June 7th, 2019

House Democratic leaders are protesting President Trump’s decision to place himself at the center of the national Fourth of July celebration on the Mall, saying his planned speech at the Lincoln Memorial would waste taxpayer dollars and impart a partisan flavor to what has traditionally been an apolitical event.

Baker's admission is another sign that despite what Attorney General William Barr said earlier this year, Inspector General Michael Horowitz's investigation may not be completed by early June...

"As soon as we came back to the room, we noticed it smelled like somebody had dumped paint everywhere," said Knull. "We were drooling excessively. My eyes would not stop watering." She continued: "That night, we both woke up soaked in sweat at like four in the morning and kind of terrified. And we booked a flight home before the sun came up." They said that once back home in the United States, a doctor diagnosed “likely organophosphate poisoning,” referring to pesticides.

Terms of the proposed settlement, which needs to be approved by a judge, were filed Thursday in federal court in Santa Ana, California. National General, an auto insurance underwriter, will pay an additional $7.5 million, according to the filing. The alleged insurance scam was one of a series of scandals involving Wells Fargo’s handling of customers’ accounts that has rocked the San Francisco-bank bank since 2016. Earlier this year, it said it might have to spend as much as $2.7 billion more than what it set aside by the end of December to resolve legal matters -- boosting its estimate of “reasonably possible” legal losses by $500 million from three months earlier.

Facebook Inc is no longer allowing pre-installation of its apps on Huawei phones, the latest blow for the Chinese tech giant as it struggles to keep its business afloat in the face of a U.S. ban on its purchase of American parts and software. Customers who already have Huawei phones will still be able to use its apps and receive updates, Facebook told Reuters. But new Huawei phones will no longer be able to have Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram apps pre-installed.

Theresa May will officially step down as the leader of the Conservative Party on Friday, but will remain as prime minister until her successor is chosen. Mrs May announced her resignation two weeks ago, saying it was a matter of deep regret that she had been unable to deliver Brexit. Eleven Conservative MPs are vying to replace her as party leader and ultimately, prime minister. Nominations open from 10:00 BST on Monday and close at 17:00 BST that day.

Using remotely operated underwater vehicles, researchers sampled microplastics in Monterey Bay at depths from five to 1,000 meters. The team also measured pollutants in the guts of 24 pelagic red crabs and eight mucus filters from giant larvaceans — both of which eat organic particles about the same size as microplastics. The concentration of particles 1,000 meters deep was roughly the same as it was five meters deep, averaging about three particles per cubic meter. Plastic in water from 200 to 600 meters deep was more concentrated, with 10 to 15 particles per cubic meter.

Cardinal George Pell will remain behind bars while an Australian appeals court considers whether to overturn his conviction on five charges of sexually assaulting two choirboys in the 1990s. A two-day hearing in Melbourne's Supreme Court building ended Thursday with no date given as to when the panel of three judges will deliver their ruling, which could result in Pell's conviction being quashed.

The DoJ alleges that Kohanbash counterfeited military parkas used by the Air Force. These parkas are manufactured with a special fabric known as Multicam, which uses near-infrared ("NIR") management technology designed to make troops virtually invisible to detect by night-vision goggles.

About two hundred of these parkas were counterfeited, lacking the important Multicam fabric, were supplied to Air Force personnel in Afghanistan, could have put them in harm's way on the battlefield.

According to Military Times, justice officials seized 1,700 boxes of counterfeit combat uniforms from Kohanbash's warehouse...

A captured ISIS fighter reportedly confessed last month that he was asked to be part of a terrorist plot to “cripple the [U.S.] economy” by illegally entering the United States from its southern border. Abu Henricki, who has dual Canadian and Trinidadian citizenship but was living in Syria at the time, says he was recruited by ISIS leaders because he could speak English. He was then told he would be smuggled from Central America to the U.S. by taking advantage of the border crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The new emergency facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, will hold as many as 1,600 teens in a complex that once housed oil field workers on government-leased land near the border, said Mark Weber, a spokesman for Office of Refugee Resettlement. The agency is also weighing using Army and Air Force bases in Georgia, Montana and Oklahoma to house an additional 1,400 kids in the coming weeks, amid the influx of children traveling to the U.S. alone.

In a brief court filing Thursday, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan instructed the court clerk to put the audio version of the Nov. 22, 2017 voicemail left for Robert Kelner on the public docket... The order comes less than a week after the transcript of the voicemail was released, per Sullivan's order. Mueller referenced parts of the voicemail in his final report, showing how Dowd asked for a "heads up" if Flynn knew information that "implicates" Trump after Flynn dropped from a joint defense agreement with the president. Defenders of the president, including Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., have highlighted how parts of the transcript were left out and have raised concerns about a possible smear job.

In a key finding of the Mueller report, Ukrainian businessman Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is tied to Russian intelligence. But hundreds of pages of government documents — which special counsel Robert Mueller possessed since 2018 — describe Kilimnik as a “sensitive” intelligence source for the U.S. State Department who informed on Ukrainian and Russian matters. Why Mueller’s team omitted that part of the Kilimnik narrative from its report and related court filings is not known.

... a 29-year-old Mexican national was referred for further inspection of his Chevy SUV, when he attempted to enter through the DeConcini Crossing. After an alert by a CBP narcotics detection canine to a scent it is trained to detect, officers removed more than 100 packages of methamphetamine from the quarter panels and tailgate. The drugs weighed more than 108 pounds, with an estimated value of more than $324,000.

A man under investigation by the New York FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force because he allegedly discussed wanting to set off an explosive device in the city’s iconic Times Square was being questioned early Friday, three law enforcement sources said. There is no threat to Times Square and the man has been under surveillance for some time and was closely monitored by authorities, the three law enforcement sources said.

Believers in conspiracy theories are usually written off immediately as weirdos and idiots, but as a new survey by YouGov for Statista reveals, in some cases, these are actually widely-held beliefs and far from the bizarre, fringe opinion that you might have come to expect.

This week, the American Tort Reform Association released a report highlighting how environmental advocacy groups are ramping up their litigation efforts by directly funding attorneys and policy staff within state governments. For example, the Michael Bloomberg-funded State Energy & Environmental Impact Center, which was initially funded with a $6 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, is placing lawyers (referred to as “fellows”) within state attorney general offices. The fellowship program is designed to support government lawsuits against energy companies by placing lawyers funded by the center in the offices of state attorneys general across the country.

As of 2018, the center had 14 fellows embedded within the offices of attorneys general in at least eight jurisdictions: Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Washington, and the District of Columbia.

A Ukrainian oligarch and former associate of Paul Manafort who has been fighting extradition to the United States for five years may be back in the U.S. as soon as early July, according to a letter from his attorney to a federal judge in Chicago filed Thursday. Dmytro Firtash was indicted in 2014 for what federal prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois allege was his role in bribing Indian officials in order to get a lucrative mining deal to sell titanium to Boeing.

In the wake of a recently filed lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana bias response team, The College Fix reviewed the 265 bias complaints the public university fielded during the last year. The lawsuit charges the university’s Bias Assessment Response Team (BART) with being a literal “speech police” force... The 128 unique complaints included a wide range of topics: sometimes trivial or politically correct incidents, other times complaints revolved around use of the n-word or other derogatory language. In a few cases, professors who said controversial things were the subject of complaints. Two big issues during that school year also focused on a “build the wall” event and the school’s controversial former mascot, a Native American chief.

After two days of intense criticism, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden reversed course Thursday and declared that he no longer supports a long-standing congressional ban on using federal health care money to pay for abortions... The former vice president’s reversal on the Hyde Amendment came after rivals and women’s rights groups blasted him for affirming through campaign aides that he still supported the decades-old budget provision.