Several members of the 2016-2017 NFL Champion New England Patriots will boycott their team's customary trip to the White House later this year.

http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/04/16/patriots-boycotting-white-house-visit-trump-chris-long-devin-mccourty-super-bowl

I wonder how many voted for him?

US beef industry was set to win big with the Trans-Pacific Partnership
President Trump killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Cattlemen want a new deal with Japan that's just as good

snip

"I'm not sure Japan will be that interested" in a new deal, said Miriam Sapiro, who served as acting U.S. trade representative under President Barack Obama and is now a partner at PR firm Finsbury. "Some concessions that Japan made because the U.S. asked might not make sense in a bilateral agreement."


http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/18/us-beef-industry-dreams-of-a-new-trade-deal-with-japan.html

It was a (red) star-studded affair, the December 2015 dinner celebrating the 10th birthday of Russian TV network RT. At a luxe Moscow hotel, President Vladimir Putin and a host of Russian luminaries toasted a state-backed news channel that U.S. intelligence calls a Kremlin mouthpiece.

And next to Putin at the head table, in the seat of honor, was an American. Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who would later become Donald Trump's national security adviser, was already advising Trump's presidential campaign when he was paid $45,000 to speak at the gala.

"It is not coincidence that Flynn was placed next to President Putin," said Michael McFaul, U.S. ambassador in Moscow from 2012 to 2014 and now an NBC News analyst. "Flynn was considered a close Trump adviser. Why else would they want him there?"

Flynn's Moscow jaunt, like his oddly timed phone chats with the Russian ambassador, has been well reported. But who else came to dinner on Dec. 10, 2015? An NBC News review of video and photos from the RT gala shows a healthy serving of ex-spies, cronies and oligarchs, with a side of friendly journalists and another American.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/guess-who-came-dinner-flynn-putin-n742696?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma

With a nasty and partisan confirmation battle behind him, Justice Neil Gorsuch took his seat on the nation's highest court on Monday and quickly proved himself to be an active, persistent questioner.

As the court buzzer sounded, Gorsuch emerged from behind the red velvet curtains with his eight colleagues and took his seat at the far right of the bench, no pun intended. (That's where the most junior justice sits, regardless of his or her politics.)

snip

Gorsuch repeatedly suggested it would be "a lot simpler" or "a lot easier if we just follow the text of the statute." But as the lawyers on both sides and other justices pointed out, the statute has multiple provisions that are interdependent, and nothing about them is simple or easy.

"This is unbelievably complicated," lamented Alito. "The one thing about this case that seems perfectly clear to me is that nobody who's not a lawyer — and no ordinary lawyer — could read these statutes and figure out what they are supposed to do."

http://www.npr.org/2017/04/17/524393113/justice-gorsuch-jumps-right-into-questioning-in-supreme-court-debut?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social

Reebok, the athletic apparel company, is creating its first shoe made entirely from biological materials.

The shoe, which will be available in the fall, will have a cotton upper and a sole made from Susterra, a corn-based plastic substitute, said Bill McInnis, who heads ReebokFuture. It’s intended to be completely compostable and will even use biologically derived glue to join the different pieces together.

“We started considering the whole lifecycle of the shoe and whether you can make it with something that grows, taking into account that people have to accept the styling and the comfort,” he said.

“We know there’s an appetite for it already.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/reeboks-next-shoe-will-be-made-from-corn/

SUNNY ISLES BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Perched in trees and scampering down sidewalks, green iguanas have become so common across South Florida that many see them not as exotic invaders, but as reptilian squirrels.

Native to Central and South America, green iguanas that escaped or were dumped as pets have been breeding in the Miami suburbs and the Keys for at least a decade without making headlines like other voracious invasive reptiles such as Burmese pythons or black-and-white tegu lizards.

They've been considered mostly harmless because they eat plants instead of native animals. But their burrows undermine seawalls, sidewalks and levees, and they eat their way through valuable landscaping as well as native plants. Their droppings can be a significant cleanup problem, as well as a potential source of salmonella bacteria, which causes food poisoning.

Compared with elusive pythons in the Everglades, iguanas are easy to spot. They can grow to more than 5 feet long, and they like what draws people to Florida: nice landscaping, waterfront views, swimming pools and sunbathing.

https://apnews.com/832c029d7a754de1a5543a7aefcb0331/In-South-Florida,-green-iguanas-spread-into-suburban-scourge

Partisan gerrymandering—the practice of drawing voting districts to give one political party an unfair edge—is one of the few political issues that voters of all stripes find common cause in condemning. Voters should choose their elected officials, the thinking goes, rather than elected officials choosing their voters. The Supreme Court agrees, at least in theory: In 1986 it ruled that partisan gerrymandering, if extreme enough, is unconstitutional.

Yet in that same ruling, the court declined to strike down two Indiana maps under consideration, even though both “used every trick in the book,” according to a paper in the University of Chicago Law Review. And in the decades since then, the court has failed to throw out a single map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

“If you’re never going to declare a partisan gerrymander, what is it that’s unconstitutional?” said Wendy K. Tam Cho, a political scientist and statistician at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The problem is that there is no such thing as a perfect map—every map will have some partisan effect. So how much is too much? In 2004, in a ruling that rejected nearly every available test for partisan gerrymandering, the Supreme Court called this an “unanswerable question.” Meanwhile, as the court wrestles with this issue, maps are growing increasingly biased, many experts say.

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/gerrymandering-illegal-mathematicians-can-prove/?mbid=nl_41617_p2&CNDID=30772003

A Q&A with Congressman Joaquin Castro on the future of the Democratic Party in Texas, Trump, Ted Cruz and tacos.

Since Joaquin Castro was elected to the Texas Legislature as a 28-year-old in 2002, he has never received less than 58 percent of the vote in an election. He and his twin brother, Julían, a former mayor of San Antonio who served as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Obama, have repeatedly been called “rising Democratic stars” by national news outlets since at least 2012, when Joaquin was elected to Congress.

But ambitious Democrats in blood-red Texas have been limited to two options for decades: Run in safe, gerrymandered districts or commit political suicide by campaigning for statewide office. Now, the second-generation Mexican American from San Antonio’s largely Hispanic West Side says he’s considering a run against U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, who has already drawn one Democratic challenger in Congressman Beto O’Rourke. Castro spoke with the Observer about Cruz, Trump, the Texas Democratic Party’s shortcomings and two of San Antonio’s national treasures: tacos and the Spurs.

https://www.texasobserver.org/joaquin-castro-texas-democrats/

https://twitter.com/Cora_Bee/status/853612735426248704

A television photojournalist was arrested during a protest in front of Trump International on Saturday.
More than 200 people were demonstrating in front of the hotel, calling on President Donald Trump to release his tax returns, when KLAS-TV photojournalist Nebyou Solomon was arrested.
He was standing on a sidewalk with his camera filming the protest when he was detained for what police said was trespassing on private property owned by the Fashion Show Mall.

Solomon was the only person arrested “during today’s otherwise peaceful protest,” the Metropolitan Police Department said in a statement. He faces misdemeanor charges of trespassing not amounting to burglary and obstructing a public officer.

https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/journalist-arrested-during-tax-protest-outside-trump-international-in-las-vegas/