Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) sent messages to all members of Congress terminating their positions, stating “Your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment.” All Democratic and independent members of Congress, as well as two Republicans, found themselves locked out of their offices after everything inside had been confiscated.   read more

Of all President-elect Donald Trump’s rivals over the past year, the tiny narrow-mouthed whorl snail must be the smallest. Sometimes, though, less is more: Now it appears that the snail has prevailed. The sea wall plan had attracted attention because the Trump Organization’s representatives had used the threat of rising seawater from climate change as a rationale for building it, even though Trump has referred to climate change as a hoax.   read more

Sawerengera was appointed as ambassador to Brazil in 2014 but served there only a short time before he and the ambassadors to the United Nations and to the United States were rotated. The move provoked some controversy in Malawi, with speculation that the UN ambassador had fallen out of favor and other reports that Sawerengera may have been involved in a questionable deal for Brazilian maize.   read more

Congress offered sanctuary to only a fraction of the Afghan interpreters who have risked their lives to help the military. Last summer, Republicans questioned the cost of 4,000 visas requested by Obama this year. Now, the fate of the visa program will hinge on a government led by President-elect Donald Trump, who has yet to say how he will handle an issue that is championed by the military but would also bring more Muslim immigrants to the U.S.--a prospect Trump has railed against.   read more

“Throughout the presidential campaign and since, the president-elect has made many troubling statements that run counter to the principles that define California today,” said Kevin de León, the state Senate president pro tempore, “If the president-elect has identified 2 to 3 million criminal immigrants, we can only assume it’s a pretense to open up criteria to deport mothers who are pulled over for a broken taillight. We want to ensure that those facing deportation are afforded due process...”   read more

Popular theories for the cause of the decline, including an increase in obesity rates and an opiod epidemic, fail to explain a problem that feels broader. “If you actually dissect the data, neither of those arguments hold,” said Muennig. “This report slams it home that this is really a mystery.” Researchers suspect that the strain of income inequality in the U.S. -- and the stress that this causes — could be a major contributing factor to the uptick, but it has been hard to prove.   read more

"This was a criminal, fraud operation masquerading as a fake U.S. embassy," said the U.S. State Dept. It was not clear how many people were defrauded by the fake embassy, which charged $6,000 for its services. Those running the operation were able to bribe corrupt officials "to look the other way," the State Dept said. The fake embassy featured an American flag and photo of President Barack Obama. The fake consular officers were Turkish.   read more

In 2008, Zackios took over as chairman of the Nitijela’s Committee on Public Accounts. He lost that seat in 2012 after an election in which he won a majority of the vote from constituents in the Marshall Islands, but lost when votes from islanders in the United States were counted. In 2013, Zackios was made regional director of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, the principal technical and scientific organization in the region. He held that post until taking the Washington assignment.   read more

AFL-CIO chief Trumka called Puzder “a man whose business record is defined by fighting against working people.” Indeed, Puzder welcomes increased automation because machines are “always polite ... they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall or an age, sex or race discrimination case.” Puzder's company runs TV ads that often feature women wearing next to nothing. “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis," he said. "I think it’s very American.”   read more

These findings reveal the spiraling and often unseen effects of mass deportations, a point that is no longer purely academic as Donald Trump weighs whether to make good on his campaign promise to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants. Previous research suggests that Hispanic households, like black ones, were disproportionately victimized by subprime lending schemes. But the fact that foreclosure rates among Hispanics surpassed those among blacks points to something else going on.   read more

With the full power of the presidency just weeks away, Trump’s decision to single out Jones for ridicule has drawn condemnation from historians and White House veterans. “When you attack a man for living an ordinary life in an ordinary job, it is bullying,” said Nicolle Wallace, who was communications director for President George W. Bush and a top strategist to other Republicans. “It is cyberbullying. This is a strategy to bully somebody who dissents. That’s what is dark and disturbing.”   read more

When interest rates go up, crime goes up. When interest rates go down, crime goes down. This has been so at least since 1953. Rarely does social science research yield such a high statistical association and strong relationship between two phenomena, particularly when they are not intuitively related. Nobody would suggest that high interest rates directly cause crime. But there is a wealth of evidence on the causes of crime that demystifies this seemingly baffling relationship.   read more

"The state of health apps is even worse than we thought," said Dr. James Madara, chief executive of the American Medical Association. Perhaps most concerning was what happened when doctor reviewers entered information that should have drawn warnings from the app — like selecting "yes" when the app asked if the user was feeling suicidal, or entering extremely abnormal levels for blood sugar levels. "The vast majority of apps do not have any kind of response," said lead study author Singh.   read more

The choice of Scott Pruitt signals Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change — and much of the EPA itself. Pruitt has been a key architect of the legal battle against Obama’s climate change policies. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to “cancel” the multi-nation Paris accord fighting climate change, and attacked Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a “war on coal.”   read more

Amid growing security tensions in the West, governments, intelligence agencies and advocacy groups want Google, Microsoft and other tech firms to take further steps to curb hate speech, as well as to clamp down on how terrorists circulate information online. But freedom of expression advocates have warned that such demands may limit people’s ability to communicate across the internet, and they have cautioned that the line between hate speech and legitimate political discussion can be blurry.   read more

That finding puts respondents in the United States in contrast with citizens of many countries and at odds with international law, which prohibits torture under any circumstances. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump endorsed waterboarding, claiming that “it works.” Only Israelis, Palestinians and Nigerians seemed to endorse torture as enthusiastically as Americans. Forty percent of Americans also accepted the killing of humanitarian workers in a conflict zone as being part of war.   read more

The Trump International Hotel has come under scrutiny by government ethics experts who worry that foreign governments, special interest groups and others will book rooms and events there to curry favor with the president-elect. About 100 foreign diplomats from around the world used the hotel for a reception just a week after the election. Since the election, government ethics experts have called for the Trump Organization to sell its interest in the hotel.   read more