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

When Barack Obama promised during the 2008 presidential campaign to unite Americans from both left and right, he surely did not intend to unite them in opposition to his policies, but that has certainly happened when it comes to his administration’s indiscriminate snooping on telephone records. Nineteen groups from across the political spectrum last Tuesday sued the NSA in federal court for its “Associational Tracking Program” dragnet collection of telephone records.   read more

The Obama administration won a major court victory in its fight against investigative journalism last week, convincing two judges on a sharply divided federal appeals court panel to rule that reporters can be ordered to testify about their confidential sources and jailed for refusing. If the case survives an inevitable appeal, it will almost surely inhibit reporters from pursuing stories based on confidential government informants, according to both the dissenting judge and journalism experts.   read more

That elicited a sharp response from Judge Collyer. “No, no, no,” she said. “The executive is not an effective check on the executive.” Rejecting the claim that judges are incapable of weighing complex national security issues, she pointed out that the Constitution prescribes three separate branches of government, insisting that “You’d be surprised at the amount of understanding other parts of the government think judges have.”   read more

Ron Dermer, an ex-American who has been a close political advisor to Netanyahu for the past four years, once called the “two-state solution”—for decades Washington’s preferred outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse—“childish.”   read more

Since 2010, FEMA has had to make do with less money for mapmaking. Congress, with the support of the White House, has trimmed this funding for the map updating service by more than half in the last three years, from $221 million down to $100 million.   read more

Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project, said, “The government’s willingness to admit error and accept its duty to correct those errors in an extraordinarily large number of cases is truly unprecedented. It signals a new era in this country that values science and recognizes that truth and justice should triumph over procedural obstacles.”   read more

The issue comes down to this: Should the graves of those who actively committed treason against the United States by taking up arms against it be decorated by the government they tried to overthrow? The federal government does not pay to maintain the memories of Loyalists who fought for the British during the American Revolution, nor for the Irish-Americans who formed St. Patrick’s Battalion to defend Mexico during the Mexican-American War.   read more

Malinowski repeatedly criticized various aspects of President Obama’s policies, which should prove interesting once he finds himself a member of the Obama administration. For example, Malinowski had opposed indefinite imprisonment without trial, supported the acknowledgment of Uzbekistan’s dictator is a dictator, praised the honesty of State Department officials regarding Tunisia’s dictator as revealed in cables published by WikiLeaks—but not spoken in public.   read more

Pearce’s stint in Algeria coincided with increased cooperation between the Algerian government and the U.S. government in the battle against al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a partnership that included providing the Algerians with military radios and fingerprint identification kits, not to mention Boeing-made airplanes and gas-powered turbines. In exchange, the U.S. imported billions of dollars worth of Algerian oil and natural gas.   read more

On Friday, one day after Snyder’s declaration, Ingham County Judge Rosemarie Aquilina ruled that his action was unconstitutional because it automatically cut the pension benefits of retired state employees, which are protected by state law. Snyder’s administration immediately appealed Aquilina’s decision.   read more

This information can include bank account details, email records, photographs and videos, passwords, shopping accounts and even music playlists. Facebook limits requests to either removing a person’s account or converting it to memorial site. Twitter will at most deactivate an account, but won’t allow relatives to access the deceased’s account.   read more

Experts at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) say the discrepancy is due to higher death rates caused by heart disease, cancer, homicide, diabetes, and problems occurring during childbirth or early childhood. All of these factors combined accounted for about 60% of the black population disadvantage. Heart disease alone is responsible for trimming slightly more than one year off the lives of blacks, according to the NCHS).   read more

David Hale, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service who has served in Beirut twice before, has been special envoy for Middle East peace since June 2011, having served as deputy special envoy under his predecessor, former Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Maine), from 2009 to 2011.   read more

Hammer served as political aide to ambassador Phillip Goldberg in La Paz, Bolivia, from 2007 to September 2008, when Goldberg was expelled after a series of incidents suggested that the embassy was engaged in espionage and fomenting discontent against the government. Back in Washington, Hammer was again detailed to the National Security Council, serving at the White House as special assistant to President Obama, senior director for press and communications, and NSC spokesman.   read more

In firearm-related killings in which the shooter and the victim are strangers, such as the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin case, Roman notes that “a little less than 3 percent of black-on-white homicides are ruled to be justified. When the races are reversed, the percentage of cases that are ruled to be justified climbs to more than 29 percent in non-SYG states and almost 36 percent in SYG states.”   read more

License plate data is captured by small cameras mounted to police vehicles, on light poles, bridges, street signs and buildings, allowing police or others to know someone’s whereabouts down to the second, the ACLU says. This information “is being placed into databases, and is sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems. As a result, enormous databases of motorists’ location information are being created. All too frequently, these data are retained permanently and shared widely."   read more