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

Stumpf-Biro said the cost of American medical care is a big reason, “but the main driving factor is quality and a common background.” Michael Shopenn went to Belgium in 2007 for hip replacement surgery. If he elected to have the surgery in the U.S., the cost would have approached $100,000. But in Belgium he paid only $13,660, which included all medicine, doctors’ fees and round-trip airfare.   read more

The DEA requires police who receive the agency’s help to cover up the fact that they were given the tips—and not even tell defense lawyers, prosecutors and judges that their investigations began with the DEA. Also, Reuters obtained DEA documents showing that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail in order to conceal the agency’s involvement in the arrests.   read more

Adding to the agencies’ frustration is the fact that the NSA’s stonewalling flies in the face of a 2008 executive order modification intended to facilitate NSA’s sharing of surveillance data with other agencies that submitted requests deemed “relevant” to its own investigations. The NSA also has been less than forthcoming with lawmakers about the agency’s work.   read more

Although the BND and NSA have been working hand-in-hand—with American agents providing German agents with training as well as its secret surveillance technology—the issue as to whether it is Germany or the U.S. that is the primary director of this intelligence gathering remains murky. The BND took over NSA-operated surveillance sites controlled by the BND on German soil and has been passing along its collected data to the NSA.   read more

William Lietzau, who is stepping down as the Pentagon’s deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs, told the British newspaper The Daily Mail that Guantánamo should never have been created. He added that the detainees should have been legally designated as prisoners of war and held in Afghanistan, or charged with crimes and taken to U.S. federal prisons. Lietzau also recommended that Obama announce that the war with al-Qaeda is over in order to shutter Guantánamo.   read more

Of the $586,000 in contributions, the largest amount went to the Democratic National Committee, which received more than $245,000 in “dead money.” In second place, the Libertarian Party received $163,200, followed by the Green Party ($96,329), the Obama Victory Fund ($31,203) and the National Committee for Effective Congress ($25,000), a pro-Democrat PAC.   read more

The children are forbidden to utter certain “illegal words”—forever. In court, James Swett, representing Range Resources, made it clear that the gag order applied to the whole family, not just the parents, and that his client intended to enforce the gag order. Jessie Allen, an assistant professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that applying the non-disclosure agreement to kids was “strange” and “over the top.”   read more

Cell phone “information is, by and large, of a highly personal nature: photographs, videos, written and audio messages (text, email and voicemail), contacts, calendar appointments, web search and browsing history, purchases and financial and medical records.” Stahl also wrote: “It is the kind of information one would previously have stored in one’s home,” and accessing that by police has historically involved getting a warrant first.   read more

“One by one, the tools and attitudes of the war on terror, of a world in which the “gloves” are eternally off, have come home,” Van Buren wrote. “The comic strip character Pogo’s classic warning—“We have met the enemy and he is us”—seems ever less like a metaphor. According to the government, increasingly we are now indeed their enemy.”   read more

Up until about a decade ago, the FBI didn’t even bother to keep track what crimes its informants were committing. But the bureau had to change its ways after it was revealed that FBI agents allowed Boston mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger to run his illegal operations in exchange for information about the Mafia.   read more

The U.S. still holds 67 non-Afghan detainees at the facility. The question now is what to do with these individuals, most of whom are from Pakistan and deemed too dangerous to release by the administration. This despite the fact that informal military review boards cleared many of them, the newspaper reported. None of them have been put on trial. Unlike the prisoners at Guantánamo, those at Bagram do not have habeas corpus rights.   read more

Inflating the credit-worthiness of dicey Wall Street financial securities was a winning strategy for the nation’s top ratings agencies before the financial collapse of 2008 put a crimp in their style. But despite multiple multi-billion-dollar lawsuits filed by the federal government and more than a dozen states, Standard & Poor’s is revisiting those discredited practices, according to a study commissioned by the New York Times.   read more

• In 2011, Thomas and Scalia were the main speakers at a fundraiser for the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group with strong ties to Republican politics. • In 2010, both attended secretive political events sponsored by Koch Industries intended “to review strategies for combating the multitude of public policies that threaten to destroy America as we know it,” just months after they voted in the landmark Citizens United case to allow corporate money to flood politics.   read more

The judge cited a friend-of-the-court submission from Senator Durbin about the true meaning of the law—along with a footnote to Strunk & White’s Elements of Style on how to use basic English—to castigate the board for its “blatant act of policymaking that runs counter to Congress’s will.”   read more

Feinstein's proposal defines journalists as those who earn salaries regardless of their qualifications. Thus, under Feinstein’s bill, if Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh does volunteer work for WikiLeaks, he would not be a journalist, but if Fox News pays Sean Hannity to be on TV, he is.   read more

Until recently, chemical and other related industries opposed federal laws governing their products, but have changed their tune since individual states have become more aggressive in overseeing their behavior. Conservative arguments about states’ rights trumping federal authority have morphed into an argument that allowing individual states to set policy preempts the authority of other states by pressuring industries to change on a national scale.   read more