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

A landfill in Wayne County, near Detroit, is one of the few places in the eastern United States with a license to take such waste. As such, drillers and other producers of radioactive materials from nearby states with tougher environmental laws send their waste there.   read more

In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Among its provisions was the order that “the Attorney General shall, through appropriate means, acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.” The Justice Department was also required to publish an annual report on the data collected. And…that’s pretty much the last anyone heard of that.   read more

UltraViolet says the ads aren’t political. They’re “designed to elevate issues like paycheck fairness, minimum wage increases, and paid family leave and to expose the ongoing attacks on women’s health and economic security,” Karin Roland of UltraViolet, told ThinkProgress. “The goal is to shame and pressure candidates with industries that rely on tourism to make them champions for these causes.”   read more

But many of the Americans with a database entry are in the system only because they were arrested, even though they were never charged or convicted of a crime. Records are often not updated to reflect that an individual was found not guilty or guilty of a minor offense, such as trespassing while exercising free speech rights during a demonstration.   read more

One big problem with the Lone Star State is its requirement of those seeking information to reveal who they are and to provide credit card information in order to access Texas’s corporate registry. In other words, Texas puts more emphasis on personal disclosure in the course of supposedly facilitating corporate disclosure.   read more

Sometimes even a six-figure salary isn’t enough. Ron Packard, who until early this year was CEO of charter school operator K12, made $4.1 million in 2013, according to Conniff. K12 has been accused by the state of Florida of attempting to falsify records, using unqualified teachers, and booking classes of more than 100 students.   read more

Some invoices billed the Army for employees working more than 24 hours a day and DynCorp also is said to have charged the Army for workers unqualified for the positions they were supposed to be filling. The earlier IG investigation showed the Army being billed for one employee working 1,208 hours over 12 days. That’s a lot of multi-tasking considering there are only 288 hours in 12 days.   read more

In Yemen, where a U.S. drone strike last year killed 12 members of a wedding party on December 12, 2013, families of those killed or injured collectively received more than $1 million. That’s more money than the U.S. gave to survivors of similar attacks in Afghanistan over an entire year. The disclosures about the Yemeni blood-money payouts also indicated that those targeted in the attack had nothing to do with terrorism, which the U.S. previously insisted.   read more

Although the population of Ferguson is 67% African-American, the mayor is a white Republican and five of the six members of the city council are white, as are 50 of Ferguson’s 53 police officers. One of the main reasons for this disparity is that the city holds its local elections separate from state and federal balloting. Residents vote for governor or president in even-numbered years, but Ferguson residents go to the polls to elect the mayor and city council in April of odd-numbered years.   read more

Regionally, organic foods rated the highest in the West (54%), followed by 47% in the Midwest, 43% in the South and 39% in the East. Half of urbanities say they try to eat organic foods, while 46% of those in the suburbs said the same thing. Only 37% of rural and small-town residents try to include organic foods in their diets.   read more

Humanitarian Outcomes says in its new report that there were 251 separate attacks in 30 nations last year involving 460 humanitarian workers. But about 75% of all these attacks occurred in just five countries: Afghanistan, Syria, South Sudan, Pakistan and Sudan. Afghanistan is by far the worst place for humanitarian missions, with 81 workers dying there in 2013.   read more

Producers of small wind turbines in the United States aren’t selling as many of their units to American operators, so they’ve shifted their sales efforts to foreign buyers. The move comes largely because Congress did not renew a $13 billion subsidy, the Wind Production Tax Credit (WPTC), designed to help the wind industry in the U.S.   read more

While serving in the Office of Legal Counsel, Barron and another lawyer, Marty Lederman, wrote the first of two memorandums that sought to rationalize how the administration could target and kill an American Islamic cleric, Anwar al-Aulaqi, in Yemen for his suspected ties to al-Qaeda. Their first attempt to explain how the Central Intelligence Agency could legally assassinate al-Aulaqi was only seven pages long.   read more

The plaintiffs claim the trouble started in April 2009, when then-White House counsel Gregory Craig informed Executive Branch operations that any FOIA requests that might have “White House equities” should go through his office. The term has never been defined, but some agencies are taking it to mean any document that mentions the White House.   read more

The U.S. Department of Justice contends that company officials were aware of illegal shipments from online pharmacies, but accepted them anyway, which if proven would make FedEx criminally liable. But now prosecutors have added money-laundering charges and the company could face a fine of $1.6 billion if found guilty on all counts.   read more

A big mistake in developing the program, according to Williams, was a lack of proper government oversight. The feds provided money for the program, while the states took care of licensing training programs. However, officials are prohibited from recommending schools to prospective students, which leaves unscrupulous colleges an opening to exploit those looking for a new career.   read more