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

Hall has been a Republican for only nine years, after switching parties in 2004 to boost his chances of reelection after redistricting changed the makeup of his northeast Texas seat. He does not hold the record for the oldest person to serve in Congress. That distinction goes to another party switcher, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who left the Senate on January 3, 2003, at the age of 100.   read more

About 90% of all new mortgages are backed by the government, three times more than in 2006. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-controlled, semi-private housing giants, were saved with infusions of $187.5 billion of public funds starting in 2008, and now guarantee 69% of new mortgages, up from only 27% in 2006, while the Federal Housing Administration and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs back about 21% of mortgages, up from just 2.8% in 2006.   read more

The majority of the deportations (55%) involved individuals with criminal records, which represented another record, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Another 21% were repeat immigration violators. The total number of those deported in Obama’s four years in office has nearly matched all deportations during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration.   read more

NHTSA officials say expanding the use of the data recorders in all new cars and trucks will help them better assess the cause of accidents. The boxes have heretofore recorded a vehicle’s speed, its location and total number of passengers at the time of an accident. There will now be a requirement that 15 types of data be recorded. Privacy advocates don’t want the data in the black boxes to be used by marketers.   read more

“Normally, the federal government is not in the business of preserving graffiti,” Alexandra Picavet, a Park Service spokeswoman, told The New York Times. “The water tower was the occupation’s most outwardly focused message to the world and it is an important part of the island’s history.” Alcatraz gets 1.4 million visitors per year.   read more

Sakineh Sarreshteh is a naturalized U.S. citizen, and Daryoush Sarreshteh possessed a green card, although he had not been in the U.S. for three years, according to The Washington Post. In any event, CBP officials decided to interrogate the Sarreshtehs for five hours, during which they were shouted at in English—according to Sakineh—which neither understood. When the husband and wife were released, Daryoush Sarreshteh appeared shaken and crying.   read more

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was used two years ago to allow the government to indefinitely detain anyone, including U.S. citizens, has been approved again by the U.S. Senate. A group of Democrats and Republicans pushed for an amendment to the NDAA that would have prohibited the military from detaining American citizens on U.S. soil. But then a House-Senate conference committee led by Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) removed the provision from the bill.   read more

Especially upsetting to some is the scene in ZD30 that shows an older prisoner indicating he’ll talk to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—and provide key intelligence that will ultimately lead to locating bin Laden—as long as his interrogators agree not to torture him anymore. This event as portrayed in the film didn’t happen in real life, despite Bigelow’s assertion that her film is a “journalistic account” of what took place to get the most hated terrorist in the world.   read more

The documents show that FBI agents began spying on Occupy organizers as early as August 2011, a month before demonstrators camped out in—and were eventually evicted from—Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, site of the movement’s public birthplace. In one memo, an FBI agent expressed concern that the Occupy movement could become “an outlet for a lone offender exploiting the movement for reasons associated with general government dissatisfaction.”   read more

Thanks to unauthorized shredding of documents, U.S. officials in Afghanistan have been unable to account for about $200 million spent by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on fuel for the Afghan Army over a two-year period.   read more

Judge William Alsup objected to the government’s tactic. He wrote: “Here the government seeks to affirmatively use allegedly privileged information to dispose of the case entirely without ever revealing to the other side what its secret evidence might be.” Ibrahim is currently dean of the Faculty of Design and Architecture at Universiti Putra Malaysia.   read more

The federal government will continue to access Americans’ emails without a warrant, after the U.S. Senate dropped a key amendment to legislation now headed to the White House for approval. Currently, the government can collect emails and other cloud data without a warrant as long as the content has been stored on a third-party server for 180 days or more. Federal agents need only demonstrate that they have “reasonable grounds to believe” the information would be useful in an investigation.   read more

If they could afford bail, they would most likely never spend any length of time incarcerated. That’s because about 95% of all jail inmates are never given prison sentences after being convicted. Instead, the vast majority of those arrested and found guilty wind up serving probation or (for drug offenders) going into rehab. In some jurisdictions, it would appear that unaffordable bail is used as a form of unofficial punishment.   read more

Simple assaults (those not involving an injury or a weapon) constituted 60% of violent victimizations committed by strangers two years ago. Aggravated assault made up another 20%, robbery 17%, and rape or sexual assault just 2%. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that about 45% of violent crimes by strangers are not reported to the police.   read more

Counting only random mass murders with at least two casualties, Lankford found that 179 such crimes occurred between 1966 and 2010, an average rate of 3.97 per year. From 1966 to 1980, there were 20 mass killings for a rate of 0.75 per year, but in the 1980s the rate doubled to 1.8 per year, tripled in the 1990s to 5.4, and went up 160% in the 2000s to 8.7 per year. The rate could easily reach 10 per year during the present decade.   read more

For about thirty years now, the federal government has been implementing policies that take tax dollars from middle class Americans and give them to the rich. The net effect has been to redistribute wealth to the rich and create the most unequal developed society on earth. Three specific aspects of federal policy—low taxes for the rich, outsourcing government functions to private companies, and the financial clout of Washington lobbyists—have been the major drivers of growing inequality.   read more