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

Sung Y. Kim was nominated to be the United States’ next ambassador to South Korea in June, 2011, and received his Senate confirmation in October. He was sworn in on November 3 and arrived in Seoul a week later. He is the first American of Korean d...   read more

Susan D. Page was nominated by President Barack Obama in August to become the first U.S. ambassador to the newly created state of South Sudan, which gained its independence on July 9, 2011. She had already spent several years working on negotiatio...   read more

Until recently, the air above the blue-collar town of Tonawanda, New York, was often a “toxic blue haze” featuring odors like ammonia, sulfur and other fumes. If left up to government regulators, townsfolk might still be wondering what the cause w...   read more

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke doesn’t seem to consider America’s unemployment problem a high priority. An analysis of Bernanke’s public testimony by the investor website dshort.com found his favorite word to be “financial,” (1,298 mentions...   read more

After three years of trying to restructure and avoid the worst, Jefferson County has filed for bankruptcy protection from its Wall Street-concocted scheme for sewer financing that nearly ruined Alabama’s largest county.   The Chapter 9 petition ...   read more

David T. Danielson, whose career has been devoted to promoting clean and renewable energies, was nominated in July to lead the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.   A native of Monterey, California, Danielson...   read more

In the wake of the May 2011 pressured resignation of Ambassador to Malta Douglas Kmiec, the ex-Reagan administration official and George W. Bush campaign donor who crossed party line to endorse Barack Obama in 2008, the president has replaced Kmie...   read more

Officials at Grand Canyon National Park were planning last year to ban all plastic bottles from the scenic treasure in order to reduce litter. But National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis scuttled the plan after Coca-Cola, a major donor to the Na...   read more

There’s something about Mitt Romney the networks can’t get enough of. Over the last five Republican presidential debates, Romney has scored far more speaking time than his rivals, according to statistics compiled by Smart Politics. He’s logged 73 ...   read more

Forced to reveal who’s been paying them and how much, virtually all of the retired military commanders in a Department of Defense mentoring program have quit.   The mentors worked as part-time government advisors who were paid as much as $330 an...   read more

Twenty years after its betrayal, the U.S. government has finally apologized to the Shiites of Iraq for abandoning them at the end of the Gulf War.   In 1991, President George H. W. Bush publicly urged Shiites, who constitute a majority of Iraq’s...   read more

On October 19, 2011, Carlo Maria Viganò took over as ambassador to the United States from the city-state of Vatican City (Holy See). A Vatican financial reformer who apparently did not want the job, Viganò, who is an archbishop in the Roman Cathol...   read more

Officials with the Federal Bureau of Prisons have been informed that U.S. penitentiaries could be vulnerable to cyber attacks that would help prisoners escape.   Most American prisons are operated by industrial control systems (ICS) that also ar...   read more

After wasting $1 billion trying to build a virtual border fence and giving up, the Department of Homeland Security wants to spend another $1.5 billion on a replacement program that hasn’t been well thought out, according to critics.   Customs an...   read more

More than 25% of Medicare patients in 2008 were at risk of being subjected to an “adverse event” at a hospital, according to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general.   A 2008 survey of 81 hospitals found that ...   read more

Once again the U.S. military has failed to properly tend to its fallen soldiers, having first botched burials at the nation’s leading cemetery for service personnel and now mistreating remains upon their return to the U.S.   At Dover Air Force B...   read more