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Over at Scientific American you can read a 6,000-word story about how one such plant, a GM mushroom, was created. The short version is that a plant scientist named Yinong Yang used the gene-editing technique called CRISPR to snip out a few DNA letters in the genome of “Agaricus bisporus, the most popular dinner-table mushroom in the Western world.”

The result: he turned off an enzyme that turns mushrooms brown.

But Yang’s mushroom doesn’t have any bacterial DNA in its genome. He didn’t add any DNA at all, he told the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Instead, he just used gene-editing to blow a few teeny little holes in one gene and shut it off.

As a result, the USDA’s APHIS division told Yang his GMO plant isn’t going to be regulated because it sidesteps the regulation:

APHIS has concluded that your CRISPR/Cas9-edited white button mushrooms as described in your letter do not contain any introduced genetic material. APHIS has no reason to believe that CRISPR/Cas9-edited white button mushrooms are plant pests.

During the past six months, the Pentagon has started to talk publicly about a once-secret programme to develop unmanned undersea vehicles, the term given to the drone subs that are becoming part of its plan to deter China from trying to dominate the region.

The 52 companies being barred include American Electric Power Co. Inc., China Shenhua Energy Co. Ltd., Whitehaven Coal Ltd., Tata Power Co. and Peabody Energy Corp., according to a statement from Norges Bank Investment Management, the unit of Norway’s central bank that manages the world’s biggest wealth fund. The exclusions are based on new criteria introduced by the government in February impacting companies that base at least 30 percent of their activities or revenues on coal.

The Obama administration has lobbied Congress to block the bill’s passage, according to administration officials and congressional aides from both parties, and the Saudi threats have been the subject of intense discussions in recent weeks between lawmakers and officials from the State Department and the Pentagon. The officials have warned senators of diplomatic and economic fallout from the legislation.

Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the kingdom’s message personally last month during a trip to Washington, telling lawmakers that Saudi Arabia would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they could be in danger of being frozen by American courts.

Several outside economists are skeptical that the Saudis will follow through, saying that such a sell-off would be difficult to execute and would end up crippling the kingdom’s economy. But the threat is another sign of the escalating tensions between Saudi Arabia and the United States.

The administration, which argues that the legislation would put Americans at legal risk overseas, has been lobbying so intently against the bill that some lawmakers and families of Sept. 11 victims are infuriated. In their view, the Obama administration has consistently sided with the kingdom and has thwarted their efforts to learn what they believe to be the truth about the role some Saudi officials played in the terrorist plot.

“It’s stunning to think that our government would back the Saudis over its own citizens,” said Mindy Kleinberg, whose husband died in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and who is part of a group of victims’ family members pushing for the legislation.

It’s a tempting thought. But it seems impossible. Lobbying is a multi-billion dollar industry and an accepted—if hated—part of American politics. American courts have ruled that lobbying is constitutionally protected free speech, and lawyers and laymen alike generally accept this.

The same is true of more indirect lobbying, like the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling that allows businesses to spend unlimited sums of money on Super Pacs and advertisements for or against a candidate.

Yet from America’s founding through much of the 19th century, the legal system treated lobbying as a corrupt and illegitimate activity. Lobbying still happened, but a number of states made lobbying a criminal offense, and the federal government banned some forms of lobbying. This all happened without legal challenge, as the courts viewed lobbying as incompatible with the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

This forgotten history of lobbying in America has been documented by Zephyr Teachout, an Elizabeth Warren-style academic turned activist-politician who believes that Americans—and American legal minds—have forgotten the long American tradition of treating lobbying as a violation of a citizen’s responsibility to represent only him or herself in the political process.

The Washington Post reports on Sanders’s income. “The senator from Vermont reported income of just more than $200,000 on his 2014 returns, according to the first few pages of his federal and Vermont filings, which were shared with The Washington Post back in June. On Friday, the couple is planning to release the rest of the returns, including attached schedules,” writes the paper. “The vast majority of the couple’s income came from Sanders’s $174,000 Senate salary and Social Security benefits that both he and his wife, Jane, a former college president, receive.”

In 2014 alone, Clinton gave speeches to GE (for $225,500), the National Automobile Dealers Association ($325,500), Deutsche Bank AG ($280,000), and many more.

As CNN reported at the beginning of this year, “Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, combined to earn more than $153 million in paid speeches from 2001 until Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign last spring, a CNN analysis shows.

Deputy defence secretary Robert Work touted the long-considered “loyal wingman” concept at a forum hosted by the Washington Post in Washington DC on 30 March, where he explained that the air force will pair unmanned Lockheed F-16s with F-35s in future battles.

“You take an F-16 and make it totally unmanned,” Work says. “The F-16 is a fourth-generation fighter, and pair it with an F-35, a fifth-generation battle network node, and have those two operating together.”

Work says he expects “unmanned wingman, unmanned undersea vehicles and surface vessels” as well as pilotless cargo helicopters for delivering supplies to troops on the battlefield to be introduced operationally before robotic military vehicles.