Trump announced that from now on the NFL will be known as the NTL: The National Trump League. The Super Bowl will be renamed the Trump Bowl, and professional players must be called Trumpball Players. Anyone, on any level, who refuses to comply with Trump’s orders will be arrested and charged with being a threat to national security.   read more

The 2004 law required that DNA be collected from anyone arrested on suspicion of committing a felony and from some convicted of certain misdemeanors. No charges need to be filed. No conviction needs to be obtained. Lily Haskell, one of the people challenging the law, was arrested at an anti-war demonstration. She was released without any charges being filed, but was compelled to give a DNA sample while in custody.   read more

Nearly three months after the U.S. government sued a reluctant JPMorgan Chase & Co. for documents during an investigation of allegations that it had manipulated California energy prices, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is threatening to suspend its energy trading unit from the state market. JPMorgan denied manipulating the market and said it had committed an “inadvertent factual error in papers related to discovery and promptly informed the commission of this mistake.”   read more

What Nixon lacked in affinity for nature, he made up for in practical deal-making that put him in a position to compromise with Democrats. Under his watch, the government created the Environmental Protection Agency and adopted numerous landmark pieces of legislation, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, and the Endangered Species Act.   read more

Consistent with the Obama administration’s policy of focusing deportation policy on those with prior criminal records, in 2011 the U.S. expelled a record 188,000 immigrants with criminal records, 55% of all those returned without a removal order. The majority of these were charged with drug-related offenses, criminal traffic offenses (such as hit-and-run and driving under the influence) and immigration violations.   read more

It is true that prisoners have used dental floss to escape, although it is rare. In 1994, Robert Dale Shepard made an 18-foot rope out of floss and then used it to scale the walls of a West Virginia prison. In 2002, Scott Brimble used dental floss and toothpaste to weaken wire mesh surrounding the exercise yard at Okanogan County Jail in Washington and then pried open enough of an opening to slip through.   read more

Under a controversial plan proposed by President José Mujica, Uruguay would create a state monopoly over the production and sale of marijuana, making it the first government in the world to sell the drug directly to citizens. Supporters say the radical move would reduce drug-related crime, decrease health risks among users and be more effective than the U.S.-touted war on drugs, which is wearing thin in countries other than the United States.   read more

The Department of Defense has lifted a 26-year-old ban on New Zealand warships entering U.S. bases. The prohibition came in response to a New Zealand law adopted in the 1986 that denied the docking of any American warship carrying nuclear weapons. New Zealand has sent troops to support the U.S. war in Afghanistan, and ten New Zealand soldiers have been killed there, including five last month.   read more

President Obama has nominated an international development expert to be the next ambassador to the central African nation of Burundi, one of the world’s poorest countries. Dawn M. Liberi, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, has specialized in sub-Saharan Africa for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), although she the past few years she has been posted to the hot spots of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.   read more

Nearly half (48%) of all mail is now of the junk variety. With Americans disposing much of it into the garbage, and thus landfills and recycling centers, local governments are trying to prevent the Postal Service from delivering unwanted mail. Meanwhile, the newspaper industry is also opposing the Postal Service’s push to lower the cost of sending junk mail…because it will mean less junk advertising fliers and inserts in Sunday papers and a potential loss of $1 billion a year in revenue.   read more

Among the other Ig Nobel prizes this year were awards for a joint Dutch-American study that discovered that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends; a French paper that advised doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode; and a Dutch study titled “Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation.”   read more

In January 2008, Negodić was appointed head of Bosnia’s mission to the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. During her tenure, Bosnia signed the Stabilization and Association Agreement with the EU on June 16, 2008, which set Bosnia on the road toward EU membership. She returned to London in December 2008 to serve as ambassador to the UK until 2012.   read more

In early 2010, Razāns was nominated to be foreign minister, but withdrew his name in April, the day before Latvia’s parliament was set to approve the appointment, citing “personal family problems.” It was rumored that Latvian President Valdim Zatlers objected to his nomination. Instead, Razāns served as political director and undersecretary of state at the Foreign Affairs Ministry from February 2010 to July 2012.   read more

Citing cost concerns, Senate Republicans this week blocked legislation designed to create a Veterans Job Corps that would have spent $1 billion over five years to put unemployed veterans back to work. The Veterans Job Corps Act of 2012, loosely based on the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, would have put ex-soldiers to work preserving and restoring federal, state and local lands and find them jobs in firefighting and police work.   read more

The Americans, 22 Central Intelligence Agency spies and one Air Force officer (Lt. Col. Joseph Romano), were convicted last year of helping abduct Abu Omar (Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr) from Milan in February 2003. The cleric was transferred to U.S. military bases in Italy and Germany and eventually shipped to Egypt, where he says he was tortured.   read more

Richard H. Perkins, a reliability and risk engineer with the NRC’s division of risk analysis, said superiors blacked out critical portions of a report he helped author that detailed which nuclear plants face the risk of flooding from swollen rivers or reservoirs. Perkins’ assertions were backed up by another anonymous NRC risk engineer who warned that the three reactors at the Oconee Nuclear Station near Seneca, South Carolina, could face a Fukushima-like episode should a nearby dam fail.   read more

Hicks and others noticed that a safety relief valve had lifted, causing a leakage of coolant. Following federal regulations, he says he ordered the reactor shut down to avoid an accident similar to the 1979 Three Mile Island incident in Middletown, Pennsylvania. Hicks reported what he had done to his superiors, including FPL executive vice president Manoochehr Nazar, who ordered Hicks to restart the reactor. Hicks refused.   read more