The national shame that is America’s treatment of undocumented children continues to devolve into a literal nightmare. The U.S. government is currently responsible for some 13,000 migrant children, five times the number in custody as recently as last year, which now amounts to the largest population of immigrant minors in custody ever. As the time spent in detention as increased—from 34 to 59 days—the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the children’s care, has struggled to house the growing number of unaccompanied minors, most of whom share rooms of two or three in private foster homes or shelters, where they receive schooling as their cases slowly work their way through the system.
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That, however, is changing and the New York Times paints a devastating picture of hundreds of children getting rounded up each week, in the middle of the night in order to avoid attempts to escape, and transported to a mass shelter in South Texas. So far 1,600 have been shipped to Texas from across the country, according to the Times, leaving behind a system of care and required schooling and care licensed and monitored by state child welfare authorities for a largely unregulated tent city governed by HHS guidelines that don’t require or provide schooling.

President Donald Trump said he and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “fell in love” over the course of their on-again off-again detente, hours after Pyongyang’s top diplomat said there was “ no way” the country would disarm under current conditions.
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“He wrote me beautiful letters,” Trump said of Kim Saturday during a rally in Wheeling, West Virginia. “And they’re great letters. We fell in love.”

A coalition of groups opposing Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination urged protesters to travel from throughout the U.S. to disrupt his Senate confirmation hearings this week, escalating the tension over President Donald Trump's pick for the high court.

Capitol police arrested 70 people for outbursts and disruptions during Kavanaugh's hearing Tuesday – and the protests continued during his testimony Wednesday.

The protests were so frequent at times that the hearings have assumed a decidedly halting cadence as Republican senators expressed frustration at the interruptions. On Wednesday, police temporarily closed off the hearing from additional spectators at one point, leaving some seats empty.

A federal district judge in Washington ruled Friday that a group of nearly 200 Democratic senators and representatives have legal standing to sue President Donald Trump to prove he violated the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments provision banning the acceptance of gifts from foreign and domestic interests.

​The U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan found that lawmakers have adequately shown that they’ve suffered harm from the president’s alleged violation of the emoluments clause, which prohibit government officials from accepting benefits from foreign governments unless a majority of both houses of Congress consent.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh made multiple false statements during his testimony on Thursday, ranging from incorrectly stating the legal drinking age in Maryland, to false claims about messages written in his yearbook, to mischaracterizing sworn statements from attendees at the party where he allegedly assaulted Christine Blasey Ford.

​To explain Kavanaugh’s mendacity, Shamus Khan, the chair of the sociology department at Columbia University, has written an op-ed for the Washington Post in which he explains that the Supreme Court nominee was raised from an early age to believe that rules don’t apply to him.

Deborah Ramirez, the second woman who came forward with sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, might not testify before Congress, her lawyer said Tuesday.
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Speaking to CNN's Anderson Cooper, attorney John Clune said he is pushing for an FBI investigation of his client's claims that an intoxicated Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a college party and shoved his genitals in her face. 

Attorneys for Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who has accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when the two were in high school in the 1980s, say she wants "a full investigation by law enforcement officials" before she'll appear in a public hearing, according to a CNN report published Tuesday.
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Ford's attorney's wrote a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying an FBI investigation would "ensure that the crucial facts and witnesses in this matter are assessed in a non-partisan manner" and would be critical "before conducting any hearing or making any decisions."

The world just laughed out loud at Donald Trump. On Tuesday, during the president's address to the United Nations General Assembly, the audience laughed when Trump boasted that "my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country."

As soon as the words left Trump's mouth, a ripple of laughter traveled through the crowd and grew as Trump reacted to the guffaws. 
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Taken aback, he said, with the smallest of grins, "It's so true... I didn't expect that reaction but it's okay."

When Christine Blasey Ford publicly came forward with her sexual-assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, she named conservative writer Mark Judge as Kavanaugh’s alleged accomplice during the incident. Both Judge and Kavanaugh have denied Ford’s allegations; Judge also claimed that “no horseplay” occurred at the Georgetown Prep parties they attended. But, in a Sunday night report by The New Yorker, Judge’s ex-girlfriend of three years Elizabeth Rasor says he told her a “very different story” about those parties.
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Rasor says that Judge “told her ashamedly” about an incident in which he and other boys took turns having sex with a drunk woman, per The New Yorker. He seemed to think it was consensual, she added, and he didn’t name anyone else who had been involved. There is no indication that Kavanaugh was one of the boys, The New Yorker notes.

Ten years ago, it was too-easy credit that brought financial markets to their knees. Today, it could be a global debt of $247 trillion that causes the next crash.
After a decade of escalating US household debt brought on by low wages and the national debt more than doubling over the same time frame, to $21 trillion, debt could soon put the brakes on this economic recovery, analysts warn.

...Ten years ago, it was too-easy credit that brought financial markets to their knees. Today, it could be a global debt of $247 trillion that causes the next crash.
After a decade of escalating US household debt brought on by low wages and the national debt more than doubling over the same time frame, to $21 trillion, debt could soon put the brakes on this economic recovery, analysts warn.