Donald Trump went from clown to contender in a mere 30 days. He is now polling in at 30% among Republicans, a 12-point spread from Ben Carson who is #2. Trump still loses next to Hillary by 2 points, but her nomination is not secure.A race of Sanders vs. Trump would be quite the sight, straight out of the 1930s. It's the Reds vs. the Browns all over again. My own sense is that the Browns could...Read More

They say that every vote counts, but it's not usually this literal: A vote on a local sales-tax increase in Columbia, Missouri will be decided this month by Jen Henderson, a 23-year-old college student.Henderson is the only person eligible to vote on the increase because she is the only legal resident of the Business Loop 70 Community Improvement District (CID), the Columbia Tribune reports. T...Read More

Chris Christie said Saturday that if elected president, he will track immigrants who overstay their visas like FedEx packages."I'm going to have Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, come work for the government for three months. Just come for three months to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and show these people," the New Jersey governor said at a town hall event here.Christie added...Read More

The Islamic State (Isis) militants have released a new video showing the terror group minting and distributing gold dinars, which it claims will be the new currency to save Muslims from the enslavement of 'satanic' US banks.The hour-long video, which is available in several languages, is mainly addressed to its Muslim supporters and claims that it is an attempt to take the land back to the...Read More

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said on Wednesday that the government should respect the beliefs of the Kentucky county clerk who has denied marriage licenses to same-sex couples, arguing that society needs to accommodate public officials who object to carrying out duties they say violate their religious beliefs."We should seek a balance between government's responsibility to abide by the...Read More

The website Rentboy.com is accused of connecting male sex workers with clients, enabling prostitution, which is unlawful virtually everywhere in the country. It operated fairly transparently, giving annual parties, announcing a scholarship contest for escorts and promoting the motto "Money can't buy you love … but the rest is negotiable."It's somewhat baffling, though, that...Read More

A few lines in a seemingly routine RAND Corp. report on the future of technology and law enforcement last week raised a provocative question: Should police have the power to take control of a self-driving car?Human drivers are required to pull over when a police officer gestures for them to do so. It's reasonable to expect that self-driving cars would do the same. To look at it another way: Se...Read More

In the popular imagination, the work of scientists is marked by a series of "Eureka!" moments. But most science is not about glorious flashes of insight. Instead, its humble aim is to be less wrong about the theories that govern our understanding of the universe.The best way to judge new theories, then, is the old adage of "trust, but verify." In recent decades, however, this s...Read More

It is now legal for law enforcement in North Dakota to fly drones armed with everything from Tasers to tear gas thanks to a last-minute push by a pro-police lobbyist.With all the concern over the militarization of police in the past year, no one noticed that the state became the first in the union to allow police to equip drones with "less than lethal" weapons. House Bill 1328 wasn't...Read More

In July 2013, GCHQ, Britain's equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency, forced journalists at the London headquarters of The Guardian to completely obliterate the memory of the computers on which they kept copies of top-secret documents provided to them by former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.However, in its attempt to destroy information, GCHQ also revealed intriguing...Read More

It has come to this: The GOP, formerly the party of Lincoln and ostensibly the party of liberty and limited government, is being defined by clamors for a mass roundup and deportation of millions of human beings. To will an end is to will the means for the end, so the Republican clamors are also for the requisite expansion of government's size and coercive powers.Most of Donald Trump's norm...Read More

Remember the 4th Amendment? We hear it's making a comeback. Back in May, we had a story about another court explaining to the government that, contrary to popular belief within Homeland Security, the 4th Amendment does still apply at the border, and thus Border Patrol can't just take someone's laptop without a warrant.The case involved a guy named Jae Shik Kim, who the government suspe...Read More

Two women in Saudi Arabia made history last week when they became the country's first registered female voters, according to local media."The participation of the Saudi women in the municipal elections as voters and candidates was a dream for us," Jamal al-Saadi, one of the women who registered, told the Saudi Gazette. She added: "I was quite ready for this day."A handful o...Read More

Four-star General Ray Odierno retired from his position as U.S. Army chief of staff on Friday. Now, less than a week after mustering out, he's cashing in. The former general has taken a job as a senior adviser to the investment firm JPMorgan Chase.In a press release posted on JPMorgan's website on Thursday, the firm announced that Odierno is joining the company in "a senior advisory c...Read More

We are becoming used to doing more of our banking online or on mobiles – in fact it has probably been some time since many of us actually set foot in a high street bank branch. This might lead you to conclude that the internet has shaken up or disrupted the banking sector.But actually banking hasn't even begun to be disrupted in the same way that the likes of Expedia, Betfair and Amazon...Read More

Ohio voters will decide this fall whether to legalize marijuana in the Buckeye State for recreational and medical use.ResponsibleOhio's marijuana legalization constitutional amendment was certified Wednesday by the Ohio secretary of state. It will appear as Issue 3 on the statewide ballot for the general election on Nov. 3.If approved by voters, Ohio would be the fifth state to legalize mariju...Read More

Many local municipalities experience budgetary pressure. Rather than raise taxes or cut services in response, things that are often politically unpalatable, they turn to law enforcement and courts to make up the difference in tickets and fines. Some can also increase the number of finable offenses and stiffen the penalties.Officers, already disproportionately deployed and arrayed in so-called &quo...Read More

The GOP establishment has been plotting to consign Donald Trump to the electoral scrap heap ever since he entered the race. The question we should ask is why.The GOP will say it's because he's a clown, he has no experience, he can't win, he's more a celebrity than a politician. This might all be true. But there's another big reason they'd rather not talk about.At the debate...Read More

The National Security Agency's ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T.While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed N.S.A. documents show that the relationship...Read More

Some of the earliest adopters of the digital currency Bitcoin were criminals, who have found it invaluable in online marketplaces for contraband and as payment extorted through lucrative "ransomware" that holds personal data hostage. A new Bitcoin-inspired technology that some investors believe will be much more useful and powerful may be set to unlock a new wave of criminal innovation.T...Read More