President Donald Trump gleefully announced that, under his direction, U.S. military troops had swooped down on the Governor’s Mansion in Sacramento and kidnapped California Governor Gavin Newsom. “We’re charging Newscum with fraud.” When a reporter asked for specifics about the fraud charges, Trump pointed to Attorney General Pam Bondi. Bondi, clearly taken by surprise, said, “We’re looking into it and will let you know the details as soon as we’ve created them.”   read more

Facebook has nearly one billion profiles. It also has tens of millions of phony ones, too.   The social media giant has admitted that nearly 9% of all “users” on Facebook are not real. That translates into 83 million fake profiles, out of 955 mi...   read more

Like it or not, the tobacco industry will continue being monitored and regulated by both the federal courts and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), according to the U.S. Appeals Court in Washington.   Cigarette makers filed motions to end co...   read more

Alan Gourgue served four years in the Marine Corps and was honorably discharged. But that didn’t stop the military from wrongly arresting him years later, claiming he was a deserter.   The resident of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is now suing the ser...   read more

A longtime critic of the defense industry, Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) surprised many observers when he hired a former Lockheed Martin executive to help him on the Senate Armed Services Committee.   Ann Elise Sauer, a one-time Lockheed vice ...   read more

The United States has often made bad decisions while trying to reconstruct Afghanistan, where hundreds of millions of American tax dollars are going to waste.   As much as $400 million has been spent unwisely on large construction projects, acco...   read more

A federal appeals court has blocked the implementation of Arizona’s late-term abortion law, which was set to take effect on August 2.   The Center for Reproductive Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in July to stop the...   read more

The Department of Justice has been doing a lousy job of informing other federal agencies about companies that have broken the law and are supposed to be barred from contracting work.   According to the department’s inspector general (IG), the Bu...   read more

Living without electricity is something hundreds of millions in India do everyday, and not just when the country’s shaky power grid collapses.   The world’s second most populous country garnered international attention this week when it experien...   read more

After spending years trying to debunk global warming, scientist Richard Muller has come to the conclusion that the earth really is heating up—and that humans are to blame.   Muller, a UC Berkeley physicist, co-founded the Berkeley Earth Surface ...   read more

Pennsylvania’s “Medical Gag Rule” faces a legal challenge in federal court now that a local doctor has sued the state to get the fracking-related law thrown out.   Dr. Alfonso Rodriguez filed a lawsuit against the state attorney general, its sec...   read more

Putting the cart before the horse can have dangerous consequences if the cart is a nuclear power plant and the horse represents earthquake safety.   But that’s what has happened in Japan, where the government decided to restart some of its nucle...   read more

The prosecution of a Southern California college professor could have far-reaching effects on other universities and laboratory faculty.   Professor Patrick Harran and the University of California Regents were charged last year with three counts...   read more

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has retracted a suggestion that employees consider “Meatless Mondays” after the cattlemen industry reacted angrily to the idea.   In a recent internal newsletter, the USDA suggested ways for workers to r...   read more

Politicians from New York State want to rename the post office in Monroe and dedicate it to a fallen Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer.   The plan is to honor Gregg David Wenzel, who joined the CIA after the September 11 terrorist atta...   read more

Voters in Los Angeles County will decide in November whether adult film actors should be required to wear condoms.   The initiative, approved for the ballot by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, was spearheaded by the AIDS Healthcare F...   read more

The 2012 drought has become a national phenomenon, impacting at a minimum some portion of every U.S. state and Puerto Rico.   As of July 24, the U.S. Drought Monitor reported every state in the country was experiencing “at least a small area sho...   read more