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

Now the U.S. is on a tight deadline to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, and bringing home all 11,000 MRAPs from the conflict would not be cost effective, military experts say. Leaving them with the Afghan military also appears out of the question, due to concerns that the Afghans wouldn’t be able to maintain them. So, it’s on to the scrap yard. About 2,000 of the vehicles will be shredded and their metal sold for pennies on the pound on the Afghan scrap market.   read more

Eight Americans were selected from 6,100 candidates, the second largest pool of applicants in NASA’s history. A mix of scientists and military pilots, the group of four men and four women will begin training for future space missions that may include trips to an asteroid and Mars.   read more

Remaining silent during questioning by police can be used against a person in a court of law, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in a startling reinterpretation of Fifth Amendment rights. A narrow majority ruled 5-to-4 in Salinas v. Texas that it was permissible for authorities to present at Genovevo Salinas’ trial that he refused to answer the police’s questions about a fatal shooting because Salinas had already answered some questions prior to being arrested and read his Miranda rights.   read more

The new law applies only to state and local law enforcement. Federal law enforcement agencies are only required to get a warrant to access recent emails before they are opened by the recipient. No such provision in federal law prevents the FBI from reading emails once they have been opened or have remained unopened for 180 days. The Texas initiative requires Texas law enforcement officials to get a court warrant to gain access to emails, no matter how old they are.   read more

Terrance Brown, charged with the attempted robbery of armored cars that culminated in the murder of a Brink’s armored truck messenger in October 2010, has asked a federal judge to ask the government about telephone records that are pertinent to the case. Brown’s legal defense tried to compel prosecutors to turn over the records. But they claimed the phone company, MetroPCS, no longer had them. Judge Robin Rosenbaum ordered the U.S. Department of Justice to respond to Brown’s inquiry.   read more

It is unclear how many of these government requests were terrorist-related and how many were unrelated to national security. Whatever figures these companies are ultimately allowed to release, they are likely to be inexact or lower than the actual figures. The reason is that the government gives itself permission to add more names and search data under the umbrella of every FISA request it makes, for up to a year after the initial request.   read more

The new law, if adopted, would produce enough new revenues through taxes paid by immigrants-turned-citizens to reduce the deficit by $197 billion during the first 10 years. The savings would be even greater in the next decade, the CBO said. From 2024 to 2033, the deficit would shrink by $700 billion. During the latter time frame, government spending would increase by $262 billion, primarily due to refundable tax credits and health insurance subsidies kicking in.   read more

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected Arizona’s law requiring residents to prove their citizenship before registering to vote. The ruling, which had only two dissents (Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito), represented the second time that the Supreme Court has overturned an Arizona law targeting illegal immigrants. In both cases, the court said the state had entered legal territory where the federal government and its law are dominant.   read more

A total of 37 states now use facial-recognition technology as part of their driver’s-license registries—of which 26 permit local, state, or federal law enforcement agencies to search or request searches of photo databases to assist with criminal matters. In most cases, there was little public notice of this expanded, police use of driver’s license photos of U.S. citizens who are not under suspicion for any crime.   read more

The FTC, which estimates that the pay-for-delay deals cost American consumers $3.5 billion per year in higher drug prices, announced that it plans to proceed with litigation, now that it has gotten a green light from the Supreme Court. So which side really came out ahead as a result of this ruling? Jeffery Cross, an antitrust expert with Freeborn & Peters LLP, told Reuters that that answer was simple: “The winners here are the trial lawyers.”   read more

Another Guardian survey question revealed that 56% believe Congress has not done enough to keep watch over the NSA. The Guardian poll also showed that 58% are worried about private contractors handling secret intelligence for the government. Additionally, 59% of both Democrats and Republicans said that the government needs to be more transparent about its data collection activities.   read more

The British targeted the finance minister and more than a dozen delegates from Turkey in an attempt to assess their position on a deal “to coordinate the global economic recovery to avoid the recession becoming a depression,” according to one of the documents. The latest disclosure surfaced just as representatives of the Group of 8 industrialized nations prepared to meet in Northern Ireland. Among those attending the meeting are some leaders who were spied on in 2009.   read more

Simone Gordon, who worked at the bank from 2007 until early 2012 as a senior collector, told ProPublica that she and other workers “were told to lie to customers and claim that Bank of America had not received documents it had requested.” “We were told that admitting that the Bank received documents ‘would open a can of worms,’” she added. Bank employees “who placed ten or more accounts into foreclosure in a given month received a $500 bonus.”   read more

The first explosion occurred on June 13 at a chemical plant in Geismar owned by Williams Cos. Inc. that resulted in two deaths and dozens of injuries. It is not yet known what caused the accident. The plant produces ethylene and propylene. The very next day an explosion at a chemical plant just a few miles away in Donaldsonville, killed one worker and injured eight others.   read more

Take Miami, Florida, for example. It has a human population of about 409,000. But a factory farm with 2,500 cows can equal Miami’s production of “fertilizer.” Even more concerning is that the waste from really large factory farms, what the government calls “concentrated animal feeding operations” (CAFOs), is not treated. It simply gets dumped—either onto fields as fertilizer or stored in surface ponds that can grow into small lakes.   read more

A study was convened by the Over-Criminalization Task Force, which discovered the criminal code had grown by 500 new statutes in about 10 years. It now includes about 4,500 crimes. Some of the laws have wound up punishing Americans for actions not considered a serious offense, such as a child who was fined $535 under the migratory bird law for saving a woodpecker from her family’s cat. After a public outcry, the fine was cancelled.   read more