President Donald Trump invited the Dodgers to the White House. Many of their fans feared that the team, by accepting, would humiliate themselves and betray the team’s large Latino, Asian and African-American fan base. Dodgers controlling owner Mark Walter, along with co-owner Magic Johnson, have proposed a solution. Trump has promised that if he can keep the championship trophy, the Commissioner’s Trophy, he will end all seizures and deportations of immigrants.   read more

Mahlangu was elected to South Africa’s parliament in 1994. He was appointed deputy chairman of the National Council of Provinces, the upper house in South Africa’s legislature and became chairman in 2005. In his official biographies, Mahlangu has claimed that he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from University of Fairfax in 1995, but this was actually an unaccredited diploma mill.   read more

Washington agreed to pay $1.9 million for work to mitigate the damage caused to the coral reef. But an environmental group claims it will cost between $17 million and $27 million. "The said financial compensation is not enough to...absolve the U.S. Navy for the crime [it committed] in Tubbataha. The U.S. Navy not only incurred considerable damage to our world heritage site, they also clearly violated our Philippine sovereignty and laws,” said Clemente Bautista.   read more

The study showed that from 1987 to 2014, students in their senior year of high school who said they partied six hours or more per week declined from 34.5% to 8.6%. The report says 2014 incoming students’ self-rated emotional health dropped to 50.7%, its lowest level ever, a drop of 2.3% from the freshmen class of 2013. The number of students admitting to “frequently” feeling depressed also went up by 9.5%, which was 3.4% higher than in 2009.   read more

Using federal documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, TRAC discovered that immigration courts under the Obama administration adopted rules last year that pushed cases involving women with children to the head of the line. TRAC’s analysis of 26,342 adults-with-children cases found that fewer than 30% of the families were able to find a lawyer to help them, and those immigrants were allowed to stay in the United States only 26.3% of the time.   read more

Pérez took elective office himself in 2002 as a senator from the Dominican Republic’s national district, serving in that office for four years. In 2007 he was made director of his country’s Civil Aviation Institute and was later caught up in a controversy for overspending on a headquarters building for his agency. Pérez twice sought the PLD nomination for president, in 2008 and 2012, but failed to get it both times.   read more

“Hicks was the first prisoner to be convicted by a Guantánamo military commission, by virtue of his guilty plea, and he’s now the first to have his conviction vacated,” said McClatchy. “I was subjected to five and a half years of physical and psychological torture that I will now live with always,” said Hicks. He claims to have been subjected to waterboarding, beatings, and forced drugging. Threatened with being sent to Egypt to be tortured, he agreed to the condition for release—plead guilty.   read more

The apples will now be sold in stores—without any labeling informing consumers that the apples’ DNA has been altered. The USDA decided to commercialize them despite receiving 73,000 comments in opposition. Apple industry officials and food-safety advocates criticized the decision. Some believe it could hurt the “wholesome image of the fruit that reputedly ‘keeps the doctor away,’” as well as damage exporting of apples to countries that reject genetically modified foods.   read more

L.A. Police Chief Charlie Beck has called on toy-gun makers to stop producing weapons that closely resemble deadly firearms that an officer can easily mistake for a threat. Slate's Peters says that in some cases the police officers involved in the shootings may be responsible for the deaths: “Jamar Nicholson was shot in the back. He wasn’t even holding the fake gun. Tamir Rice wasn’t pointing a gun at Officer Timothy Loehmann when Loehmann shot and killed him."   read more

State Attorney Alvarez said that “terrifying” threats and false evidence were fabricated by Protess’s students at his direction. Private investigator Ciolino has admitted that a videotape was made featuring an actor posing as a witness who claimed to have seen Simon commit the murders. Additionally, Simon’s estranged wife was persuaded to falsely testify that she witnessed the killings. All of this was used against Simon to coerce him into confessing to the crime, he claims.   read more

Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who often is mentioned as a potential Republican candidate for president, frequently discusses his evangelical faith in public and has gone so far as to imply that he talks to God. But when asked to show proof of that, his office said it could not provide it. “While it's on the record that the governor is communicating with higher powers like billionaire and political kingmaker Sheldon Adelson, that's where the paper trail ends,” wrote the Foundation.   read more

This year’s five Oscar nominees for Best Animated Feature have something unusual in common: in none of them is the young protagonist raised by his or her birth mother. The target audience for all of the nominees (even the more sophisticated Princess Kaguya) is children.   read more

With the encouragement of U.S. defense contractors, the Obama administration has, for the first time, decided to allow the export of armed drones to countries other than the United Kingdom. The foreign governments next in line to acquire weaponized unmanned aerial vehicles weren't identified. But it was reported that “allied nations from Italy to Turkey to the Persian Gulf region” have wanted to get their hands on drones that can attack targets.   read more

If the previous six years is any indication, it is unlikely any executives of financial institutions will be charged. The Obama administration has consistently opted for civil, not criminal, punishment of major banks for their alleged wrongdoing. Huge settlements have been reached between Holder’s department and Wall Street firms but there have been no admissions of guilt or executives facing criminal charges. Holder said that his prosecutors haven’t found any smoking guns.   read more

Burger King and Canadian doughnut company Tim Hortons have merged. The upshot for Burger King is it is no longer a U.S.-based business. By renouncing its U.S. citizenship, Burger King stands to avoid paying between $400 million and $1.2 billion in U.S. taxes over the next four years. But moving to Canada won’t mean it is pulling its lucrative franchises from the U.S., where it currently has 7,155 restaurants. It will still make more than $8 billion annually in sales from American consumers.   read more

A breakthrough in treating hepatitis C costs almost 300 times more in the U.S. than it does in India, a disparity made all the more outrageous by the fact that the U.S. government helped fund the research for the drug. The cost to produce it is in the range of $68 to $136. “In other words, the U.S. price-cost markup is roughly 1,000-to-1!” said Jeffrey Sachs. Sovaldi was developed with grants from the National Institutes of Health and support from the Department of Veterans Affairs.   read more

The incidents have reminded some of Ferguson, Missouri, last summer, when a white officer shot and killed an unarmed African American, Michael Brown. However in the Pasco case, a special investigative unit, the county coroner and the FBI are looking into the shooting. Pasco’s population is 56% Hispanic, but only 14 of the 68 officers are Hispanic. The city council has one Latino member, and the five-member school board has no Latinos.   read more