Trump ordered that the term Homo sapiens be changed to Hetero sapiens. In history books and on websites, the airplane from which the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima will no longer be identified as the Enola Gay, but rather the Enola Straight. Trump also ordered billionaire Mark Cuban, who supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, to change his name to Mark American. If he does not do so, he will be charged with terrorism.   read more

The snafus have forced the Fed to return more than 30 million hundred-dollar notes—the equivalent of $3 billion if legally in circulation—and to demand that BEP refund the Fed’s money. Meanwhile, “another thirty billion dollars’ worth of paper sits in limbo awaiting examination,” according to David Wolman of The New Yorker. The new deadline for BEP to get it right is October 8.   read more

On March 22, about 50 activists set out to block the company’s gates. But some of them didn’t make it that far, as police pulled over their cars. Other officers were waiting at the gates for the rest of the demonstrators who showed up early that morning to begin unloading equipment. The protest was called off, and the group was left dumbfounded over how the police could have known about their plans.   read more

In the past two weeks alone, as many as six civilians died from a recent surge in drone strikes that totaled nine missions. But neither the White House nor the Department of Defense will reveal if American tax dollars are going to survivors of such attacks.   read more

Too often lost in the legal controversy surrounding Manning is the fact that materials he provided included evidence of war crimes, including video footage from a U.S. helicopter showing the unprovoked and indiscriminate killing of more than a dozen civilians in Iraq.   read more

The lone dissenter, Judge Andrew J. Kleinfeld, wrote: “They do not get one cent. They do not even get an injunction against Facebook doing exactly the same thing to them again.” He added: “This settlement perverts the class action into a device for depriving victims of remedies for wrongs, while enriching both the wrongdoers and the lawyers purporting to represent the class.”   read more

A complex catastrophe is defined as: “Any natural or man-made incident, including cyberspace attack, power grid failure, and terrorism, which results in cascading failures of multiple, interdependent, critical, life-sustaining infrastructure sectors and causes extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage or disruption severely affecting the population, environment, economy, public health, national morale, response efforts, and/or government functions.”   read more

Retired Air Force General Richard B. Myers told The Washington Post that deporting veterans “is not fair, and it’s not appropriate for who we are as a people.” “One thing America has always done is revere its veterans,” he said. “To say to them, ‘You swore to support and defend the Constitution and put your life on the line for the rest of us. But you’re not a citizen. So, too bad. You’re gone.’ I just think that’s not us.”   read more

Davis recommends shrinking the general officer corps. He notes that in 1945, at the end of World War II, 2,000 general and flag officers led a force of about 12 million. Today, although there are only 1.4 million U.S. troops, there are 900 generals and admirals.   read more

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reported 1,130 people appeared on the list of citizenship renunciations during the second quarter of this year. That’s more than the previous high of 679 in the first quarter—and more than were reported for all of last year. Americans are giving up their citizenship or permanent-resident status in response to the federal government going after Americans who stash assets overseas to avoid paying the IRS.   read more

In Barnhart, Texas, residents turn on their taps and get nothing, a product of shale gas fracking operations that have drained water from underground wells. In the nearby county of Crockett, fracking uses up to 25% of the water, according to the groundwater conservation district.   read more

Determined to not repeat the embarrassing Edward Snowden affair, the National Security Agency (NSA) is eliminating 90% of its system administrators and replacing them with machines. Snowden was a contract employee and system administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton who used his top-secret security access to NSA computers and databases to divulge classified operations about domestic snooping on Americans.   read more

Banks are so willing to pony up sizeable contributions that House leaders over the past three decades have kept adding seats to the Financial Services Committee, expanding it from 44 members in 1980 to 61 members today. Both parties like to put newly elected members of Congress on the committee because they are considered more vulnerable in their reelection battles and need more campaign funds.   read more

The basic thrust of Obama’s position is that the snooping is constitutional because “Supreme Court precedent” says that callers “lack any reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment in the metadata records generated by their telephone calls.” None of the cases cited, however, dealt with anything like the NSA’s indiscriminate bulk collection of records.   read more

“The Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court,” Judge Carney wrote. But the Ninth Court of Appeals said that wasn’t true and reversed his ruling. You can, apparently lie to a judge if later on you admit you lied. The FBI had initially released eight heavily-redacted pages of information in response to the lawsuit brought against them and said that was all there was. But eventually they coughed up another 100 pages of equally heavily-redacted documents.   read more

The courts rejected efforts to assign liability according to company market shares, out of fear that this approach “risks exposing these defendants to liability greater than their responsibility and may allow the actual wrongdoer to escape liability entirely,” as the Missouri Supreme Court put it in 2007. That court, apparently, thought that letting all the wrongdoers escape liability entirely was a better alternative, and most other courts have agreed.   read more

By reducing the case to whether or not O’Connor had been “hired,” the Court also reduced the entire employment relationship to a question of money: “Where no financial benefit is obtained by the purported employee from the employer, no ‘plausible’ employment relationship of any sort can be said to exist.” The Court did not explain why the promised educational benefits of the internship were not sufficient to serve as O’Connor’s remuneration.   read more