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

the large majority of campaign contributions (64%) over the past year were provided by 0.16% of all American adults (or 1 out of 600). This conclusion was based on campaign checks of $200 or more given to federal candidates, PACs, and party committees. When the contribution level of $2,600 or more was used instead of $200 (the federal limit for each individual per election is $2,600), the overall adult percentage financing races got even tinier: .02%--one out of 5,000 adult Americans.   read more

Police in the Sunshine State and in Arizona have invested in Harris’ tracking equipment. But the equipment is technically on loan from Harris, so agencies must sign nondisclosure agreements that state they can use the spy technology only as long as they keep it a secret from outside parties, including the judicial system.   read more

ATF realized there was something wrong with the business in 2005, when agents conducted an audit and reported 2,396 guns, including assault rifles and handguns, were unaccounted for. Furthermore, agents suspected that Kesserling was involved in gun trafficking, as it sold 10 or more guns a year in two different years that wound up being used in crimes within three years of their sale.   read more

Some are suspicious that Wheeler, a former telecommunications executive and Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association lobbyist, will not do his utmost to protect consumers as the new rules are fashioned. The answer will come May 15, when the proposed new rules will be released.   read more

Bob and Lisa Parr of Decatur won a $3 million award in a Dallas County court after a six-person jury agreed that the plaintiffs were harmed by the fracking operations of Aruba Petroleum. The Parrs said the company’s drilling near their 40-acre ranch caused illnesses that afflicted them and their daughter, as well as pets and livestock, including asthma, nausea, nose bleeds, ear ringing and depression. They even had to abandon their home at times because of the troubles.   read more

The worst of the proposals from a human rights standpoint is one put forward by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California), the FISA Improvements Act. Her plan would codify the use of current bulk collection programs, would allow intelligence gatherers to query information without prior approval by the FISA Court and would permit the use of intelligence by law enforcement agencies.   read more

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) says that of the $4 billion allotted by the State Department from 2002 to 2013, 69.3% went to DynCorp. In terms of actual dollars, DynCorp took in $2.8 billion. Giving so much to one company might not have been a good idea, given DynCorp’s record. The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) notes the contractor’s “colorful history” includes instances of labor smuggling, overpayments, and botched construction.   read more

In 1999, California Governor Gray Davis (D) appointed Contreras-Sweet secretary of Business, Transportation and Housing. In that role, she managed 44,000 employees and a $14 billion budget. When Arnold Schwarzenegger took over the governor’s office in 2003 after the recall of Davis, Contreras-Sweet left public service and founded Fortius Holdings, a private equity and venture fund aimed at the Latino community.   read more

This comes even though the United States is still the world’s richest country. However, increasing income inequality in the U.S. has caused median incomes to drop even as average incomes increase because of huge gains at the high end of the scale. Poor people in the United States fare even worse, as they are far behind the median incomes of those living in Canada and much of Europe.   read more

Judge Rosemary M. Collyer ruled that, based on a 1979 decision by the Supreme Court, people have no expectation of privacy when dialing phone numbers. However, American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Patrick C. Toomey told The Washington Post that the 1979 case, Smith v. Maryland, involved the records of one criminal suspect collected over several days. “That case looked nothing like the NSA’s phone-records program," he said.   read more

While O’Brien was undergoing treatment, a state police investigator, trying to help O’Brien’s wife, Stephanie Cannon O’Brien, attempted to file disability retirement papers with the New York State and Local Retirement System from three different hospital fax machines. However, O’Brien died seven minutes before the papers—on the ninth attempt—were successfully received.   read more

Westphal served on Obama’s transition team for defense in 2008. Also that year, he worked with The New School University in New York. Obama made Westphal under secretary of the Army in 2009, where he served until recently. In that post, he was the Army’s chief management officer. Westphal, who speaks Spanish fluently, also had several missions to Latin American, working with the armies in several nations.   read more

Since taking his post in Washington, Cui has seemingly become immersed in American culture. He took his wife, Ni Peijun, to the Super Bowl last February and was photographed on the sidelines. In March 2014, he told a panel in Beijing “I have seen both seasons of ‘House of Cards,’ which I think embodies some of the characteristics and corruption that is present in American politics.”   read more

A small but expanding group of federal judges has thwarted efforts by law enforcement to have carte blanche to pry into the personal communications of suspects. These judges have made it clear that protecting constitutional rights is more important in some cases than helping police conduct broad searches into cell phone and email data. Facciola has characterized some law enforcement efforts to access entire contents of email accounts as “repugnant” to the U.S. Constitution.   read more

The class action lawsuit filed by the city targets the New York and Chicago stock exchanges, NASDAQ and many of the most powerful banks and investment firms in the country: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, and Charles Schwab, among others. The alleged fraud involving sophisticated high-frequency trading (HFT) firms resulted in the diversion of “billions of dollars annually from buyers and sellers of securities to themselves.”   read more

JPMorgan Chase recently notified customers who work in adult films that they must close all of their accounts with the bank by May 11. Chase gave no reason for the closures in the hundreds of letters they sent out. Banks have been able to take this stand since a 2012 warning by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation that included adult entertainment on a list of businesses that might have a higher risk of consumer fraud.   read more