Nothing in the records supports the Pentagon's casting of top military brass as hard-nosed crime fighters who insisted on taking the cases to trial after civilian law enforcement said no. No evidence showed any case was prosecuted at a commander's insistence. "Someone at the Pentagon should be held accountable," said retired USAF prosecutor Col. Don Christensen. "...Every senator — especially those who repeated the claim or based their vote on the claim — should be outraged."   read more

This police tactic raises troubling questions about the fairness and effectiveness of how the NYPD uses undercover officers. They neither arrested nor pursued the dealers who sold the drugs to the addicts. Instead, they waited for the addict to return with the drugs before swooping in. Jurors have questioned why police and prosecutors so aggressively pursue troubled addicts. The tactic would seem at odds with public positions of some of the city’s top politicians and law enforcement figures.   read more

Regulators have given five of the biggest U.S. banks failing grades for the strategies they would deploy if they tumbled into bankruptcy. The big banks have been working on their plans for four years. The regulators already put them on notice in mid-2014 that they had to correct serious deficiencies. But for now, the regulators' thumbs-down represents merely a ripple for the banking industry, which faces no government sanctions as a result.   read more

Lockheed has dragged out the F-35 program from eight or 10 years to. . . .forever. Nevertheless, it has full US backing to sell pre-production prototypes to US allies who can be pressured to buy. The US Partners who trusted the US should be especially upset considering they have contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to F-35 development only to now see the best deals going to buyers who arrived 15 years after they thought they had an agreement.   read more

The NFL, Apple and other behemoths have cajoled Republicans into rejecting or softening bills in recent years that supporters say protect people who oppose same-sex marriage on religious grounds. The pushback retreads ground from a 2014 Arizona clash. That state's legislature approved a bill allowing business owners with strongly held religious beliefs to deny service to gays and lesbians. American Airlines and Apple joined with business groups to oppose the measure.   read more

A California school district refused to include scholarship offers from two atheist groups in the lists they distribute to students, the groups claim in court. Both say the district and Palmdale High refused to make their scholarship offers available to students. The high school does, however, announce a scholarship named after L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology. The refusal suppresses speech and denies equal access to the school's scholarship distribution system, said the complaint.   read more

With racial protests roiling U.S. cities, an unusual collection of Georgetown professors, students and alumni is trying to find out what happened to those 272 enslaved men, women and children. And they are confronting a particularly wrenching question: What, if anything, is owed to the descendants of slaves who were sold to help ensure the college’s survival? The 1838 slave sale organized by the Jesuits, who founded and ran Georgetown, stands out among others for its sheer size, historians say.   read more

Defending a Texas law banning the sale of sex toys, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz argued in a 2007 court brief that people have no legal right to use them, even in the privacy of their own bedrooms. But these days he makes no mention of that decade-old case he lost. Cruz defended the Texas ban as "protecting public morals — discouraging prurient interests in sexual gratification" and argued that in doing so the state had a vested moral interest in discouraging "autonomous sex."   read more

Manners matter to Americans. "He's a bully," says independent voter Kellie Zangrillo of Donald Trump. Trump not only may have set the tone in the campaign, she suggested, but his nasty words could have real consequences if uttered as president. "I think he'd get us into World War III." Eight in 10 people say remarks about race or gender and sexuality are unacceptable in public places, and that political leaders should be held to a higher standard of behavior than other people.   read more

Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, both former secretaries of defense under Obama, criticized the NSC and the growth of its influence. Panetta said NSC advisors shade their views in order to please the president and "try to influence the direction of policy through the back door." "[This] undermines the very process that a president needs in order to get the best discussion and information possible to be able to make the right decision," Panetta said.   read more

As more people store data, Microsoft said the government exploits that trend "as a means of expanding its power to conduct secret investigations." Microsoft chief Brad Smith said: "We appreciate there are times when secrecy around a government warrant is needed. But based on the many secrecy orders we have received, we question whether these orders are grounded in specific facts that truly demand secrecy. To the contrary, it appears that the issuance of secrecy orders has become too routine."   read more

Leopold sought the agency's investigative files, its correspondence and the CIA talking points to uncover how spies spun the squabble to the public. Boasberg rebuffed the request in a scathing, 24-page opinion. The reporter filed four complaints alone related to the CIA's entanglement with Senate investigators, seeking access to the declassified torture report summary, the Panetta review, and the case discussed in this opinion. Boasberg so far has dismissed three of them.   read more

Her criminal case was transferred to three different prosecuting attorneys. It was dropped after several months of litigation, on the condition that Plucinski sign a letter to "apologize for speaking out of turn during a public meeting." Plucinski says her jailing has made her hesitant to stand up against big oil, which has backing of government officials who have chilled her right to "engage in free speech and public discourse."   read more

The report gives validation to complaints made for years by African-American residents here who have said they were unfairly targeted by officers without justification on a regular basis. In a city where whites, blacks and Hispanics each make up about one-third of the population, 74% of the 404 people shot by Chicago police between 2008 and 2015 were black. Black people were targeted in 72% of thousands of investigative street stops that did not lead to arrests during a recent summer.   read more

Critics have blasted Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as incompetent after errors were discovered in Spanish-language voter guides that could have caused voters to miss registration deadlines. English guides gave voters 21 days to register, while Spanish ones gave 15 days. The Spanish version also omitted passports as an acceptable form of voter ID. Critics say the errors are another example of Kobach--an advocate of photo ID laws--enacting policies that disenfranchise minority voters.   read more

In what became known as the Battle of Blair Mountain, 5,000 coal miners marched to liberate fellow miners living under martial law in West Virginia in late August 1921. That scene, the biggest labor war in U.S. history, was removed from the National Register of Historic Places under pressure from coal mining interests, "without any indicia of reasoned decision-making," a federal judge ruled.   read more