Trump said he would send the National Guard to Toronto and impose 50% tariffs on all Los Angeles products. AllGov reporter Sidney Finster suggested that perhaps Trump had confused the two cities. Because Toronto is in Canada, not the United States, Trump can’t send the National Guard there. And because Los Angeles is in the United States, Trump can’t impose tariffs on a U.S. city. Trump defended his position by saying, “I’m always right.”   read more

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied 400 healthy people and did not find a single person whose body was resistant to aspirin. But they did find that the coating on the pills that is meant to help protect the stomach might interfere with the body’s ability to absorb the aspirin.   read more

“Still, it is important to note that the 33% of all employed Americans preferring to work for government is nearly double the 17% who currently do work for government,” according to Lydia Saad at Gallup.   read more

Following this year’s election, Public Policy Polling (PPP) asked voters if the controversial group ACORN stole the election from Mitt Romney. Among Republicans, 49% said “yes.” What’s most remarkable about this opinion is that ACORN, which stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, filed for bankruptcy and disbanded in 2010 after GOP lawmakers in the U.S. House voted to end all federal support for the group.   read more

A new KIDS COUNT® report (pdf) from The Annie E. Casey Foundation says youth employment is at its lowest level since World War II, with nearly 6.5 million teenagers and young adults unemployed and not in school. Nationwide, only 26% of Americans aged 16 to 19 are employed; while 61% aged 20 to 24 have jobs.   read more

The Navy is developing an underwater drone shaped like a torpedo that can do many of the same tasks performed by dolphins. Once available, the drones can be built in much less time that it takes to train mammals, about seven years. By 2017, many of the Navy’s 80 dolphins will be reassigned to other jobs. Sea lion jobs are safe for now.   read more

The judge insisted the First Amendment ensures the right of priests and ministers to perform marriages. If CFI wants to marry people, it must register itself as a religious organization, according to Barker’s ruling. “If we would declare ourselves a religion, then we could do it,” Reba Boyd Wooden, executive director for the Indiana CFI chapter, told the Indianapolis Star. “But we’re very adamant we’re not a religion.”   read more

The Yale team says 154 Vietnam-era veterans petitioned the U.S. Army to upgrade discharges because of PTSD from 2003 to 2012, but that only two were successful. The Army Board of Corrections for Military Records, meanwhile, has been more generous in granting upgrades, at a rate of nearly 50%, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyers. They also claim that more than 250,000 Vietnam vets were discharged under other-than-honorable conditions, and that thousands of those probably had PTSD.   read more

The 2012 School Violence Prevention Act, which took effect December 1, makes it a misdemeanor for students to create false profiles for teachers, sign them up for Internet porn or post their images and private information on the Web. The law also prohibits any statement, “whether true or false,” which might provoke a third party to harass a teacher or administrator.   read more

The continuing drought of 2012 may soon prevent barge traffic from navigating the critical 180-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between the confluences of the Missouri River near St. Louis and the Ohio River at Cairo, Ill., along which river depth is 15 to 20 feet less than normal. At the same time, oil companies conducting fracking operations in North Dakota are demanding immense quantities of Missouri River water be diverted to them, further threatening levels on the Mississippi.   read more

In 35 years of handing out awards to singers, musicians and actors, the center has recognized only one Latino American: actress Chita Rivera in 2002. Rivera’s father was Puerto Rican. Advocates have repeatedly called upon the Kennedy Center to recognize more Hispanics, citing many examples of deserving artists: Anthony Quinn, Celia Cruz, Desi Arnaz, Rita Moreno, Edward James Olmos, Joan Baez, Carlos Santana and many others.   read more

Today, only about 20% of young adults will reach a higher level of education than their parents, a rate that’s among the lowest rates in the developed world, according to the OECD. Schleicher says that a major problem in the U.S. is that the skyrocketing cost of going to college has created a barrier for many young Americans who do not come from wealthy families.   read more

For many of these women, they are caught in the middle of a Catch 22 mess: they don’t qualify for mortgage modifications unless their name is on the loan, but many lenders won’t add them to the note until they pay any amounts that are past due. As a result, many women 50 and older are losing their homes because they are outliving their husbands while being unable to cope with pension cuts and rising medical expenses.   read more

The case studies include 17 Louisiana cows that died of respiratory failure after an hour’s exposure to spilled fracking fluid; 70 Pennsylvania cows that died after 140 of them were exposed to fracking wastewater from an impoundment breach; and a Pennsylvania herd whose pregnant cows had a 50% rate of stillborn calves after grazing in a pasture contaminated by fracking chemicals from an overflowing waste pit.   read more

Under Arizona law even the two students found with a joints’ worth of pot face possible prison time because they were apprehended on school grounds. They are exactly the kind of low risk, minimum to medium security prisoners off of which CCA makes much of its profits. This constitutes a clear conflict of interest   read more

, “militant leaders” of anti-U.S. groups like the Pakistani Taliban, the Afghan Taliban, or al-Qaeda, constituted only about 30% of those killed by drones under the Bush administration, and only 13% under Obama. The rest are local insurgents, as in Pakistan, where for two years most strikes have targeted militants fighting the Pakistani government or American troops in Afghanistan   read more

Since May 2011, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has handed out more than $3.6 billion to 74,317 medical professionals and 1,333 hospitals who agreed to switch from paper to electronic files. But the agency hasn’t bothered to verify that doctors and hospitals are meeting the required quality goals, according to a report by the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general (IG).   read more