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

The company misled customers about the quality and price of its merchandise, the terms of loan contracts, and its warranty and debt cancellation. One Army private bought a laptop shortly before shipping out for Iraq. For a model that typically retailed for $650, he agreed to pay almost $3,000. After he fell behind on his payments, he was sued in Virginia while stationed in Germany. The company later sought to seize his military pay and froze his credit union account.   read more

The judges asked how much the Constitution protects not only a person's right to wave a banner but also to have it seen. The pacifist symbol held special meaning on the turret of the neighborhood's iconic Ansonia building. Built in 1899, the Ansonia earned its place on the U.S. Register of Historic Places with its connections to social idealism and scandal. It had been designed as a residential hotel with a rooftop farm, a utopian experiment at self-sufficient living.   read more

Hayden became one of the most vocal critics of the Patriot Act, passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which included language allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation access to library records and forbade library personnel from disclosing to patrons that they were targets of investigators. She continued to fight the law when in 2003 she was elected to a one-year term as the President of the American Library Association.   read more

The Labor Dept concluded that states have decreased benefits, created hurdles to medical care, raised the burden of proof to qualify and shifted costs to public programs. “We’re sounding an alarm bell,” said Perez. “A critical part of the safety net is being both attacked and eroded...because there are no federal minimum standards for workers’ compensation.” The report details how states have changed their laws to reduce business costs--a trend the report calls a “race to the bottom.”   read more

Al-Ajmi, who was blacklisted as a financer of terror by the U.S. and UN, has organized Twitter campaigns to help fund ISIS's systematic murder and displacement of Assyrian Christians, according to the lawsuit. Because Kuwait is not a signatory to the Hague Convention, St. Francis could not serve al-Ajmi through a centralized authority as it can in other nations. In her ruling, Judge Beeler granted the plaintiff's request to use an alternative method to serve al-Ajmi with the suit: Twitter.   read more

The expansion was first approved in 2012 then held up by environmentalists waging a legal campaign. Environmentalists with WildEarth Guardians had sued the Interior Dept to challenge the mine expansion, which extracts coal from publicly owned reserves, saying it would make climate change worse. "(Federal mining officials) want to say that this is a drop in the bucket. But every drop matters," Nichols said. "This is a huge resource locking in hundreds of millions of tons of carbon emissions."   read more

There is no way to know exactly why certain medical specialties attract Democrats or Republicans. But researchers offered a few theories. One explanation could be money. Doctors tend to earn very high salaries compared with average Americans, but the highest-paid doctors earn many times as much as those in the lower-paying specialties. The fields with higher average salaries tended to contain more doctors who were Republican, while lower-paying fields were more popular among Democrats.   read more

Visa CEO Scharf said 2014 the card networks, banks, merchants and trade groups got together "in a room"... The defendants argued that inviting merchants "in the room" makes allegations of a conspiracy implausible because retailers were the ones affected by the new rules, but the judge disagreed. "We would expect the giant retail chains to be involved in the planning..." Alsup wrote. "Run-of-the-mill merchants, like our plaintiffs, are the ones to suffer under the liability shift."   read more

From 2000 to 2004, Silliman held the post of political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Jordan, then returned to Washington as director of the State Dept’s Office of Southern European Affairs. Starting in July 2008, he served as deputy chief of mission in Ankara, Turkey, and in 2010 he became charge d’affaires for the embassy there. During his time in Turkey, Silliman and his wife Catherine appeared on Turkish television, showing viewers what went into an American Thanksgiving dinner.   read more

Yahoo conducted the surveillance last year after receiving a classified demand from the NSA or the FBI. Yahoo built a special software program to comply with the government's request. Civil libertarians denounced the reported Yahoo action. The ACLU called Yahoo's reported acquiescence to a government order "deeply disturbing," adding that the order itself appears to be "unprecedented and unconstitutional." The report will likely test the bounds of Yahoo users' already stressed loyalty.   read more

President Obama’s central plank in his strategy to combat climate change is in danger. His plan to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide from the nation’s power sector could be undone within a matter of weeks by an unlikely bipartisan collection of senators that includes staunch Republican climate change deniers as well as Democrats who support the administration’s strategy. They want to force the government to assume that burning forests to generate electricity is "a renewable energy source."   read more

On one recording, a DMV worker tells a person asking for an ID that she's not guaranteed to get one. Other workers incorrectly say that no temporary voting credentials are available. Another DMV worker says it could take weeks to get an ID without a birth certificate. "This evidence makes clear that the State does not have — and is incapable of implementing — a functioning safety net for its strict voter ID law," said an OWI attorney.   read more

“It could be the case that people’s political orientations are an anchoring point for applying their knowledge — rather than the other way around,” the Pew report said. Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman who is working to get members of his party to accept climate change, said that language used to discuss the issue has, in part, created the gap in the perceptions of liberals and conservatives. Part of it is that climate change has been framed as a question of belief, he said.   read more

Defendant-intervenor Friends of Animals' legal director Michael Harris said, "This is an important victory for African elephants." The species "has taken a huge loss this past year, largely due to poor conservation management practices. Zimbabwe is one of the worst wildlife managers on earth," he added. "It is about time the United States took action to protect these elephants from Americans seeking to take advantage of Zimbabwe's poor conservation practices in order to take a blood trophy."   read more

The wife and daughter of a Navy commander killed on 9/11 sued the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on Friday for its alleged support of al-Qaida's plan to carry out the attacks. The lawsuit came two days after Congress rebuked President Obama's veto of a bill that creates an exception in the law to let American victims of terrorism sue foreign governments for aiding and abetting terror attacks carried out on U.S. soil if they can prove that foreign government officials played a role in the attacks.   read more

WHINSEC trains foreign military leaders on U.S. Army doctrine, with courses on intelligence and command. But some past attendees used their training to commit atrocities in their home nations. Judge Ikuta wrote: "Because disclosing the names of WHINSEC students and instructors would give rise to a 'clearly unwarranted' invasion of privacy, those names are therefore exempt from disclosure..." In his dissent, Judge Watford said that protecting identities takes a back seat to public interest.   read more