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 legal hurdles just keep cropping up for developers of solar energy farms in the Southern California desert.   California Unions for Reliable Energy (CURE) has sued the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management to st...   read more

Waiting for “Superman”, a documentary currently angling for an Academy Award nomination, puts much of the blame for the poor state of education in the United States on bad teachers and on teacher unions. But it’s possible that teachers could be ...   read more

The new Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives intends to give broad new powers to the chairman of the budget committee, authorizing him to craft large budget cuts or tax breaks without requiring a full vote by all House member...   read more

At the same time that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) made it easier for soldiers to file a post-traumatic stress disorder claim, the agency also made it more difficult to receive such a diagnosis, prompting veterans groups to sue the gove...   read more

The Obama administration is working on new guidelines for the public to follow in the event of a nuclear explosion, whether it comes from a missile attack or a terrorist “dirty bomb.” The biggest challenge for government officials is figuring ou...   read more

A lawsuit seeking to establish voting rights for U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico was rejected by a federal appeals court in Boston, citing the supremacy of the Constitution over international law.   Plaintiffs tried using The United Nations Inter...   read more

Ten years after it decriminalized all illegal drugs, Portugal has not descended into a narcotic hell, as some predicted when the government passed a groundbreaking law in 2000. Instead, the country has managed to shift resources away from prosecut...   read more

After refusing to pay the bill for decades of pollution from its factories, the 3M Corporation is being sued by the state of Minnesota for discharging perfluorochemicals (PFCs) into the Mississippi River.   The lawsuit was filed after months o...   read more

In a town where lobbyists regularly take on ignominious clients, Lanny J. Davis stands out in Washington, DC. Davis, the attorney who helped defend President Bill Clinton from impeachment, finds himself in the spotlight these days, as the media,...   read more

With more than a million Americans out of work for two years or longer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has decided to expand the length of time someone can be defined as long-term unemployed.   Currently, the BLS asks if an individual ha...   read more

Michael C. Polt was sworn in as U.S. Ambassador to Estonia on November 30, 2009.   Born in Austria, Polt immigrated to the United States when he was 15 years old and settled with his family in Tennessee. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Am...   read more

A member of the Senior Foreign Service, Michele Thoren Bond has served as ambassador to the small southern African nation of Lesotho since September 14, 2010.    A graduate of Wellesley College, Bond has a master’s degree in foreign service fr...   read more

Shortly after the his 2009 inauguration, President Barack Obama and his administration turned to two leading Republican politicians to help key subordinates of President George W. Bush who faced criminal prosecution in Spain for orchestrating th...   read more

America’s long-anticipated withdrawal from Iraq was small news in 2010, as far as the readers of the Jerusalem Post were concerned. The pullout of U.S. soldiers received only 15% of the vote for story of the year, putting it a distant second to ...   read more

The last two decades witnessed the continued disappearance of small- and medium-sized farms, thanks to the ever-expanding presence of corporate-owned “factory” farms, according to Food and Water Watch.   In a new report, the agricultural watch...   read more

After 33 years in the Foreign Service, Karen B. Stewart received her second appointment to be an ambassador when President Barack Obama selected her for the top U.S. diplomatic post in Laos. She was sworn in on October 25, 2010. She previously s...   read more