According to an open letter addressed to the “Oregon Terrorists,” there are some 40 million nature photographers and bird lovers in the United States, and they’re pissed.

The letter, written by a wildlife tracker and nature photographer named Kevin, warns the militants who are currently holed up in Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge that “no small group of armed thugs is going to destroy the great wildlife and national park system that our great Republican President Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir put in place over a century ago.”

Writing under the name Norwegian Chief, the author states that the entire birding community is up-in-arms over what is going on in Oregon:

We are watching your every move, and we have been watching you for a long time. And yes absolutely you are domestic terrorists of the worst kind, and the truth about your decades of constant poaching of protected wildlife around Malheur and other wildlife refuges, national parks, national forests and BLM lands has been well-documented. For years those of us who are wildlife photographers, birdwatchers and carers of wildlife, have been documenting the activities of you poachers and criminals around many of our nation’s wildlife refuges.

The United States government, now with the endorsement of the Justice Department, has said that after investigation it found that essentially every large bank involved in the secondary market sales to Fannie and Freddie committed fraud. And frauds and intentional crime. Right? So that's an extraordinary thing.

There were three of these epidemics of mortgage fraud that drove this crisis. Individually, each of the three fraud epidemics would have been the most destructive financial fraud in world history, but all three of them occurred at the same time and they're related. So the first two are in the mortgage origination phase, and that is what I've described in the past: the epidemic of appraisal fraud, led by lenders, and the epidemic of liars loans, also led by lenders and their agents. And that generated literally millions of fraudulent mortgages originated each year, most of which they sold to the secondary market. And since there's no fraud [incompr.] they had to, of course, engage in fraud in the representations and warranties--what we call reps and warranties for short--in the sale of these fraudulent mortgages through a further fraudulent representation to the secondary market.

So the first thing that we have is that there are admissions not just as to JPMorgan in this statement of facts, but also as to Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. And collectively, of course, we're talking about three of the largest and most elite financial institutions in the world. And the Justice Department says each of these engaged in fraud, which ought to be sort of the headline news, right, that three of the largest financial entities in the world engaged in pervasive fraud.

Now, this is particularly remarkable in the case of Bear Stearns and in the case of Washington Mutual, both of them acquired by JPMorgan (Washington Mutual is called WAMU by most people for short), because they're infamous from past investigations. So the famous phrase used by the industry--remember, the industry used the phrase liars loans. That was not something that prosecutors came up with to try to bias juries. Well, the phrase in the industry was "Bear don't care", meaning that Bear Stearns could care less about the quality of the loans that it was buying in the secondary market, that it was most happily deceived and such. And Washington Mutual's infamous for the investigations that found that it was one of those places that did have a literal blacklist of honest appraisers who refused to inflate appraisals, in which WAMU refused to send future business to honest appraisers because it wanted to engage in this massive fraud scheme of inflating appraisals.

Okay. So we've got not just really big, really elite, but incredibly infamous places, and we're getting confirmation from the Justice Department and from JPMorgan, the acquirers of these entities, that says, yes, these two entities ran this fraud scheme in the secondary market sales. But, of course, there's also the same allegations against JPMorgan and JPMorgan conceding to these facts as well, which, of course, leads to the obvious question: why haven't these senior officers controlling JPMorgan, Washington Mutual, and Bear Stearns been prosecuted for the crimes? And if for some reason they don't think they can prosecute the individuals, why don't you prosecute the corporation instead of letting it get off scot-free, apparently, with no criminal case? So that's the big take away at this point.

In a new television ad -- his campaign’s first -- Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump shows footage of dozens of people swarming over a border fence. But the footage isn’t as it seems.

About halfway through the ad, a narrator says of Trump, "He'll stop illegal immigration by building a wall on our southern border that Mexico will pay for." Video footage shows dozens of people streaming across the border, as if they were ants fleeing an anthill.

The clear suggestion is that the footage is of the "southern border" between the United States and Mexico. But it’s not -- it’s 5,000 miles away, in a small Spanish enclave on the mainland of Morocco.

PolitiFact was able to trace the footage back to the Italian television network RepubblicaTV. On May 3, 2014, the network posted footage of Moroccans crossing the border into Melilla, one of two enclaves on the Moroccan coast that are held by Spain. Migrants who cross the border there are essentially entering territory held by a European Union nation, even though they are still on the African continent. (It can also be seen posted by a YouTube user here.)

If you were rich 1700s nobleman, had a dinner table, and wanted to impress your fellow gentry, a pineapple would sure as hell be the way to go.

Indeed, if you find yourself at an old inn or perhaps even a new, trendy hotel, there will likely be a picture of a pineapple somewhere near you. It is a near-universal symbol of hospitality. But why? Thanks to centuries of pillaging and colonizing, the pineapple has traveled far and wide and come to represent something more than tasty fruit. Beyond merely being a symbol of welcoming, it has dark imperial roots to show.

Up until the 15th century, pineapples were not known by the Western world. In South American countries like Brazil, they were grown and enjoyed by the locals, but few others outside these countries knew of the pineapple’s existence. Historical accounts claim that Christopher Columbus was the first European to come face to face with the fruit during his second voyage in 1493, when he and his crew found a Caribbean village that ate pineapple. They tried it and reportedly liked it quite a bit, deciding to bring it back to their European home.

The very concept of pineapples equating to hospitality, in fact, comes from these Caribbean trips, according to the World Encyclopedia of Food. Imperial travelers would go to these remote islands, and discovered that natives who hung the fruit in front of their entrances were welcoming to strangers.
Thanks to their presence in front of villages and local huts, once they reached Europe pineapples became widely considered a gentry symbol of hospitality. The concept travelled to America too, where colonial houses began showcasing the pineapple’s image in common areas. Plantations took up the trend and started carving pineapple-like shapes into columns at their entrances. This, in fact, became a well-known addition to entrance architecture.