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

While U.S. media coverage of pirate attacks has subsided, acts of piracy continue to rise. Last year, in fact, was the worst ever, with a record number 1,181 people abducted from 53 ships. Eight were killed.   As has been the case for some tim...   read more

James Dunkin is suing his employer, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Company (BNSF), because he claims he was fired for not participating in prayer meetings. Furthermore, Dunkin says his boss, shop superintendent Jeff Kirby, handed out r...   read more

Unable to attack Iran’s secret, fortified nuclear weapons program with conventional means, Israel and the United States may have turned to a new form of computer warfare to achieve what used to be left to military air strikes.   Experts believ...   read more

Wary of how federal regulators might react to its plan, Goldman Sachs has decided not to sell shares of Facebook to U.S. investors. The turnabout was a result of too much public exposure of the plan, which Goldman officials initially didn’t seem...   read more

Like the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War, Mohamed Bouazizi’s act of self-immolation has fueled political protests and inspired others to kill themselves in the same shocking manner. Self-immolation, which can be ...   read more

Pharmaceutical manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline is preparing to spend $3.4 billion to pay for investigations and lawsuits related to its diabetes drug Avandia.   The money—equal to the company’s 2010 fourth quarter profits—comes after allocating $...   read more

The U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg, Cynthia Stroum, has resigned effective January 31. She gave the usual generic reasons for her resignation—family and business.   The American ambassadorship to Luxembourg has long been reserved as a post for ...   read more

The Obama administration is continuing its defense of the federal law banning gay marriage, claiming the controversial statute is consistent with the U.S. Constitution.   Last July, a district court in Massachusetts struck down the Defense of ...   read more

African-Americans have yet to serve in the U.S. House on behalf of 26 states, and the situation is even worse in the U.S. Senate. In the more than 220 years of Congress, only three states have ever elected a black senator.   Those three states...   read more

There are no atheists in foxholes, and only one in the 112th Congress.   A survey of those serving in the U.S. House and Senate reveals only one member considers himself an atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular”: Pete Stark (D-California) ...   read more

In a classic example of policy disconnect, the State Department, while denouncing the publication of classified cables on the Internet by WikiLeaks, is at the same time promoting a documentary about Daniel Ellsberg, the most infamous leaker of t...   read more

Nearly two billion people across the globe used the Internet last year, according to statistics compiled by Pingdom.   There were 107 trillion emails sent, at an average daily rate of 294 billion—of which 89% were believed to be spam (262 bill...   read more

Things are not getting any easier for cash-strapped state governments. On top of the $82 billion deficit that states collectively face, more than half of them will soon have to pay interest on billion-dollar loans from the federal government to ...   read more

How big is too big when it comes to banks? Maybe when a mere half dozen institutions are worth more than 60% of the American economy.   The latest financial data from the third quarter of last year shows the assets of the six largest banks—JPM...   read more

After spending more than $1 billion on an incomplete project, the Department of Homeland Security has decided to terminate SBInet, a plan to install a virtual border fence along the American Southwest. But the government is not giving up on the ...   read more

Republicans have altered the names of two House committees, upsetting Democrats, labor representatives and civil libertarians.   For the second time, the Education and Labor Committee, which was founded in 1867, is being changed to the Educati...   read more