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

Every year I write an article for Parade magazine about The World’s Worst Dictators, and every year I rank Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei among the 10 worst. Clearly, I am rooting for the current Iranian regime to fall and be replaced by a democrat...   read more

As Congress takes up the issue of health care reform, the financial interests of the industry are well represented on Capitol Hill, and not just through the employment of hundreds of lobbyists. Many lawmakers have investments in insurance, pharmac...   read more

There are more than 40 coal combustion waste sites in the United States that are considered a hazard, and yet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) refuses to disclose their location to the public. Why this is happening is unclear, althou...   read more

Billion-dollar business deals have trumped human rights concerns for some of the largest defense and energy corporations in the United States when it comes to the issue of recognizing the Armenian genocide. According to the Associated Press, six i...   read more

Pursuing attackers of abortion clinics was not a priority of the Justice Department during the Bush administration, concludes an investigation conducted by The Washington Independent. The publication found that enforcement of a federal law making ...   read more

A plan to open up the Federal Reserve to congressional audits received enough support in the House of Representatives this week to guarantee that it will receive a full hearing by lawmakers. Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) has been the driving force b...   read more

A federal plan designed to boost sales of automobiles with better gas mileage is getting closer to passing Congress, despite its uneven provisions for improving fuel efficiency. The Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save and Act (CARS) will provi...   read more

President Barack Obama tried late last week to quietly fire an inspector general who had investigated a close political ally, a move that prompted attention from several media sources anyway. Obama terminated Gerald Walpin, inspector general of th...   read more

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co. made Zyprexa its best-selling drug, largely through marketing it to patients with dementia, even though Zyprexa was only approved for use in cases of schizophrenia and the company’s own research showed the medi...   read more

A footpath running from Washington state to Montana will soon become part of the National Trails System, devised by President Lyndon Johnson forty years ago to allow Americans to hike from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The new Pacific Northwest Nat...   read more

On April 10, 2009, President Obama named Sandra Henriquez as the new Assistant Secretary for Public and Indian Housing (PIH), a position within the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and she was confirmed on May 21. PIH manages programs ...   read more

On April 14, 2009, President Obama appointed Thomasina V. Rogers to be Chair of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, an independent, quasi-judicial agency responsible for hearing appeals from decisions made by the Occupational Saf...   read more

John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who took a leading role in crafting the Bush administration’s legal rationale for torturing terrorism suspects, can be sued in federal court for his actions, according to a Republican-appointed judge....   read more

Intent on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, San Francisco officials this week approved an aggressive expansion of the city’s recycling program, requiring all residents and businesses to separate recyclable materials and food waste from garbage th...   read more

Since it was reported weeks ago that North Korea’s Kim Jong Il was preparing to hand over power to his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, experts have wondered what title the 26-year-old would take on as part of the cult of personality tradition that has ...   read more

Humankind has been warned of all kinds of apocalyptic dangers raining down from the skies, from nuclear weapons to earth-colliding asteroids. But there’s a growing kind of threat looming high overhead, one that is threatening to severely disrupt m...   read more