The recently installed ambassador from Lebanon is actually a Lebanese-American who lived in the U.S. more than 40 years. Shortly before the 2016 presidential election in Lebanon, Gabriel Issa of Detroit returned to Lebanon on a permanent basis and became a close advisor to Lebanon’s soon-to-be president, Michel Aoun. By the age of 21, Issa had founded two businesses, AAA Language Services and Iterotext Translation, which, along with several other businesses, he devoted his career to building.   read more

The stimulus fund will give $100 million to the Emergency Food and Shelter National Board Program (EFSP), a public-private organization that was created in 1983 to help provide for the needs of hungry and homeless Americans. The program, which is ...   read more

As part of his education agenda, President Barack Obama wants to overhaul the way the federal government helps students attend college, by eliminating the current program that heavily subsidizes banks that provide student loans. Instead of banks d...   read more

A Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital in Washington, DC, was the site last week of a row between a college reporter and government officials that quickly escalated into a calls-to-arm by media organizations and First Amendment advocates. ...   read more

As the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre approaches, the Chinese government has launched a public relations campaign claiming that the human rights situation China will soon improve. However, actions speak louder than words. Last w...   read more

Nearly a quarter million pages of records from the Reagan White House are finally going to be released to the public today, thanks to an executive order signed by President Barack Obama. Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, the documents we...   read more

According to a study in the Seattle area, the number of seniors living in their vehicles is increasing, as the King County homeless population in general has risen 68% in the past year. This growing category of homeless includes people who have wo...   read more

Household problems ranging from corroded plumbing to serious skin rashes all are coming from the same source—China—according to experts in the United States and in other countries. For many Americans living in as many as 100,000 new homes built du...   read more

Manhattan Federal District Judge Shira Scheindlin is allowing some claims against companies that allegedly did business with the racist South African government during the 1970s and 1980s to go forward.  More than a dozen lawsuits were initially f...   read more

Surprising as it may seem to most Americans, about three billion people still eat meals that are cooked using firewood. This adds considerably to deforestation and global warming. Introducing a solution: a cardboard box.   A Kenya-based company,...   read more

Considered a leading real estate economist, Raphael Bostic (42) has spent most of this decade teaching and researching at the University of Southern California, during which time he incorrectly refuted the notion that a “housing bubble” existed in...   read more

Only ten days after taking office, President Barack Obama changed the way government-hired contractors can hire employees—which may result in less outsourcing of jobs by federal offices. It sometimes happens that the federal government will replac...   read more

Some day the nation’s energy needs might be entirely solved through the use of hot water, and the man to thank didn’t get his business started until he was 83. Bob Potter, now 88, started Potter Drilling five years ago to develop a novel way of dr...   read more

Cathy Zoi, President Barack Obama’s choice to serve as Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, has been an advocate for more environmentally-conscious and conservation-oriented energy policy, with a long history i...   read more

Heading up the federal government’s key agency for managing water resources is Michael L. Connor, a lawyer who has spent most of his career in Washington, DC, quietly working for the Senate and the Department of the Interior during the Clinton adm...   read more

The American media have been happy to parrot the message coming out of the US military that things are better in Iraq these days, based solely on the fact that American soldiers aren’t dying in the numbers they were three or more years ago. But th...   read more

While bank leaders publicly clamor about returning federal bailout funds to avoid restrictions on executive pay, the Obama administration is working on ways to quietly allow financial institutions to avoid the salary rules. On Friday, following a ...   read more