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

Within three years, most airline passengers in the U.S. will have to pass through full-body scanners before boarding planes, exposing them to radiation levels that the government says are safe but that some scientists have questioned. The move t...   read more

Federal law has long prohibited the use of taxpayer dollars to fund abortions, except in cases of rape or incest. But this exception does not apply to female members of the military who are raped and become pregnant.   Democrats, civil liberta...   read more

In order to become Israel’s ambassador to the United States in May 2009, U.S.-born scholar Michael B. Oren had to relinquish his American citizenship, because the Jewish state does not allow dual citizens to represent it overseas.   When newly...   read more

Muktar Djumaliev became ambassador of Kyrgyzstan to the United States in December 2010.   Born on June 22, 1972, Djumaliev earned an undergraduate economics degree from the National University of the Kyrgyz Republic in 1994, and three years la...   read more

During the financial crisis of 2008, the Federal Reserve made short-term loans worth at least $100 billion to banks without bothering to tell shareholders or Congress. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts), who co-authored the 2010 financial regulat...   read more

In addition to bungling its job looking for billion-dollar Wall Street fraudsters, such as Bernard Madoff, or allowing employees to surf for porn, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) itself broke the law by buying faulty computers.   ...   read more

Recent cases of American Muslims arrested for plotting terrorist acts were little more than government entrapment operations, says a study from New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice.   Three terrorism cases in New Yo...   read more

Reading Is Fundamental (RIF), the nation’s largest organization providing free books to children, has lost all of its federal funding as a result of the budget deal between President Barack Obama and House Republicans. Federal funding has surviv...   read more

A scientist and long-time government official, Meret Bayramovich Orazov has served as Turkmenistan’s ambassador to the United States since February 2001. He began his government involvement during the period when Turkmenistan was part of the Sov...   read more

Vermont is on its way to establishing the nation’s first single-payer health care system—the proposed national version of which is known as “Medicare for All.” But how the state actually gets there and begins operating the program is unclear, beca...   read more

The National Archives has finally decided to declassify the Report of the OSD Vietnam Task Force—aka the Pentagon Papers—after excerpts of the document were first published 40 years ago by The New York Times.   But the 7,000-page edition will ...   read more

World peace has been on a downward trend in recent years, according to an annual gauge of domestic and foreign conflict.   The 2011 edition of the Global Peace Index, produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace, concludes that the levels...   read more

Meera Shankar has served as India’s ambassador to the United States since April 2009.   Born October 9, 1950, Shankar joined the Indian Foreign Service in July 1973.   She gradually rose up in rank, and by 1985, was serving as a director in ...   read more

Mauro Vieira presented his credentials as Brazil’s ambassador to the United States in January 2010.   Vieira was born on February 15, 1952, in Niterói in the state of Rio de Janeiro. He earned a bachelor’s degree in law from the Universidade F...   read more

Before Congress passed the reauthorization of the Patriot Act on Thursday, two Democratic U.S. senators objected that some provisions of the law give the government broad authority to secretly spy on Americans.   But what those provisions enta...   read more

In opposing the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling regarding the release of prisoners from California penitentiaries, Justice Antonin Scalia unleashed a blistering dissent this week that characterized the majority opinion as a “judicial travesty.”   ...   read more