Obama may settle, giving them $5 billion.  Inside Sources

The Guardian: “An official investigation into the fatal shooting of Oregon militia leader LaVoy Finicum has raised questions about whether federal agents lied about their actions and removed bullet casings from the scene, adding to accusations that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) engaged in a cover-up…

…Further bolstering theories of evidence removal, law enforcement sources told the Oregonian this week that they had seen an FBI video that showed an agent appear to bend over twice and pick up something near where the two shots likely occurred.”

“Us yokels out here in flyover country”…et cetera.  I had always assumed it was because the Political Class fly *over us, rather than land, as they crisscross the continent between the coasts.  National Geographic.

Due to their battle with an overweening Surveillance State.  CNET

Third-party encryption options means that the FBI’s battle with Apple is largely futile.  If the feds get their “backdoor”, just install one of many open-source encryption apps.  betanews

Sheldon Richman on Trump’s aggrieved-Empire routine.  Antiwar.  Relevant chunks:

The key to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign – the feature that explains nearly everything else about that toxic dump – is his aggrieved-nation shtick. Just about everything Trump says (when he’s not adoring himself or belittling others) is about how the once-great American nation has been humbled by the rest of the world. To hear him tell it, the United States is a 99-pound weakling who repeatedly has had sand kicked in his face by everyone. “We don’t win anymore,” he says. “We don’t win with trade. We don’t win with the military. We don’t win…

…Trump promises to get even, to turn things around so that we eat their lunch, finally. For Trump a deal – and he is the self-proclaimed master of the art – is for the purpose of dealing someone a defeat. “I beat China all the time,” he told an interviewer, referring to his private business. (In reality trade is free cooperation for mutual benefit, a win-win endeavor.)

In Trump’s view (or in his view of what others want to hear), foreigners are not the only ones who abuse America. There’s also a fifth column that’s stabbing “us” in the back. These are the forces of political correctness – the pansy “liberals” who aren’t tough on protesters, illegal immigrants, Muslims and lots of other Others. These appeasers are as much the enemy as those outside the country. It’s a vast conspiracy aimed at real Americans to keep “our country” from being great again. And so they must all be stopped, even if it takes a little strong-arming.”

I will always find it hilarious that Trump voters believe they’re the vanguard of some revolution to “re-take America”.  But Republicans always, always run on a platform of “taking our country back”.  Trump doesn’t care about liberty, or peace, which are the only truly revolutionary platforms.

The October 3rd, 2015 aerial attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan left 42 people dead.  The soldiers responsible won’t face criminal charges, but they have been “disciplined”.  So, a thorough chewing-out is a sufficient punishment for what has all the characteristics of a war crime.  Chicago Tribune

Congrats, Health and Human Services.  HHS will burn through $1.1 trillion in 2016.  FEE.

And it’s all the more urgent that marijuana should be legal, now that the CDC says no to opioid prescriptions for chronic pain sufferers.  They’ll get them, though, legal or otherwise.

From Yahoo Finance: “…the FBI said that if can’t require Apple to create the weakened software, it may demand access to what it described as Apple’s “crown jewels” instead. Source code is the list of programming code instructions used to create the software that runs the iPhone. The code controls everything from the background colors on the screen to the most critical security protections the phone has. Apple’s secret signature is a digital “key” required to update software on all iPhones.

If the FBI got access to those two items, the bureau, or outside programming experts it hired, could try to write the security-weakened version of iOS and install it onto Farook’s iPhone without Apple’s assistance.”