Trump ordered that the term Homo sapiens be changed to Hetero sapiens. In history books and on websites, the airplane from which the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima will no longer be identified as the Enola Gay, but rather the Enola Straight. Trump also ordered billionaire Mark Cuban, who supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, to change his name to Mark American. If he does not do so, he will be charged with terrorism.   read more

Car salesman Khaled el-Masri, 49, was abducted on December 31, 2003, by Macedonian authorities after a CIA analyst confused him with an al-Qaeda operative possessing a similar name. He was turned over to the CIA and “severely beaten, sodomized, shackled and hooded,” according to the court’s ruling. Masri was transferred to Afghanistan, where he spent more than four months in prison before the CIA agents realized their mistake.   read more

Broadway has not given up. Col. Jeffrey Sanborn, the garrison commander at Ft. Bragg, has agreed to meet with her soon to address the situation. Given that at least one military spouses club—the Goodfellow Combines Spouses’ Club at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas,—already welcomes gay spouses, the question is whether Col. Sanborn will order club President Mary Ring to cease discriminating against gay spouses.   read more

Obama now has 120 days to submit a list of Russian officials his administration deems guilty of human rights violations. However, a clause in the new law allows the president to keep the names secret by invoking “the national security interests of the United States.”   read more

Television commercials must now air at the same volume level as TV programs, under a new federal law that’s finally gone into effect. Representative Anna Eshoo (D-California), who first introduced the bill in 2008, told the media this week that the change “has been a top consumer complaint for decades. I never dreamed that this would strike the chord that it did with the American public.”   read more

Jack McCullough, 73, was convicted of kidnapping and murdering seven-year-old Maria Ridulph in Sycamore, Illinois. She went missing on December 3, 1957, and her body was found in a field five months later. The long unsolved crime haunted the small town, where residents compared the impact of Ridulph’s death to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.   read more

Miller has served most of his 25 years at the IRS, an agency in the Treasury Department, in its Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division (TE/GE). From April to September 2009, Miller served as commissioner of the Large Business and Mid-Size Business Division, leaving that post when he was named deputy commissioner for Services and Enforcement.   read more

The Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense and the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked the military judge, Colonel James Pohl, to censor any statements from the detainees going on trial that reveal how they were tortured or abused by the U.S. Pohl agreed with the agencies that classified information should not be disclosed during the proceedings, including any details about the use of interrogation techniques on the defendants.   read more

The only state law in the U.S. banning the possession of guns in public has been overturned by a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court. The Seventh Circuit panel voted 2-1 to throw out an Illinois statute that prohibits citizens from carrying firearms outside the home. In a dissent that was longer than the majority opinion, Judge Ann Claire Williams argued that it was the right of the state of Illinois to make its own laws regarding controlling guns to combat crime.   read more

In the Northeast, more than half of the region’s 103 ski resorts will offer less than 100 days of skiing by 2039, according to an upcoming study by Daniel Scott, director of the Interdisciplinary Center on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. Some states, such as Connecticut and Massachusetts, may lose all of their ski resorts by then, while New Hampshire could lose more than half.   read more

In Maine, 42% of those shot by police since 2000—and 58% of people who died from their wounds—were mentally ill. The Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram noted that the Justice Department does not keep track of police shootings that involve the mentally ill. Nor does the Federal Bureau of Investigation quantify police shootings that turn out to be “unjustified.”   read more

Some detained immigrants who have no criminal records can spend weeks, if not months or years, in jails with no access to due process and sometimes little opportunity to communicate with relatives or others trying to help them. Meanwhile, 8,500 criminals—including 201 murderers—were released by ICE into U.S. cities during the past four years because their native countries refused to accept them back.   read more

. The editorial staff of The New York Times observed that “It boggles the mind that a bank could launder money as HSBC did without anyone in a position of authority making culpable decisions. Clearly, the government has bought into the notion that too big to fail is too big to jail. When prosecutors choose not to prosecute to the full extent of the law in a case as egregious as this, the law itself is diminished.”   read more

When asked to choose between higher taxes and cutting entitlement programs, 35% of respondents to the new United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll said they’re more worried about reductions to Social Security and Medicare. Only 27% said they were more concerned with their tax bill going up. Also, only 13% expressed worry over a budget deal resulting in the government spending too much money in the future.   read more

A new report from the Center for American Progress disputes this assumption. It says about 164,000 seniors who lost their Medicare eligibility may not have Obamacare to fall back on if they live in the 10 states whose governors have declared they will opt out of the Medicaid expansion called for by the president’s law.   read more

Information collected by the apps includes phone numbers, precise locations and unique serial codes of a mobile device, which are then transmitted to app developers, advertising networks or other companies, according to the FTC report. Regulators warned that the information could be used to locate or contact children or track their activities across different apps without their parents’ knowledge or consent.   read more

With 54 nations ranked, American fourth-graders ranked 11th in math and 7th in science, while eighth-graders were 9th in math and 10th in science. Also, only 7% of US students reached the advanced level in eighth-grade math, compared to 48% of eighth graders in Singapore and 47% of eighth graders in South Korea.   read more