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

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

China and other countries will stay committed to the Paris Agreement on climate change, irrespective of what the next U.S. administration does. “Of course they are going to move forward,” said U.S. climate envoy Pershing. “I’m hearing the same from the Europeans...the Brazilians. I’m hearing the same from Mexico...Canada...Costa Rica and from Colombia.” Trump has called global warming a “hoax” on social media and promised during his campaign to “cancel” the Paris deal adopted last year.   read more

Just like college freshmen, newly elected members of the House descended on Washington Monday for a week of orientation, a class photo and a lottery to determine their offices for the next two years. The new Congress includes the first Latina senator, three House members moving across the Capitol to the Senate and a few former lawmakers who seized their old jobs back. While Congress will include a record number of minority women, Congress will remain overwhelmingly white, male and middle-aged.   read more

If Obama can't close it, his successor likely won't. Donald Trump has not only pledged to keep Guantanamo open, in April he said that "we're gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me. We're gonna load it up." He also said he'd try U.S. citizens accused of terrorism at the base, though that would require Congress to change federal law. Obama "knows what's at stake and he knows he can't leave the door to Guantanamo open for Donald Trump," said Amnesty Intl's Naureen Shah.   read more

There is no doubt that as he rose in the ranks of a special police force in Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic, Khalimov received extensive taxpayer-funded military training from the U.S. to help counter drug-running and extremism along the border with Afghanistan. Now, Khalimov appears to have become the second senior commander of the Islamic State, the terrorist group he defected to last year, to have benefited from American military training provided to former Soviet states.   read more

Critics say Trump's pledged U.S. Muslim ban has contributed to anti-Muslim sentiment. "We've seen how words from public figures like Donald Trump translate into violence," said SPLC's Mark Potok. Last year, there were 257 reported incidents of anti-Muslim bias compared to 154 the year before, a 67% increase. "That spike has...accelerated after the election of President-elect Trump," Hooper said, referring to reports of racist incidents around the country since the Nov. 8 election.   read more

U.S. military and CIA may have committed war crimes by torturing detainees in Afghanistan, the Court's chief prosecutor said, suggesting that American citizens could be indicted. "Members of US armed forces appear to have subjected at least 61 detained persons to torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity..." said the report. And that CIA operatives may have subjected 27 detainees in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania and Lithuania to the same, as well as rape.   read more

During the past week, two of the world’s biggest internet companies have faced mounting criticism over how fake news on their sites may have influenced the presidential election’s outcome. Facebook was accused of swinging some voters in favor of Donald Trump through misleading and outright wrong stories that spread quickly via the social network. Google did not escape the glare: the top result on a Google search wrongly stated that Trump was ahead of Hillary Clinton in the popular vote.   read more

Among the changes found in the new study: multivitamin/mineral use declined to 31% from 37%, “and the rates of vitamin C, vitamin E and selenium use decreased, perhaps in response to research findings showing no benefit,” Cohen wrote. Sometimes people do act sensibly when faced with solid evidence. However, he added, “other products continued to be used at the same rate despite major studies demonstrating no benefit over placebo.”   read more

Stretching the rules to take pets into grocery stores, amusement parks and restaurants has become so commonplace that online merchants are selling official-looking service animal certificates and vests for as little as $50. The growing practice is insulting and harmful to those who genuinely require a service animal, said Karen Shirk. "Faking service dogs is one of the worst things anybody can do...[to] take advantage of something that was supposed to make a disabled person's life easier."   read more