Rumors are spreading that the U.S. Supreme Court will vote 5-4 to rule that a U.S. president cannot be prosecuted for anything he does while he is president. Some Democrats are suggesting that Joe Biden bring a gun to his first debate with Donald Trump. If he shoots Trump, he would be immune, but if Trump shoots Biden he would be prosecuted because he is not a sitting president.   read more

Former Vice President Dick Cheney and officials from five companies, including Halliburton, face indictments in Nigeria for their roles in allegedly bribing government officials to win a $6 billion liquefied natural-gas contract.   A Nigerian ...   read more

Coal is becoming an increasingly unpopular source of energy in the United States because of its danger to workers and to the environment. But the Chinese government considers these factors irrelevant. And so, China is poised to become a big inve...   read more

Having embarrassed the federal government repeatedly with thousands of leaked documents, Wikileaks appears poised to go after a major U.S. bank in early 2011. The question is: Which one? Bank of America?   In a recent interview with Forbes, Wi...   read more

More than nine years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and more than six years after the 9/11 Commission made its recommendations for improving security in the United States, the federal government has finally figured out a way to ...   read more

Can Iran really strike deep into Russia or Western Europe with a ballistic missile? This is one of the many questions raised in the wake of Wikileaks’ latest file dump of U.S. government documents, in which hundreds of American diplomatic cables...   read more

Gamers might think Xbox is the best system for playing war games, but can it be transformed into a supercomputer for use by the U.S. military? Sony’s PlayStation 3 can.   In what might be called supercomputing-on-the-cheap, a U.S. Air Force re...   read more

If the United States stays on its present course of military spending increases, the Department of Defense’s annual budget would reach $1 trillion—that’s “t” for trillion—by 2030.   Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said the Pentagon’s ‘cultu...   read more

As part of its economic stimulus plan, the Obama administration awarded federal contracts to known polluters and exempted them from environmental laws, says The Center for Public Integrity.   The watchdog organization uncovered nearly 180,000 ...   read more

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has downsized the amount of Alaska wilderness that should be considered critical habitat for polar bears, after complaints were raised by the oil industry over the agency’s original proposal.   In Octob...   read more

The Obama administration is in the final stages of approving new rules requiring hospitals that accept Medicare and Medicaid to grant visitation rights to same-sex partners. The regulations, developed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Servi...   read more

No, not that Harry Potter. This Harry Potter, of Birmingham, England, served in the British Army and was stationed in Israel, where he was killed, at the age of 18, on July 22, 1939, during an ambush by anti-colonial Arab rebels. Despite not bei...   read more

Adopted with the blessing of conservatives like President Ronald Reagan and Democrats in Congress, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 equalized taxes on income from investments and income from wages. It ended the practice of lower taxes on income from w...   read more

To hear the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) tell it, the reason why it is conducting far fewer audits these days is because of an emphasis on quality over quantity. Whatever the rationale, DCAA’s productivity has really dropped in the last ...   read more

A presidential panel’s bipartisan recommendations for reducing the budget deficit could save the government a couple hundred billion dollars—but at the risk of losing millions of jobs.   The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Ref...   read more

Terry Vermillion, the Food and Drug Administration’s top criminal investigator, has abruptly retired after allegations surfaced that he abused his position of power. Vermillion, a former Secret Service agent who established the FDA’s Office of C...   read more

The European Union’s bailout of bankrupt Ireland is pricey, coming in at 85 billion euros, or about $111 billion. But the rescue of an entire European country is still less than just one segment of the American bailout from 2008.   In addition...   read more