President Donald Trump invited the Dodgers to the White House. Many of their fans feared that the team, by accepting, would humiliate themselves and betray the team’s large Latino, Asian and African-American fan base. Dodgers controlling owner Mark Walter, along with co-owner Magic Johnson, have proposed a solution. Trump has promised that if he can keep the championship trophy, the Commissioner’s Trophy, he will end all seizures and deportations of immigrants.   read more

The Balkan nation of Croatia, known to most Americans as the homeland of NBA stars like Toni Kukoč and Dražen Petrović, will soon have a new ambassador from the U.S. President Barack Obama nominated career diplomat and current ambassador to Haiti ...   read more

Estonia, a former Soviet republic and now a staunch U.S. ally, will soon get a new ambassador from the U.S. who is a specialist on post-Soviet countries. President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate diplomat Jeffrey D. Levine to be next...   read more

Contending with insurgents in foreign countries may prove to be a more manageable task for the Department of Defense than balancing its books.   Since 2003, the Pentagon has spent more than $2.6 billion on a new accounting system for the armed s...   read more

As far as U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez is concerned, despite the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, corporations don’t enjoy the same rights as individuals when it comes to submitting ballot propositions.   In a ruling out of San Diego...   read more

The federal government’s effort to crackdown on tax evaders using overseas banks has become hampered by the sudden loss of almost one-third of its tax prosecutors can civil litigators.   Within the Department of Justice, 25 of the 95 attorneys i...   read more

Reactors inside Japan’s crippled nuclear power plant are still too hot for man and machine to get close enough to assess the damage from last year’s disaster.   Radiation levels inside reactor No. 2’s containment vessel are so high—(73 sieverts ...   read more

          Born under a bad sign,           I’ve been down since I began to crawl;           If it wasn’t for bad luck,           I wouldn’t have no luck at all.                     —“Born Under A Bad Sign” by Booker T. Jones and William Bell ...   read more

The U.S. intelligence community might have known ahead of time about al-Qaeda’s plan to attack the United States on September 11, 2001, had it managed to follow through in the 1990s on plans to eavesdrop on Afghanistan’s proposed new phone system....   read more

Pipelines carrying natural gas from hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) operations are currently unregulated by the federal government, leaving a large gap in the reporting of leaks, corrosion and potential health hazards.   A new report from the...   read more

Having become the first state to sell off the naming rights of its rest stops, Virginia is going one step further by naming roads and bridges after anyone ponying up the necessary cash.   State officials are still deciding how much it will cost ...   read more

When is big really small? When the federal government says so.   The Small Business Administration (SBA), responsible for helping “small” businesses, allows many types of companies to qualify even though they wouldn’t seem to most Americans to b...   read more

A group of university historians has faulted the National Park Service (NPS) for doing an inconsistent job of properly sharing the history of national treasures with visitors.   In the study Imperiled Promise, which was commissioned by NPS, four...   read more

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has a human resources problem, both in terms of leadership and espirit de corps.   Things are so bad at DHS that a congressional hearing was held to discuss the matter. But when the House Subcommittee on...   read more

Had the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) done its job, nearly 30 miners might be alive today.   In April 2010, an explosion inside the Upper Big Branch Mine (UBB) in West Virginia killed 29 men digging for coal. But the accident migh...   read more

Leaders of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) are not well regarded by the agency’s rank and file. An internal survey asked employees if managers maintained “high standards of honesty and integrity.” Only 44% said “yes.”...   read more

A nine-year-old boy might wind up forcing the U.S. government to do something it has long avoided: Officially declare whether Jerusalem is part of Israel.   Because Israel and Jordan have long fought over the divided city, the U.S. has had a pol...   read more