Former FBI Director James Comey was in Los Angeles talking to FBI employees when the TV in the room delivered the news that he'd been fired. "He immediately thought it was a prank, and a pretty funny one at that," says The Week. But no one else was laughing.

His staff knew it wasn't a joke, and told Comey to wrap it up and join them in a private office. He stopped, shook hands with the employees he had been addressing, and then joined his staff, who confirmed he had been fired.

The Department of Energy has rebuffed Donald Trump's demand for the names of employees and contractors involved in shaping and executing government climate policy -- which was widely viewed as a prelude to a politicized purge, to be carried out by Trump's climate-denying DoE leadership. Read the rest

The Trump administration will put a fox in every henhouse, from the Goldman Sachs execs who'll run the treasury to the working conditions repeat offender who'll run the Department of Labor to the public school abolitionist who'll run the Department of Education, but when it comes to climate and energy, the Trump administration is pulling out all the stops. Read the rest

Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues his massive, authoritarian purge of his country's public institutions, news media and civil society groups with a fresh wave of public-sector firings, bringing the total number of jettisoned public servants to 100,000. Read the rest