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

“We calculate that each upset loss of the LSU football team generates excess punishments of juvenile defenders in Louisiana by a total of more than 1,332 days, including time in custody and probation,” Eren and Mocan wrote. “Importantly, 159 extra days of jail time has been assigned to juveniles convicted of a felony due to an upset loss in a football game.” Not surprisingly, African-American defendants bear the brunt of the judges’ unhappiness about the Tigers’ fortunes.   read more

Imagine a scene straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie: You call a phone number, unaware that it has been wiretapped as part of a federal investigation, and incriminate yourself in a different crime altogether. Judge Gould noted the novelty of the question: Is the evidence admissible when a valid wiretap helps catch someone else who happens to be involved in a different crime? The government needs to stop listening to people's conversations when it knows it shouldn't, said Johnson.   read more

“I would like to be buried in Arlington Cemetery,” she wrote. “Even if there are no ashes left, I would like an empty urn placed at Arlington.” The problem was that the Army never considered the women — who carried weapons, wore uniforms and had access to classified intelligence — to be the same as active-duty male troops. “They gave the ultimate sacrifice, and then when the war was over, they were told, ‘Thank you for your service, the cockpits go back to the men now,'” said Rep. McSally.   read more

Declaring a “moral obligation” to heal the wounds of a secret war, President Barack Obama on Tuesday pledged help to clear away the 80 million unexploded bombs the U.S. dropped on Laos a generation ago — more than 10 for every one of the country’s 7 million people. Obama announced the U.S. would double its spending on bomb-clearing efforts to $90 million over three years.   read more

A coalition of New York-based advocates on Tuesday launched a national campaign to press large retailers, restaurant chains and other companies to end on-call and last-minute scheduling, which allows companies to assign shifts to workers with only a few hours’ notice. They say three in five American workers — about 75 million people — are paid hourly, with recent job growth mainly in low-wage jobs, often part-time and subject to last-minute scheduling practices.   read more

In a federal class action, two mothers — one of them a consultant in the $1 billion NFL concussion litigation — trace their adult sons’ deaths to brain injuries they suffered playing Pop Warner youth football. Kimberly Archie and Jo Cornell sued Pop Warner Little Scholars and two other organizations, claiming they failed to protect children from head trauma while playing tackle football and misled parents about safety policies, coaches training and helmet standards.   read more

Albuquerque hauls in more than $1 million a year by seizing cars, sometimes from innocent people, in defiance of state law and public outrage, claims a mother who wants the city’s program declared unconstitutional. The city even writes into its budget ahead of time the money it expects to make from selling seized cars.   read more

Mines are closing and the coal industry is facing a run of bankruptcies and other bad news, but a company backed by a $90 million investment is defying conventional wisdom by preparing to open two new mines in Appalachia, the hardest-hit coal region. This coal won’t be used for electricity but for steel manufacturing. Metallurgical coal prices are up lately due to a mix of international market factors.   read more

“This is opening up a whole new can of worms — we have seen problems with security contractors on the battlefield since 9/11, and there’s been an improvement in oversight in that area, but that came after a decade of problems,” said law professor Laura A. Dickinson. “With drones, this is a new area where we already do not have a lot of transparency and with contractors operating drones there’s no clearly defined regime of oversight and accountability.”   read more

This election cycle, it seems that many CEOs have chosen to be less public about whom they are supporting in the presidential race. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich canceled an event at his home for Donald Trump after it was reported to be causing a firestorm among Intel employees. Some executives privately say they worry they could see reprisals against their business or industry if they were to actively campaign for one candidate or another.   read more

Borrowers wrestling with college debt often complain about the companies that manage their student loans. Now federal regulators have stepped up pressure on loan servicers to treat their borrowers better. Just this week, Wells Fargo, the second largest lender of private student loans, agreed to pay a $3.6 million civil penalty to settle allegations that the bank used illegal loan servicing practices that resulted in higher costs and fees for some borrowers.   read more

It is a growing national problem. The number of homes on the market in the U.S. has fallen for the last 14 months. The inventory of homes for sale is the lowest it has been since modern records started being kept in 1982. Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire Facebook CEO, found a place he liked near San Francisco’s Mission District in 2012 and paid the owner at least twice what it was worth. People of much more modest means are now echoing his tactics, even if they cannot extend his lavish terms.   read more

She began work at the Afghanistan desk on July 30, 2001, while the Taliban were still in power. Less than two and a half months later, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. Beginning in 2003, Pasi served as deputy principal officer and acting consul general at the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt, Germany. From 2006 to 2009, she was the deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires at the embassy in Dhaka, Bangladesh.   read more

The NSO Group sells surveillance tools that can capture all smartphone activity, such as a user’s location and personal contacts. They can even turn the phone into a secret recording device. Last month, its spyware tried to gain access to the iPhone of a human-rights activist in the UAE. A second target was a Mexican journalist who wrote about corruption in the Mexican government. “There’s no check on this ... governments can essentially use them however they want," said Bill Marczak.   read more

“I’m a Republican, but I also realize, by any objective analysis, the sea level is rising,” said Tybee mayor Jason Buelterman. Local leaders say they cannot tackle this problem alone. Yet Congress has largely ignored their pleas, and has even tried to block plans by the military to head off future problems at the numerous bases imperiled by a rising sea. A Republican congressman from Colorado, Ken Buck, recently called one military proposal part of a “radical climate change agenda."   read more

Thousands of earthquakes have hit Oklahoma in recent years. Seismologists say the quakes are caused by high-pressure injection of wastewater from oil and gas wells, both conventional ones and those that are hydraulically fractured, or fracked. The Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which oversees oil and gas activity, announced that it had ordered the shutdown of wastewater wells across 725 square miles in the area hit by the quake. About three dozen wells are affected.   read more