According to aides who were present when Trump discussed the issue, but who choose to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, Trump said he was sick of Vance and wanted to fire him. “I wanted him to be my attack dog,” said Trump, “but he appears foolish on television. He dropped the college football trophy. He met with Pope Francis and the next day the pope died. Vance is toxic, and I don’t want him to come near me. He just doesn’t look as good on television as I thought he would.”   read more

Goldman Sachs has managed to double dip its way through the U.S. government’s efforts to help Wall Street and the national economy rebound from the financial crisis that struck last year. Not only has Goldman Sachs received federal bailout funds (...   read more

Almost 80% of prostate cancer treatments at the VA hospital in Philadelphia were performed badly over a six-year period, found The New York Times, which uncovered a “rogue” cancer unit that routinely failed to properly treat patients. Of 116 prost...   read more

Republicans in Congress can complain all they want about how some federal stimulus funds are being spent on so-called frivolous projects, but the Lake Jackson Ecopassage in Florida is not one of them, according to supporters. The project is a $3 m...   read more

The Obama administration, led by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, wants to turn around thousands of low-performing schools across the United States using a plan utilized in Chicago when Duncan was the head of that city’s public schools. The Chicag...   read more

The National Security Archive at George Washington University took the U.S. Air Force to court four years ago because of its failure to respond to numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. But even though the non-profit organization won...   read more

An expert in federal infrastructure budgeting and finance, Peter M. Rogoff was confirmed on May 21, 2009, as the Administrator of the Federal Transit Administration. Rogoff spent the past two decades working for the U.S. Senate as a key aide to De...   read more

Weeks of violent protests in Peru have ended after the government agreed to revoke two key elements of a free trade agreement with the United States that threatened to open up the country’s Amazonian forests to foreign oil and mineral interests. I...   read more

Franklin Roosevelt made Wall Street good and angry with his overhaul of the financial system and the imposition of strong government oversight during the New Deal. But one can hardly imagine bankers getting little more than ruffled over President ...   read more

Lt. Col. Deanna Violette became the first woman to assume command of a fighter squadron in the U.S. Air Force on Thursday, taking control of the 13th Air Support Operations Squadron at Fort Carson, CO. Violette is a product of the military’s decis...   read more

It took nearly eight hours and a record-setting 53 votes, but the House of Representatives finally approved the first appropriations bill for the FY 2010 budget on Thursday. Although the $64.4 billion bill was not without importance—providing fund...   read more

After years of negotiations with local officials, an off-the-grid collective in Austin, TX, has won approval for the city’s first officially-sanctioned “humanure” toilet—a modern day outhouse that uses no running water. Built by the Rhizome Collec...   read more

The small town of Libby, Montana, home to one of the worst cases of asbestos contamination in the country, has prompted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to declare its first-ever public health emergency. Coming under the Comprehensive Envi...   read more

Although its ruling rejected any constitutional right to DNA testing by prisoners, a U.S. Supreme Court decision on Thursday is not expected to drastically affect efforts by inmates across the country to challenge their convictions through genetic...   read more

Despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to improve the system of processing benefits claims for veterans, and hiring thousands more adjusters, the Department of Veterans Affairs has almost a million unprocessed requests piling up on its desks. A c...   read more

This is one reunion Tom Hayden and the remaining members of the Chicago Seven probably won’t be attending. Next Friday the Fraternal Order of Police is planning a “Chicago Riot Cops Reunion” to bring together and celebrate the men in blue who part...   read more

Twenty-five years after one of the world’s worst chemical accidents, the city of Bhopal is still struggling to get the American corporate owners of the plant that spilled deadly fumes to clean up the mess left behind. A delegation from India, incl...   read more