Midday Roundup: Feds sack Redskins trademarks

The Washington Disparagers. In what patent experts are calling a landmark ruling, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has canceled six trademarks held by the Washington Redskins on the team’s name, logo, and brand. The decision came after five Native Americans filed a complaint with the agency. In making its ruling, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board said the team’s nickname is “disparaging of Native Americans.” The agency made a similar ruling in 1992, but the U.S District Court for the District of Columbia reversed the decision in 2003. Today’s decision comes amid growing pressure on the team to drop its name. Last month, 50 Democratic senators wrote to the National Football League asking it to force the team to come up with a new moniker.

Impartiality impossible? Lawyers for accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will ask a federal judge today to consider moving his trial out of Boston, where they say it will be impossible to seat an impartial jury. Tsarnaev, 20, has pleaded not guilty to a host of charges, including shooting a police officer and orchestrating the bomb attack that killed three people and injured almost 300. He faces the death penalty if convicted. Last month, another federal judge rejected a similar request for a trial relocation for three of Tsarnaev’s college friends, who are facing charges for destroying evidence of his involvement in the attack after the FBI announced they were looking for him and his brother, Tamerlan, who died in the manhunt after the bombing.

Send them back. During an interview with CNN yesterday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the illegal immigrant children flooding U.S. borders in recent months should be sent back to their families in Central America despite the dangers they face there. The comments could come back to haunt Clinton, a presumed candidate for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Immigration reform is likely to be a major topic during the campaign. “We have to send a clear message: Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay,” Clinton told CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour. “We don’t want to send a message that is contrary to our laws, or we'll encourage more children to make that dangerous journey.”

Fish market. President Barack Obama announced yesterday he would use his executive authority to expand the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, which currently covers about 82,129 square miles in the south-central Pacific Ocean. Commercial fishing and other extraction activities are banned in the area, and the president plans to expand measures to combat black-market fishing. A presidential task force will make recommendations in the next six months for measures that will “give consumers confidence that, when they go to a restaurant or a fish counter, their filets were caught legally and they were labeled correctly,” said White House counselor John Podesta.

Dialing Jeff Bezos? Amazon is expected to join the already-saturated smartphone market later today when it unveils it’s own competitor for the iPhone and Android devices. The online retail giant might not bring anything new to the table, in terms of features, but its pricing model could make smartphones more accessible. With its family of Kindle e-readers and tablets, Amazon heavily subsidizes the device prices to reel customers in and get them hooked on its content. “An Amazon smartphone would be less about profiting from device sales, per se, and more a way to pocket a larger share of multiple revenue streams, such as mobile retail sales, mobile content, and advertising,” said Cathy Boyle, a senior analyst at eMarketer.