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

Ordinarily, GE crops come under federal regulation as long as they contain genetic material from “plant pests”—the beings that the gene manipulation are designed to resist. But Scotts decided to use DNA from other plants in creating the new kind of Kentucky bluegrass, along with other techniques that avoided triggering the USDA to step in and require testing, as well as its approval, before the grass could be sold to consumers.   read more

Last year, Americans holding a college degree made on average 98% more per hour than those who skipped post-secondary education, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington. That gap was the largest ever recorded. But the difference between the college grads and the high school grads has been significant for some time. In the 1980s, it was 64%. By the 1990s, it was up to 85%. And by last decade it had reached 89%.   read more

To date, 154 of the approximately 250 machines owned by TSA have been sold to state and local prisons, including those in Iowa, Virginia and Louisiana, where inmates and their visitors aren’t in a position to complain about privacy rights. TSA won’t say how much of its money has been reclaimed through the sales. But the Los Angeles Times reported that “several law enforcement agencies paid only a fraction of the original cost under a federal surplus program.”   read more

While on one hand the federal government goes after companies employing undocumented immigrants, it doesn’t have a problem using some of these same people to fill jobs in its detention centers. These detainees perform a wide variety of tasks at the detention facilities, from preparing and serving food to cleaning floors. Correction officials claim the work is voluntary. However, many have complained that they were coerced into working during their detentions.   read more

The Department of Energy, which oversees all nuclear weapons facilities and operations, says some of the containers located half a mile underground may have been packaged improperly before being delivered to the WIPP for storage. And by improperly packaged, they mean someone used the “wrong” kitty litter during the process. Mineral-based cat box filler is used to absorb moisture and stabilize materials inside containers of nuclear waste before they’re sealed.   read more

GOP lawmakers, by a vote of 231-192, pushed through an amendment that prevents the Department of Defense from spending money on matters related to climate change, or using funds on alternative sources of energy. The national security implications of climate change include future flooding in areas of key military bases and growing overseas threats created by weather-related famine.   read more

The changes are never publicized or made clear, leaving judges and academics with no choice but to put the old and new versions side-by-side to determine what was altered. Adam Liptak at The New York Times says the edits “have not reversed decisions outright, but they have withdrawn conclusions on significant points of law.” Nevertheless, what the justices are doing amounts to changing the law, with most people being unaware of it.   read more

The CIA refused to release the Volume V draft. The majority opinion stated “that a draft of an agency’s official history is pre-decisional and deliberative, and thus protected under the deliberative process privilege.” Judge Brett Kavanaugh did concede that “there may be no final agency document because a draft died on the vine.” That means the CIA could sit on the document indefinitely as long as it never finalizes the draft report.   read more

Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives claim they have addressed the problems of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) notorious bulk collection of data, made so famous last year by whistleblower Edward Snowden. But the legislation adopted to end this controversial practice contains huge loopholes that could allow the NSA to keep vacuuming up large amounts of Americans’ communications records, all with the blessing of the Obama administration.   read more

Demonstrating they value costly weapons programs—and the jobs they provide back home in their districts—more than making tough economic choices, lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly agreed to adopt a new Pentagon spending plan that rejected multimillion-dollar savings provided by defense officials.   read more

The background check industry is unregulated in the United States. A report (pdf) by the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) shows that screening companies often mismatch people with records, fail to report crucial information about a case (such as when someone is arrested but found not guilty), access information that was supposed to be expunged from records and other errors.   read more

NSA documents show that the program, called SOMALGET, is in use in the Bahamas to locate “international narcotics traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers,” according to The Intercept. Washington doesn’t even pretend there’s a terror-related reason for the collection. “There is little to no threat facing Americans from domestic (Bahamian) terrorism, war, or civil unrest,” according to a 2013 State Department report.   read more

In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Taylor to be coordinator for counterterrorism for the Department of State, holding the rank of ambassador in the post. During the time he was in that post, he contradicted the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had links to Mohamed Atta, the suspected ringleader in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.   read more

The documents show monitoring in 2011 and 2012 by law enforcement agencies around the country, reporting on religious meetings, Christmas caroling and other events. The Boston fusion center was among the most active. It passed along information about a lecture by Noam Chomsky, flash mobs protesting a bank’s lending practices and notably, a yoga class. Much of the information was acquired through social media channels.   read more

• Sixty-one percent of drone strikes in Pakistan targeted domestic buildings, with at least 132 houses destroyed, in more than 380 strikes. • At least 222 civilians are estimated to be among the 1,500 or more people killed in attacks on such buildings. • The time of an attack affects how many people—and how many civilians—are likely to die. Strikes that took place in the evening, when families are likely to be at home, were particularly deadly.   read more

The largest single contributor to Foxx’s campaign is Corinthian Colleges, based in Santa Ana, California. Corinthian is under investigation by California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who has said the company has engaged in “deceptive and false advertisements and aggressive marketing campaigns that misrepresented job placement rates and school programs.” Seventeen other states are investigating the school for various violations. The federal government is also investigating Corinthian.   read more