The Guardian: “Antarctica’s increasing sea ice restricting access to research stations. Scientists are in Tasmania for workshops on how to accurately forecast sea ice levels in the polar region, aiming to ease access and reduce shipping costs. Sea ice around Antarctica is currently at record levels for May, part of a trend of increasing ice around the frozen continent making it harder to resupply and refuel research stations.”
Washington Post: “How the DEA took a young man’s life savings without ever charging him with a crime. Joseph Rivers was hoping to hit it big. According to the Albuquerque Journal, the aspiring businessman from just outside of Detroit had pulled together $16,000 in seed money to fulfill a lifetime dream of starting a music video company. . . . A DEA agent boarded the train at the Albuquerque Amtrak station. . . . The agent found Rivers’s cash, still in a bank envelope. . . . he agents found nothing in Rivers’s belongings that indicated that he was involved with the drug trade: no drugs, no guns. They didn’t arrest him or charge him with a crime. But they took his cash anyway, every last cent, under the authority of the Justice Department’s civil asset forfeiture program.”
The Daily Signal: “A small business owner from Central Florida alleges she was denied service by one of the largest banks in the United States strictly because she sells guns. . . . On May 7, Craig called TD Bank seeking a new line of credit to buy inventory and produce advertisements for her small, 23-year-old storefront, Michael’s Pawn and Gun. When a TD Bank representative pulled up the shop’s Facebook page and discovered that it sells guns, Craig says the representative told her, ‘We can’t lend to anyone who sells firearms‘.”
Washington Free Beacon: “The cost of federal regulation neared $2 trillion in 2014, according to a new report by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). . . . ‘Federal regulation and intervention cost American consumers and businesses an estimated $1.88 trillion in 2014 in lost economic productivity and higher prices,’ amounting to roughly $15,000 per household . . . . ‘In 2014, agencies issued 16 new regulations for every law—that’s 3,554 new regulations compared to 224 new laws’,”
The Daily Signal:”14 years ago, McLellan decided to try his hand at the family business and purchased his own store in the heart of the Bible Belt, naming it L&M Convenience Mart. . . . What McLellan didn’t know, though, was that the federal government could come in and take away what he’d worked so hard for.
On a summer day last July, McLellan, who hadn’t yet arrived at the store, received a phone call from one of his employees summoning him to L&M. More than a dozen federal agents had flooded into his business—officers from North Carolina’s Alcohol and Law Enforcement, the local police department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—and they were asking for him. . . .
The federal agents then showed McLellan paperwork that included deposits to the store’s account at Lumbee Guaranty Bank. The statements showed two deposits made within a 24-hour period totaling $11,400. The statements, they said, indicated he had a history of consistent cash deposits of less than $10,000, which is illegal. Then, the agents told the small business owner something that shook him to his core: The Internal Revenue Service had seized all of the money in L&M’s bank account: $107,702.66.”
Update: See “IRS Refunds $107,000 It Lifted from Business Man.”