President Donald Trump gleefully announced that, under his direction, U.S. military troops had swooped down on the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento and kidnapped California Governor Gavin Newsom. “We’re charging Newscum with fraud.” When a reporter asked for specifics about the fraud charges, Trump pointed to Attorney General Pam Bondi. Bondi, clearly taken by surprise, said, “We’re looking into it and will let you know the details as soon as we’ve created them.”   read more

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a new report that the Pentagon’s use of competitively-bid contracts has declined steadily for the past five years, decreasing from 62% to 57%. “Competition is the cornerstone of a sound acquisition process and a critical tool for achieving the best return on investment for taxpayers,” the GAO wrote. Someone should tell that to the U.S. Air Force, which had the lowest competition rate among the services: 37%.   read more

Another blunder: The Army spent more than half a million dollars to buy 9,179 small replacement gears called pinions to temporarily rectify a Stryker suspension problem that surfaced between 2007 and 2009. The Army fixed the problem in 2010, but kept buying pinions. As a result, only 15 of the pinions were ever used.   read more

Since Barack Obama became president of the United States, Saudi exports to the U.S. have more than doubled. U.S. exports to Saudi Arabia have also hit record highs. Lawrence J. Goldstein, a director of the Energy Policy Research Foundation, said Motiva “guarantees the Saudis an important but subtle footprint in the United States, and they want to have some negotiating strength when geopolitical issues in the Middle East and elsewhere arise.”   read more

Jones served her first ambassadorship from April 2008 to June 2011, as ambassador to Kuwait. She has been a scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, since July 2011. Jones is married to fellow Foreign Service officer Richard G. Olson, who has been ambassador to Pakistan since September 2012.   read more

So many members of the U.S. Senate have jumped on the same-sex marriage bandwagon in recent weeks that a majority now supports the right of homosexuals to marry. This week alone three Democratic senators publicly said they now back gay marriage: Bill Nelson of Florida, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. Nelson told the Tampa Bay Times: “Simply put, if The Lord made homosexuals as well as heterosexuals, why should I discriminate against their civil marriage?”   read more

Overall, a majority of Americans (52%) are okay with marijuana becoming legal, marking the first time this has happened in the U.S, according to Pew. Support for legalization has jumped 11 points since 2010, driven largely by increased support from those aged 30-64. The only age group in which a majority still opposes legalization is the 65 and older cohort.   read more

The study, financed by the federal government and carried out by the RAND Corporation, found that direct health care costs for dementia, including nursing home care, were $109 billion in 2010—more than the total for heart disease ($102 billion) or for cancer ($77 billion). The study also determined that the cost of informal care for dementia, usually borne by families, ranged from $50 billion to $106 billion.   read more

On September 12, 1983, he stole $7.2 million from a Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford, Connecticut, while working as an armored car driver. At the time, he told a fellow coworker that he pulled the heist because he was tired of working for other people. Later, the FBI learned Gerena was part a Puerto Rican separatist group called Los Macheteros, which needed money to finance its revolutionary activities.   read more

Knight was appointed to his first ambassadorship by President Barack Obama in 2009, serving as ambassador to the West African nation of Benin from September 2009 to December 2012, when he was appointed assistant chief of mission at the embassy in Baghdad.   read more

This tactic has resulted in laws that prevent the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from mandating background checks for those purchasing older guns, and that prohibit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from researching gun violence. When Congress adopted restrictions for credit card companies, it included a provision allowing gun owners to bring their weapons into national parks.   read more

Babies born in Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington between one week and 16 weeks after the nuclear meltdown began in March 2011 were found to be 28% more likely to suffer from congenital hypothyroidism (CH) than children born in those states during the same period one year earlier.   read more

Ebel was released on parole in late January without serving any additional time for assaulting a prison guard in 2008. The extra time was supposed to be added to the eight-year term he was already serving. However, because Judge David M. Thorson, at a June 2008 hearing, did not specify this, prison officials treated the sentence as if the two terms were applied concurrently.   read more

The Department of Defense has been ordered by a federal judge to release information on American soldiers killed last decade while wearing body armor. U.S. District Judge Richard Roberts ruled (pdf) that the Pentagon failed to demonstrate that Charles’ request for records would “shock” troops’ families. He also ordered the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner to release 89 records to the plaintiff.   read more

About 2.3 million pounds of asbestos was shipped to the U.S. last year, all of it from Brazil, the third largest producer of the mineral after Russia and China. The dangers posed by asbestos have caused more than 50 countries to ban the substance, which is used in building materials, insulation, automobile brakes and other products. But the U.S. government has not prohibited asbestos, preferring instead to regulate its use by businesses.   read more

“The U.N. Arms Trade Treaty that passed in the General Assembly today would require the United States to implement gun-control legislation as required by the treaty, which could supersede the laws our elected officials have already put into place,” Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) said in a statement. Actually, the treaty does no such thing.   read more

A different section of the U.S. Code that forbids the use of WMDs by U.S. nationals outside the U.S. also includes “any explosive, incendiary, or poison gas—(i) bomb, (ii) grenade, (iii) rocket having a propellant charge of more than four ounces, (iv) missile having an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce, (v) mine, or (vi) [similar] device.”   read more