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In what is becoming a monthly routine, President Obama granted commutations Thursday to another 102 federal inmates for mostly drug-related crimes. White House counsel Neil Eggleston said the latest commutations are for people “who have demonstrated that they are deserving of a second chance at freedom.” He said the “vast majority” were serving lengthy prison terms under outdated laws for drug sentences. With the latest grants, Mr. Obama has commuted 774 sentences, more than the previous 11 presidents combined. With 590 commutations this year, Mr. Obama has now commuted the sentences “of more individuals in one year than in any...

Talk show host Steve Harvey provided Hillary Clinton’s campaign with the exact questions he would ask of Clinton during a February interview, according to an internal campaign memo sent a week before the interview and obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “Steve is known to be a host who goes out of his way to make his guests feel comfortable,” two of Clinton’s top communications aides wrote in a memo to Clinton a week ahead of her interview. “We coordinated closely with the show’s producers on the script and format of the show.” The memo, sent to Clinton on Feb....

California’s health care exchange is requesting that it be allowed a waiver from ObamaCare regulations in order to allow illegal immigrants to buy insurance on the exchange – which would make California the first state to extend ObamaCare to illegal immigrants. ADVERTISEMENT In a Sept. 30 letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell, Covered California’s Executive Director Peter Lee said that the Affordable Care Act has been “tremendously successful” in the state and has cut the rate of uninsured in half. “While millions of Californians have benefitted from coverage purchased through the Covered California marketplace, certain individuals are...

full title.....Meet the man who's going to get millennials to vote for Hillary - Al Gore, 68, will hit the trail to woo voters who will barely remember him in office...................... Her husband's vice president, Al Gore, Democrats' nominee for president in 2000, will hit the trail for her this month They appear to be putting aside bad blood from their White House days to beat Donald Trump Many millennials were just small tots when Gore ran faced off against George W. Bush in 2000 - they wouldn’t have been alive in '92 His failed White House bid serves as...

President Obama hired hundreds of additional public relations employees to sell his administration’s policies, at a total cost to taxpayers of nearly half a billion dollars a year, the government’s chief watchdog reported Wednesday. Mr. Obama added some 667 PR staffers between 2008, the last full year under his predecessor, and 2011, when staffing levels peaked at 5,238 — a spike of 15 percent during those years. The number has since slipped, but there were still nearly 5,100 PR staffers in the administration in 2014, according to figures from the Government Accountability Office. That doesn’t include the more than $100...

"They taught me the kind of values that don't always make headlines, let alone the daily back-and-forth in Washington. Honesty and responsibility. Hard work and toughness against adversity. Keeping your word, and giving back to your community. And treating folks with respect, even if you disagree with them," he added.

In the latest partisan escalation on the Federal Election Commission, a top Democratic commissioner has ripped a Republican commissioner's bid to protect books, radio and Internet media from regulation as "pitiful." Ann Ravel, a former FEC chairwoman, joined other Democrats at a meeting this month to block Republican Lee Goodman's proposal to explicitly expand the "press exemption" from regulations to books, satellite radio and Internet-based news media. In pushing his plan aside, Ravel said that she didn't have enough time to consider Goodman's proposal. Goodman noted that the proposal has been under consideration for a while

WASHINGTON -- President Obama issued a memo to heads of government agencies today on increasing diversity in the national security workforce to make the diplomacy, development, defense, intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security complex "more effective at problem solving than homogeneous groups." The national security workforce in the federal government consists of more than 3 million workers from agencies such as the Intelligence Community, USAID, Treasury Department, State Department, Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security. Obama said data collected on the departments "indicate that agencies in this workforce are less diverse on average than the rest of the...

As Donald Trump began making noise about a possible bid for president in 2011, South Carolina conservative activist Oran Smith caught the celebrity businessman’s eye as a particularly vocal and potentially influential critic. "Trump would get thumped here,” Smith, president of the Palmetto Family Council, a social conservative public policy group, told the Christian Broadcasting Network. “He is a celebrity, but an apprentice at politics.” Smith’s comments appeared in a March 2011 CBN story alongside feedback from other key national evangelical leaders such as Ralph Reed and Tony Perkins. Shortly after the story ran, Trump called Smith and invited him...

A new posting from the hacker alias Guccifer 2.0 purported to be documents stolen from the Clinton Foundation appears to be a hoax. ADVERTISEMENT Guccifer 2.0 — believed to be a misinformation campaign operated by Russian intelligence — posted an 860-megabyte file on Tuesday afternoon that he claimed was donor information he hacked from Clinton Foundation servers. A sampling of the posted documents include a spreadsheet of big bank donations, a list of primarily California donors, an outdated spreadsheet of some Republican House members — and a screenshot of files he claimed to have obtained, one of which was titled...

WASHINGTON -- Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said America needs to stop wasting food, even if that means teaching people to cut back on the amount of food on their plates. Speaking at the National Press Club on Monday, the former Iowa governor said long-term food insecurity "is a challenge, because we're going to have to increase food production -- I've seen anywhere from 50 to 70 percent in the next 35 years -- to meet a growing world population." "But the first step, and the one way the USDA can provide help and assistance to meet this need, is to...

“The United States Department of Agriculture is committing nearly $400,000 to increase food access for the Somali community in Lewiston,” the Associated Press reports: Members of the Somali Bantu community in the city are partnering with the Cumberland County Food Security Council on the project. The funding is expected to support Somalis’ agriculture and help them reconnect with their cultural heritage. The USDA says the objectives of the project include building the capacity of the Somali Bantu community and its farmers to produce food and address the problem of limited food access. The agency describes the Somali Bantu community as...

full title Hillary -Who Lost $6 Billion of YOUR MONEY at State Dept- Bashes Trump for Losing $1 Billion of HIS MONEY in Business.....Hillary Clinton attacked Donald Trump on Monday for losing nearly a billion dollars of HIS MONEY in a single year. “What kind of genius loses $1 billion in a single year?” Trump is a #BillionDollarLoser. MT @frankthorp — Hillary: "What kind of genius loses $1 billion in a single year?" https://t.co/28ejeceluN

"Winning the presidential election this year is more important than it was in 2008 or 2012," Obama said in a fundraising email to supporters late Monday evening. "Now, that may sound incredible. After all, I'm the guy who had the honor of winning those races." "But as much as I may have disagreed with the men I ran against four and eight years ago, I didn't question whether they were fundamentally capable of serving as president," Obama said. "I didn't have to worry that our very democracy would be endangered if they won."

A new project allows black people to write their own obituaries, with most envisioning the writer dying unarmed at the hands of police officers. Ja’han Elliot Jones wrote a single piece about his own death to create the Black Obituary Project, reports the Grio. Jones felt that he could likely be fatally shot by the police and decided to write his own obituary. “Ja’han Elliot Jones, 24, was unarmed when shot and killed in conflict with local police officers,”

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The locomotive's recorder has information on train speed. National Transportation Safety Board vice chair T. Bella Dinh-Zarr said she's hopeful the data recorder in the cab control car in the front of the train is functional. Investigators haven't been able to extract that recorder because it's under a collapsed section of the train station's roof. Dinh-Zarr said the train's engineer told investigators the train was operating properly before it crashed Thursday morning. The engineer also said the train was operating at 10 mph as it approached the station. He told investigators he has no memory of the accident.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) on Sunday excused Hillary Clinton’s negative comments towards the women with whom Bill Clinton allegedly had extramarital affairs because what she has done for women and children outweighs those statements. Fox News host Chris Wallace and McCaskill discussed Donald Trump’s latest attack against Hillary Clinton regarding her husband’s past sex scandals. “I think his point with regard to the sex scandals isn’t what Bill Clinton did, it’s more what Hillary Clinton did and whether she really is a champion of women because, the fact is, over the course of these years, she has gone after...

Questioning X’s defence of the child as the debate became more heated, Patrick asked: "Why don't you move to a different country? Why are you staying here if you don't like it?" X replied: “We have fought in America’s wars and we’ve never been given the justice and the due process of everybody else in this nation.” "The country belongs to Indians [Native Americans], you white folks stole it from them. You all need to go home, you all need to go back where you came from. "Let the Indians decide who should go and I guarantee you black folks...