Rumors are spreading that the U.S. Supreme Court will vote 5-4 to rule that a U.S. president cannot be prosecuted for anything he does while he is president. Some Democrats are suggesting that Joe Biden bring a gun to his first debate with Donald Trump. If he shoots Trump, he would be immune, but if Trump shoots Biden he would be prosecuted because he is not a sitting president.   read more

Voters have long worried about elected officials using their power to line their pockets and shape policies to advance their private interests. But rarely has an incoming president represented such potential for conflicts of interest. Ken Gross calls Trump's holdings "unprecedented" in size and complexity for a president, a "tangled web" of potential conflicts that would be difficult to unravel. As it turns out, Trump doesn't even have to try. Federal ethics rules don't apply to the president.   read more

The number of providers who topped the $5 million mark for prescriptions increased more than tenfold. The number of prescribers—mostly physicians but also nurse practitioners–exceeding $10 million in drug costs jumped from two to 70. “The trends in this space are troubling and don’t show any signs of abating,” said Tim Gronniger of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “It’s going to be a pressure point for patients and the program for the foreseeable future.”   read more

It's challenging because Twitter harassment often resembles online mob action, with numerous pseudonymous accounts ganging up to tweet vile messages at particular individuals. The alt-right movement drew national attention during the presidential campaign, especially after Stephen Bannon of the Breitbart website, considered by many to be the alt-right's platform, joined Donald Trump's campaign. Trump recently named Bannon as the White House chief strategist.   read more

The past months of Mihail Gofman's life read like spy fiction: Fleeing to Washington from Moldova pursuers, he gives U.S. officials information he claims links top Moldovan political leaders and possibly U.S. citizens to a $1 billion heist that gutted the tiny eastern European nation's banking system. Now he's holed up in Washington trying to make the case that Americans should care what happened in a little-known country 5,000 miles away — and to help it try to recover the missing money.   read more

Trained in public international law, Daddah served as head of documentation and the research center of the Moktar Ould Daddah Foundation, the organization founded in honor of Daddah’s father, who served as Mauritania’s president from 1959 until he was ousted in a 1978 coup. The younger Daddah also worked as administrative and finance director of Invest Consulting, which promoted foreign investment in Mauritania.   read more

For about $50, you can get a smartphone with high-def display, fast service and...a secret feature: a backdoor that sends all your text messages to China every 72 hours. Security contractors recently discovered pre-installed software in some Android phones that monitors where users go, whom they talk to and what they write in text messages. U.S. authorities say it is not clear whether this represents secretive data mining for advertising or a Chinese government effort to collect intelligence.   read more

"We will not accept proposals to roll back civil rights ... not on our watch," said LCCHR chief Wade Henderson. The selection of Bannon, a favorite of the alt-right and white nationalist movement, concerned many of the groups, which said they would be prepared to organize and mobilize if necessary. "This is not a good sign if we're talking about the unity of our nation," said Melanie Campbell, president of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation.   read more

The cancellation was aimed at preserving the Badger-Two Medicine area, a largely-undeveloped, 130,000-acre wilderness that is the site of the creation story for members of Montana's Blackfeet Nation and the Blackfoot tribes of Canada. "It should not have been leased to begin with," Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said in announcing the cancellations at her agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C. "This sets the right tone for how business should be done in the future."   read more

Cities across the country are enacting more bans on living in vehicles, camping in public and panhandling, despite federal efforts to discourage such laws. Cities listed in the report's "hall of shame" are in Colorado, Hawaii, Texas and Washington state. The report called several such policies unconstitutional. The group said panhandling is protected by free-speech rights and preventing sleeping in public could be considered cruel and unusual punishment.   read more

Brian Smothers told the Associated Press Wednesday the VA had opened two separate inquiries into his actions and tried to get him to sign a statement saying he had broken VA rules. He said he refused. Smothers also said the VA reassigned him to an office with no computer access, no significant duties and no social contact. He called the VA's actions punitive and his working conditions intolerable. He said he resigned as of Tuesday.   read more

If Donald Trump follows through on his promises, a host of taxes that affect only the very richest Americans may be eliminated, along with almost all tax incentives to be philanthropic. As a result, wealthy families may find it much easier to amass dynastic levels of wealth. Trump's tax proposals would allow for the creation of generational wealth to rival that of the last Gilded Age, after which the modern estate tax was enacted in 1916.   read more

Twitter said Tuesday that it is expanding a "mute" function that lets people mute accounts they don't want to see tweets from. But the company is also making it easier to report hateful conduct. Abuse can easily spread on Twitter due to its public, real-time nature, where tweets are easily amplified by retweets and users can easily and openly attack others. While Twitter prohibits specific conduct that targets people, this policy has not been enough to stomp out abuse.   read more

Economists affiliated with prestigious universities show that mergers benefit consumers. But they reap their most lucrative paydays by lending their academic authority to mergers their corporate clients propose. Corporate lawyers hire them to sway the government by documenting that a merger won’t be “anti-competitive.” Their optimistic forecasts, though, often turn out to be wrong, and the mergers they champion may be hurting the economy.   read more

Some marketers have been left wondering if facts and reason matter less than they expected — a counterintuitive discovery in the age of information. DDB exec Clark said the election showed “facts are somewhat negotiable. Facts are sort of, ‘I might take them or I might not.' They’re certainly discretionary now, so there is that notion as a marketer and advertiser of understanding we live in a postfactual democracy.”   read more

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said the new rule updates 30-year-old drilling regulations to meet modern standards and ensure that natural gas is used to power the economy — not wasted by being burned into the atmosphere. The new rule also should generate tens of millions of dollars a year that can be returned to taxpayers, tribes and states while reducing pollution. A new Republican administration under President-elect Donald Trump could reconsider the rule or even scrap it.   read more

FAA has little to show for a decade of work on modernizing air traffic control, and faces billions more in spending, said a new report. "Our review has found that, at least until 2020, most of the transformational programs will not transform how air traffic is managed," said aviation I.G. Hampton. "The inspector general's report at most faults the FAA for describing NextGen programs as 'transformational' when they really just improve how the FAA manages air traffic," noted Rep. Peter DeFazio.   read more