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

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) upset many of its longtime grant recipients this week when it cut funding for numerous PBS programs. But it also won praise from videogame makers for awarding its first grants to non-profit game developers...   read more

Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 as a civil libertarian, a former professor of Constitutional Law who promised to close the military prison at Guantánamo, Cuba, undo the unconstitutional excesses of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” and sto...   read more

Patients in Minnesota and possibly other hospitals have been greeted with the unpleasant sight of bill collectors seeking payments for medical services.   The unethical and possibly illegal practice belongs to one of the nation’s largest collect...   read more

In what some legal analysts characterized as a small catch aimed at snaring a larger fish, the Obama administration filed criminal charges this week against a BP engineer who was involved in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill cleanup.   Kurt Mix, who ...   read more

African-Americans facing trial in Florida need to hope for one thing: A black person on the jury.   After examining more than 700 non-capital felony criminal cases in Sarasota and Lake Counties over a 10-year period, researchers at Duke Universi...   read more

The greenhouse gas effect behind global warming is not only causing the ice in the Arctic sea to break apart, but also unleashing potentially even more gases that could accelerate the earth’s rising temperatures.   A new study from the National ...   read more

The net flow of immigrants from Mexico to the United States has ended, with just as many, if not more, people now heading south than north.   From 2005 to 2010, about 1.4 million Mexicans moved from the U.S. to Mexico. This total was twice the n...   read more

A new multi-part series on PBS discusses four major economic issues affecting the United States and, it just so happens, the interests of the program’s corporate sponsor.   Dow Chemical underwrote the series “America Revealed,” whose four instal...   read more

Two fishermen from Panama adrift in their disabled boat might have lived had an American cruise ship bothered to stop and pick them up last month.   While sailing from South America to the United States on March 10, the Star Princess cruise ship...   read more

Federal and state officials have joined together to go after DuPont for allegedly dumping hazardous substances into Kansas’ waterways and soil.   In a lawsuit filed in federal court, the U.S. Department of Justice, along with environmental offic...   read more

Monsanto has purchased a research company whose mission is to combat the massive die off of honeybees—a problem blamed in part on the biotech giant’s genetically modified corn.   Last fall, Monsanto quietly purchased Beeologics, which is “dedica...   read more

Using a new law intended to end racial discrimination in sentencing, a judge in North Carolina threw out the death sentence of an African-American man convicted of murder 18 years ago.   Judge Greg Weeks of Cumberland County Superior Court concl...   read more

Washington’s effort to help protect the American farmer has proven to be a billion-dollar bonanza for insurance companies and agents.   According to a report from the Environmental Working Group, the federal government’s crop insurance program h...   read more

For the first time in its history, the United Nations is scrutinizing the plight of Native Americans in the United States.   UN Special Rapporteur James Anaya, a human rights professor at the University of Arizona’s College of Law, will spend th...   read more

The Obama administration should cancel an experimental Medicare program that is wasting $8 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).   As part of the 2010 health care law, Congress eliminated Medicare payments to managed ...   read more

Police in Scotland have arrested a 63-year-old woman for entering a mannequin as a city council candidate in Aberdeen.   Renee Slater was charged under a 1983 law, the Representation of the People Act, for trying to pass off the dummy, named Hel...   read more