Independent experts say the coverage gains are due to the Obama health care law, boosted by economic recovery. That poses a dilemma for GOP presidential candidates, who are vowing to repeal "Obamacare," while offering hardly any detail on how they'd replace it without millions losing coverage. Indeed, a group of conservative policy experts said Republicans will need some kind of "grandfathering exemption" to avoid disrupting the lives of people who have gained coverage.   read more

Police weren't prepared for the firehose of less-valuable intelligence generated by the $750,000 system. Since the scanners went live, they've been triggering an average of 700 alarms a day, mainly about cars with expired registration. Officers have impounded 500 vehicles. They've written more than 2,000 court summonses, mostly for minor violations. "It is a tremendous amount of workload that has been increased due to this new technology," said Freeport police chief Miguel Bermudez.   read more

Barack Obama might seem an unlikely investor in the firearms industry. But the U.S. president, a fierce advocate for gun regulation, has money in a pension fund that holds stock in gun and ammunition companies. Obama is among millions of Americans buying into gun companies - often unwittingly - as mutual funds have increased such holdings to record levels. The influx has helped boost two gun firms' shares by more than 750%; each now has a market value of about $1 billion.   read more

“These social network tools provide individuals with tremendous reach,” said Horvitz. “People can share ideas with only a few jumps to a large portion of the world’s population and with even fewer steps to the entire population of a nation.” It is a startling notion that reaching someone on the other side of the world takes only a small group of social connections. On the other hand, the result could also be evidence of psychological distance: that we were actually five “worlds apart.”   read more

Morrell was born in 1933 in the town of Utica to Lena Pierce, who named her Eva May. Social welfare officials took the baby away because Pierce, then 13, was herself a ward of the state. Eva May was adopted by a family on Long Island and grew up as Betty Morrell, an only child. She was in her early 30s when she started looking for information about her birth family. She had been told her birth mother had died during childbirth and was shocked when she learned she was still alive.   read more

"Any way you look at it, this data is very alarming," said lead study author Patrick Krill, finding it reveals "an unsustainable professional culture that's harming too many people." Lawyers in their first 10 years of practice were the most prone to problem drinking at 29%. Researchers also found that lawyers find it difficult to overcome the stigma of alcoholism to admit that they need help.   read more

Almost every top official in the remote Texas city was arrested Thursday under a detailed federal indictment that accuses them of taking bribes from contractors and sending city workers to help an illegal gambling operator nicknamed "Mr. T." Once billed as the "Spinach Capital of the World," Crystal City's logo features a cartoon of Popeye, and a spinach festival with a cook-off and a beauty pageant draws tens of thousands of people each year. But in recent months, the town has been in turmoil.   read more

Rakoff, who normally sits on the federal district court in Manhattan, said the statute was clear and downplayed concern that hospitals might seek classifications they do not deserve. The law "simply increases the number of situations in which hospitals can be treated as rural for some purposes and urban for others, but there is nothing 'absurd' about such a measured approach," he wrote. "An agency may not rewrite clear statutory terms to suit its own sense of how the statute should operate."   read more

Texas was the top state for exonerations, propelled by conviction integrity units set up in its most populous counties. The state known for its tough approach on crime has also been a national leader in prosecutorial reform. "For the integrity of the system, it is the right thing to do," said Inger Chandler, head of Harris County District Attorney's Conviction Review Section, which had 42 exonerations in 2015. Texas had 54 exonerations in 2015, followed by 17 in New York and 13 in Illinois.   read more

Multiple news outlets report that at least 350 jury summons with the incorrect phone number were sent out in Jackson County to potential jurors. Circuit Clerk Randy Carney says people started calling the circuit clerk's office Monday morning to report the problem. Others stopped by in person to address the issue. Carney says he doesn't know what caused the mix-up.   read more

"Bernie's Yearning" is mint ice cream topped with a solid chocolate disk, to reflect Sanders' campaign theme of economic inequality, said Ben & Jerry's Ben Cohen. "The chocolate disc represents the huge majority of economic gains that have gone to the top 1 percent since the end of the recession. Beneath it, the rest of us," according to the label. Cohen has made just 40 pints of the new ice cream and is giving 25 of them to the Sanders campaign. The rest will be awarded later in a drawing.   read more

Bergdahl's legal team has been monitoring statements by the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination as possibly affecting their client's right to a fair trial. Fidell said the defense has compiled an eight-page log of "some of the various appalling comments that Mr. Trump has made in an effort to – it's like a lynch mob actually – to incite ill will and vilification of Sgt. Bergdahl. [Trump] may wind up facing a defamation case down the road,"   read more

David Craig got the letter last week from his son Lynn Craig, who returned safely from Iraq in September 2005. The missing letter, dated March 14, 2005, was written about a month after Lynn Craig had been in Iraq. At that time, he was a lance corporal of the U.S. Marine Corps. He's still part of the Reserve. The Craigs say they'd like to know where the letter has been all this time.   read more

According to the park the famed Ahwahnee Hotel, which was built in the 1920s, would be renamed The Majestic Yosemite Hotel and Curry Village would be called Half Dome Village. Notable guests of the Ahwahnee have included Queen Elizabeth II, U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, as well as entertainers Desi Arnaz, Lucille Ball, Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland and Will Rogers, according to the historic-hotels-lodges.com website.   read more

Author and humorist Sean Carter, who practiced law for 10 years, said the poem was a bit graphic and the humor may have been better used in a corporate security lawsuit, but the poem did not affect the legality of the decision. "There is no grounds for appeal because a judge is silly," Carter said, adding, "You would not want to read this opinion over lunch."   read more

"You can't use hairspray because hairspray is going to affect the ozone," complained Trump. "They want me to use the pump because the other one, which I really like better than going 'bing,' 'bing,' 'bing,' and then it comes out in big globs, right? And it's stuck in your hair, and you say, 'Oh my God, I got to take a shower again, my hair's all screwed up..." He also criticized limited-flow shower heads. "You have showers where I can't wash my hair properly," he said. "It's a disaster."   read more