When Bush entered the White House race last year, the petroleum sector saw him as their natural choice: he was the son and brother of former presidents and he came from a West Texas family with historically close ties to the oil industry. "Bush is part of a family that is a friendly face to the oil industry," said Emerson. He drew more than $2 million from the CEOs of companies like Exxon Mobil and Halliburton in 2015, making up about 56% of all the industry’s contributions to the race so far.   read more

The NSA defended hiding key details of its process for deciding whether to exploit or disclose software security flaws that make people vulnerable to hackers. The EFF sued the NSA in 2014 for withholding records on the government's handling of newly discovered security flaws not yet fixed by software developers. It had been reported that for two years the government knew about and exploited a security flaw affecting an estimated two-thirds of the world's websites, without disclosing the threat.   read more

The death toll published by the Observatory, which tracks the war using a network of contacts on the ground, included at least 15 people killed when strikes hit a bakery in the city of al-Shadadi near the border with Iraq on Tuesday. Air raids in at least three other villages killed 15 others on Thursday, including three children, while eight more civilians died in air strikes elsewhere, it said.   read more

Apple CEO Cook responded with a blistering, 1,100-word letter to Apple customers, warning of the “chilling” breach of privacy posed by the government’s demands. He said the order would effectively require it to create a “backdoor” to get around its own safeguards, and Apple vowed to appeal the ruling by next week. “The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe,” Cook said.   read more

The Justice Department has found that bringing cases against kleptocrats and seizing their assets has been daunting. Government prosecutors have taken aim at funds held by officials from Nigeria, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, South Korea, Taiwan, Honduras and even Canada. One case involves the glamorous Gulnara Karimova, the Harvard-educated daughter of the Uzbek president, said to have absconded with $300 million and stashed in an American bank’s overseas branch.   read more

The report could put embarrassing pressure on the U.S. over support for Saudi Arabia. The Americans have sold arms and furnished training and expertise to a Saudi-led coalition that has faced widespread criticism for what rights groups call an indiscriminate bombing campaign in Yemen. “Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners, as well as their U.S. supplier, are blatantly disregarding the global standard that says cluster munitions should never be used under any circumstances,” said the report.   read more

In a federal complaint filed Thursday in Washington, the James Madison Project and reporter Ken Dilanian say they are seeking documents that could shed light on the extent to which the agencies may have targeted John Kiriakou, a CIA agent from 1990 to 2004, after he disclosed to a reporter the agency’s use of waterboarding, which many believe is a form of torture.   read more

The D.C. Circuit is considering whether the passage of the USA Freedom Act renders moot the injunction issued against the National Security Agency’s bulk collection program in November. The USA Freedom Act modified several provisions of the Patriot Act and purported to end the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata, though this is disputed by activist Larry Klayman, who currently has three cases against the NSA and other government agencies pending in Leon’s court.   read more

A bill headed for President Barack Obama this week includes a provision that would ban U.S. imports of fish caught by slaves in Southeast Asia, gold mined by children in Africa and garments sewn by abused women in Bangladesh, closing a loophole in an 85-year-old tariff law that has failed to keep products of forced and child labor out of America.   read more

Protecting the privacy of citizens is a pillar of Ted Cruz's Republican presidential candidacy, but his campaign is siphoning personal data from supporters. The Cruz mobile app gathers detailed information from its users' phones — tracking their movements and information on friends. It's all fed into a database holding details about nearly every adult in the U.S. Cruz's campaign says the system has the potential to power him to the nomination.   read more

The surprising move is a blow to the administration and a victory for the coalition of 27 mostly Republican-led states and industry opponents that call the regulations "an unprecedented power grab." A 5-4 majority issued the temporary freeze. The Obama administration's plan aims to stave off the worst predicted impacts of climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions at existing power plants by about one-third by 2030.   read more

Two panelists work for the Center for Practical Bioethics, which receives funding from multiple drugmakers, including OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma, which donated $100,000 in 2013. One panelist holds a chair at the center created by a $1.5-million donation from Purdue. The other received more than $8,660 in speaking fees, meals, travel and other payments from pain drugmakers. The legislation creating the panel was championed for years by drugmakers.   read more

In Flint, Michigan, as many as 8,000 children under age 6 were exposed to unsafe levels of lead. But it is hardly the only such occurrence. Unsafe levels of lead have turned up in tap water in city after city — in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Mississippi — as well as in scores of other places in recent years. Such episodes are unsettling reminders of what experts say are holes in the safety net of rules and procedures intended to keep water not just lead-free, but free of all poisons.   read more

A HUD I.G. report has found that more than 25,000 of the 1.1 million U.S. families in public housing - about 2.5% - earn too much money to qualify for housing subsidies. "The families identified by HUD ... met the income limits at the time of admission...but their income now exceeds such income limits," HUD said. The agency added that rising income is good because it is a sign that a family is on its way to self-sufficiency, but when it's temporary it shouldn't be used to end assistance.   read more

Twitter’s disclosure of the number of terrorist account suspensions sets it apart from its social media peers. Facebook regularly discloses the number of government requests it has received for content takedowns on its service, but the company does not break out the removal of terror-related content. YouTube has given more than 200 outside organizations the ability to “flag” potentially harmful content, which YouTube can then review and remove.   read more

The promises of the industry are potentially far-reaching and attracting notice on Wall Street. As more states legalize marijuana sales, analysts are weighing the stock market benefits of new businesses as cannabis goes corporate. Funds are considering the ethics of investing in marijuana. Parents are even debating whether to allow their children to buy the stocks. Lucrative legal side businesses are spinning off, like climate systems for growers and child-resistant marijuana bags.   read more