North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons, U.S. analysts say … North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, U.S. intelligence officials have concluded in a confidential assessment.

Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo  —  Engineer wrote memo blasting “politically correct monoculture”  —  CEO Pichai said Google employee violated Code of Conduct  —  Alphabet Inc.'s Google has fired an employee who wrote an internal memo blasting …

Trump at 200 days: Declining approval amid widespread mistrust  —  STORY HIGHLIGHTS  —  (CNN)Six months into his presidency, Donald Trump's overall approval rating stands at its lowest point in CNN polling, while three-quarters of Americans say they can't trust most of what they hear from the White House.

I Found Trump Fan Nicole Mincey and She's Not a Twitter Bot … Even though she's been wiped clean from the web, I still found Nicole Mincey.  The Nicole Mincey who was personally thanked by President Trump on Twitter over the weekend.  The one everyone thinks is a bot.

Scientists Fear Trump Will Dismiss Blunt Climate Report  —  WASHINGTON — The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years, according to a sweeping federal climate change report awaiting approval by the Trump administration.

Trump White House weighs unprecedented plan to privatize much of the war in Afghanistan  —  The White House is actively considering a bold plan to turn over a big chunk of the U.S. war in Afghanistan to private contractors in an effort to turn the tide in a stalemated war …

DOJ flips on SCOTUS purge case  —  Justin here (and with a caveat: at DOJ, I worked on amicus briefs on this issue, including in this case).  —  Today, DOJ filed an amicus brief in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute.  The case, now at SCOTUS, is about whether the NVRA prevents certain types of purges.

The Man Who Wrote Those Password Rules Has a New Tip: N3v$r M1^d!  —  Bill Burr's 2003 report recommended using numbers, obscure characters and capital letters and updating regularly—he regrets the error  —  The man who wrote the book on password management has a confession to make: He blew it.

Pat Robertson Weighs in On Eric Bolling — And It's as Bad as You Think … Occasionally we are reminded that Pat Robertson is still alive.  —  The televangelist ex-presidential candidate and founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network weighed in last night on the Eric Bolling imbroglio …

Exclusive — Deep State Teams with Fake News: Email Evidence Proves New York Times Soliciting Anti-Trump Bureaucracy Leakers  —  Emails from a reporter for the New York Times to government employees obtained exclusively by Breitbart News demonstrate that the newspaper's employees …

The Alt-Right and Glenn Greenwald Versus H.R. McMaster  —  Donald Trump has scrambled the political spectrum in certain ways, and one of them has been to introduce a new set of players onto the national scene.  “Nationalists” or “populists” (as they now call themselves), or the “alt-right” …

Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart … Higher Income Lower Income … Note: Inflation-adjusted annual average growth using post-tax income. … Many Americans can't remember anything other than an economy with skyrocketing inequality, in which living standards for most Americans are stagnating and the rich are pulling away.

Heller gets GOP primary challenger in Nevada  —  Danny Tarkanian announced his bid on 'Fox and Friends,"'where he criticized Heller as a ‘Never-Trumper.’  —  Danny Tarkanian, the son of a legendary Nevada college basketball coach who has run for office several times, announced Tuesday morning …

What If Mike Pence Becomes President?  —  Mike Pence—who's quietly launched his own PAC and already begun glad-handing big dollar donors—is shocked (shocked!) by the rumors that he might be laying the groundwork for his own presidency.  Fake news, he calls it.

How America Lost Its Mind … When did america become untethered from reality?  —  I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush's political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes.  Full stop.  —  Seventy-two years ago this week the United States committed war crimes against the Japanese people on a scale that was previously unimaginable in human history.  —  It is almost impossible to utter this truism …

Sanders ‘litmus test’ alarms Democrats  —  House and Senate Democrats have wondered for months whether Bernie Sanders' supporters might choose to focus their energy on launching primary challenges to party moderates in 2018.  They're about to get an answer.

I invested early in Google and Facebook and regret it.  I helped create a monster.  —  ‘Brain hacking’ Internet monopolies menace public health, democracy, writes Roger McNamee.  —  I invested in Google and Facebook years before their first revenue and profited enormously.

Now Starring in the West Wing: Sarah Huckabee Sanders  —  WASHINGTON — Pickle did not go as planned.  —  When Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the newly minted White House press secretary, began her first official briefing by reading a child's letter to President Trump — “Everybody calls me Pickle …

Law professor warns: Congress must act on growing sexbot industry  —  As the sale and use of lifelike sex robots that allow people to simulate rape continues to gain steam, one famed law professor is sounding the alarm.  —  John Banzhaf, a well-known activist professor of public interest law …