The incident on 1 December occurred after Mr McCowns arrived at the bank to cash his cheque......Because he does not have an account with Huntington Bank, they required him to provide two forms of ID, and also insisted that he provide his fingerprints.

After multiple cashiers examined the cheque, he says, they refused to cash it and asked him to leave.  But without informing Mr ​McCowns, they had also called 911 and reported that he was trying to cash a fraudulent Police handcuffed him and put him in a squad car as they called his employer, who he said told officers: "'Yes, he works for me, he just started, and yes, my payroll company does pay him that much.'"cheque. 

By Josh Gerstein @ Politico.com, Dec. 19

BuzzFeed’s legal defense of its decision to publish the so-called Trump dossier suffered a setback Tuesday night as a federal judge issued a ruling that could make it easier for a Russian internet entrepreneur to prevail in a libel suit against the online news outlet.

Miami-based U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro ruled that Russian businessman Aleksej Gubarev is not a public figure for purposes of the defamation suit he filed last year.

The decision means that Gubarev might be able to prevail in the suit by showing mere negligence by BuzzFeed and won’t have to meet the more demanding “actual malice” standard typically applied in U.S. courts in controversies involving prominent individuals or those actively engaged in a public debate [....]

By Lydia Wheeler @ TheHill.com, Dec. 19

A federal judge on Wednesday struck down most of the policies former Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued that made it almost impossible for victims of domestic and gang violence to seek asylum.

Judge Emmet Sullivan, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said the policies, which created a stricter test to satisfy the “credible fear” standard for asylum claims, were unlawful.

He also ordered the government to return to the United States the plaintiffs who were unlawfully deported under the policy [....]

reporters watching and tweeting seem enthralled. Like this

The Russia operation is staggering in its scale, precision and deceptiveness. Pages generated by the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency elicited nearly 40 million likes and more than 30 million shares on Facebook alone, reeling in susceptible users with provocative advertisements and then giving them propaganda to spread far and wide. The aim was not to toss the country into tumult, but to put the preferred candidate of a foreign adversary in the Oval Office. All the while, Americans were entirely unaware of what was happening: What seemed like local Black Lives Matter activists were actually Russian trolls well-versed in the buzzwords of social justice. Ostensible patriots for Second Amendment rights were broadcasting from St. Petersburg.

....What’s happened in recent decades, they argue, is that politics in general, and our political parties in particular, have reorganized around these worldviews, adding a new, and arguably irreconcilable, difference into our political divisions....

As he eyes a run for president, the senator from New Jersey remains stridently conciliatory.

By Franklin Foer @ TheAtlantic.com, Dec. 17

In 2013, The Atlantic ran a piece titled “Why Do Liberals Hate Cory Booker?” The article searched for the sources of progressive distrust of the senator from New Jersey. It scoured his policy positions to find his transgressions of party orthodoxy—and it couldn’t find any substantive deviation. It concluded, “The case against Booker seems to rest chiefly on tone and approach. Like Obama, he has positioned himself as a conciliator willing to work across the aisle.”

When I met with Booker this month, he reminded me several times that he had recently returned from New Hampshire. His barely concealed preparations for a presidential run have included the unveiling of large-scale, creative policy proposals that should put to rest any questions about where he resides ideologically. He has crafted a piece of legislation to provide low-income kids with a nest egg of $50,000, what he calls “baby bonds.” Another Booker bill would guarantee a job to anyone who wants one. Earlier this fall, he spoke passionately about the problem of economic concentration.

Despite all this aggressive legislation, his tone remains stridently conciliatory. A recurring theme in his speeches is love—or as he once put it, “unreasonable, irrational, impractical love.” I met him in his office, where he sat on a sofa underneath a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. We spoke at length about, well, love. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity [....]

By Craig Timberg, Tony Romm & Elisabeth Dwoskin @ WashingtonPost.com, Dec. 17, 10:28 pm

The Russian disinformation campaign tried to neutralize special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, according to a new report, going so far as to claim in an Instagram post that Mueller had worked in the past with “radical Islamic groups.”