Trump has said in the past that he supports state laws legalizing medical marijuana. Still, analysts and advocates alike say, the industry may be too big and valuable for a Trump administration to stop, especially after California voters legalized its recreational use. Seven states have now legalized pot, and a recent poll showed close to 60% of Americans support the idea.   read more

Correctly interpreted, less than 6 percent of Americans ages 1 to 70 are deficient and only 13 percent are in danger of not getting enough. That's concerning, "but these levels of deficiency do not constitute a pandemic," the authors write. Yet people may think there is one. Doctors say there's too much needless testing and too many people taking too many pills for a problem that few people truly have.   read more

The culprit seems to be abnormal calcium deposits that make the normally elastic amniotic sac prone to rupture. Such calcium buildup in the womb is similar to the kind that stiffens older people's arteries or causes kidney stones. Premature birth can cause lifelong health problems, and babies who are very premature can die. Sometimes there's an obvious cause, such as an infection. Yet most of the time, doctors can't explain what triggers preterm birth in an otherwise healthy pregnant woman.   read more

The effort faces steep demographic and institutional obstacles that have kept the offices of elected prosecutors — those deciding whether to seek criminal charges against the officers responsible — among the whitest reserves in U.S. politics. Only a few dozen out of more than 2,300 elected prosecutors nationwide are African-American. Even the National Black Prosecutors Association, which has 400 members, can point to only about a dozen who were elected to their posts.   read more

In 2001, Pantelides was made ambassador to Greece. He returned to Cyprus in 2008 to serve as the head of the diplomatic office for President Demetris Christofias. He was caught up in some controversy when, after Cypriot forces in 2009 confiscated munitions from a ship bound for Syria, the contraband exploded in a naval yard in 2011, killing 13. Christofias and Pantelides were among those found to be at least partly responsible for the failure to secure the munitions.   read more

The American Psychological Association said that 52% of American adults cited the presidential election as a “very or somewhat significant source of stress." After the debates, Excedrin tweeted: “Debates bring headaches; Excedrin brings fast headache relief.” It added that 73% of Americans would experience election-related headaches this year. Ringling's ad had a clown saying: “People keep calling candidates clowns. But we’re real clowns, and we take clowning seriously.”   read more

Facebook users filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, asserting that its ad-targeting technology violates the law. “There is no mechanism to prevent ad buyers from purchasing ads...and then excluding based on these illegal characteristics,” said the complaint. “[N]o user can tell whether they are subject to illegal discrimination, because the discrimination occurs with the ads they do not see. ...The problem will not be remedied unless Facebook is forced to take additional action.”   read more

“I have to go an extra hour earlier than anybody else, because it’s not random checking,” Syed said. An American and a Muslim, Syed wears a hijab, or head covering. More often than not, she said, she is pulled aside at security check-in for secondary screenings and pat-downs, the examiner feeling her head through the hijab. Syed and many of her American Muslim friends and Islamic-rights advocates are all too familiar with what many refer to as the stigma of traveling while Muslim.   read more

The challengers contend that SpeechNow has allowed wealthy donors to use super PACs as vehicles that let them "evade campaign-contribution limits designed to prevent corruption and the appearance of corruption." With 3,000 super PACs operating in the 2016 election cycle, 40% of contributions to these groups have come from the same 50 sources. As of October, they had raised $1.1 billion and made total expenditures of more than $799 million.   read more

In campaigning to reduce the world’s carbon emissions, environmentalists have increasingly focused on the financiers behind the fossil fuel industry — highlighting their role in financing coal, oil and gas projects. The groups have blasted the Dakota Access pipeline as outdated infrastructure with no place in a world racing to stave off the worst effects of climate change. The pipeline is expected to carry half a million barrels of crude oil daily out of the Bakken fields of North Dakota.   read more

Facebook and Twitter have been exposing millions of Americans to false stories. The contraction in the reporting corps, with the success of disinformation this year, is making for some sleepless nights in this fake-news environment. “It’s the biggest crisis facing our democracy, the failing business model of real journalism,” said Sen. McCaskill. “If you have a society where people can’t agree on basic facts, how do you have a functioning democracy?” said Post editor Baron.   read more

This technology raises issues of civil liberties, as digital information provided by social media is combined with criminal data by companies that sell it to law enforcement. The ACLU, citing reports that the Chicago Police used a computer analysis to create a “heat list” that unfairly associated innocent people with criminal behavior, has warned about the dangers of the police using big data. Even companies that make money doing this sort of work warn that it comes with civil rights risks.   read more

The U.S. Supreme Court on Saturday reinstated an Arizona law that makes it a felony to collect early ballots, stepping into a contentious political issue days before the presidential election and hurting Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts. The ruling called into question what happens to ballots that were legally collected from voters in the 20 hours that the law was blocked. The GOP chairman said the the ballots should be returned. Democrats say the law hurts minorities' ability to vote.   read more

There’s no way to quantify exactly how many times the field tests were wrong or how many innocent people pleaded guilty based on the inaccurate results, or to assess the damage to their lives. What is clear is that even as they continue to employ field tests to secure arrests and gain convictions, neither the Las Vegas Police nor the DA’s office has informed local judges of the long-standing knowledge of their unreliability. And neither has taken any additional steps to prevent mistakes.   read more

A death row inmate may be alive today because a transgender Virginia student was denied the use of the bathroom of his choice this year. The two seemingly unrelated cases have one thing in common: In each, a Supreme Court justice switched sides to provide a needed fifth vote to preserve the status quo. Justice Breyer broke with liberal colleagues to provide "a courtesy vote" to four conservative justices. Chief Justice Roberts did a similar favor, switching sides to vote in another case.   read more