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

In taking over the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, Jeffrey D. Feltman is no stranger to the issues and key players of the region, having spent much of his Foreign Service career in diplomatic posts in Israel and Lebanon. Feltman...   read more

An employee of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has been fired for telling his supervisors about the illegal hunting of mountain lions in Nevada by coworkers. Gary Strader worked for APHIS, which is part of the U.S. Departmen...   read more

The Food and Drug Administration tried almost 10 years ago to start regulating the tobacco industry by going after the use of nicotine in cigarettes, but that effort was shot down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled Congress first had to give s...   read more

L-L-L-L-Let’s get ready to Robo! It’s time again for the RoboGames in San Francisco, the world championships of advanced robotic technology. This weekend marks the sixth annual gathering of the world’s best, and most versatile, robots squaring off...   read more

When Danielle Smith of O’Fallon, Missouri, started blogging and posting on social networking sites, the last thing she expected was to find her family’s image hawking the services of a grocery store in the Czech Republic. But that’s the situation ...   read more

Ever since the beginning of the Web 2.0 phenomenon and the sudden popularity of social networking sites, experts have raised fears that people will give up on real relationships in favor of virtual ones. Having decided to see if there really has b...   read more

On April 2, 2009, President Obama nominated Dr. Robert M. Groves to be the next Director of the Census Bureau, where he will direct the 2010 Census. Groves is a generally uncontroversial professor of sociology  However, his nomination is contentio...   read more

While recent news of slight improvements in retail sales and unemployment figures offer modest signs of economic recovery, a new report released by the Federal Reserve offers a sobering reminder of just how harsh the recession has been for the cou...   read more

A retired U.S. ambassador, Johnnie Carson spent 37 years working for the Foreign Service, mostly on assignments throughout sub-Saharan Africa. On May 6, 2009, he was confirmed as the Assistant Secretary for African Affairs.   Born on April 7, 19...   read more

When Congress decided to bailout Wall Street’s largest financial institutions last year, they had more than just the nation’s interest in mind. They had their own as well. According to disclosure forms released on Wednesday by the House of Represe...   read more

Who doesn’t have a potential conflict of interest these days in Washington, DC? If it’s not economic advisors in the White House, it’s lawmakers on Capitol Hill—or even Joe the Civil Servant at the Pentagon. The Center for Public Integrity, a gove...   read more

From the tropical shores of Florida to the Neandertal Valley of Germany, a fisherman and a 40-year-old woman recently stumbled upon American-made munitions separated not only by great distances but also completely different eras of warfare.   Th...   read more

It may not be as sexy as Tom Cruise conducting aerial dogfights in his F-14 Tomcat while Kenny Loggins sings about the “Danger Zone” in the movie Top Gun, but graduates of the U.S. Air Force’s newest pilot program are hot commodities these days....   read more

Last year was a “record-breaking year” for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, after receiving a new high in the number housing discrimination complaints filed by renters from across the country. HUD’s FY 2008 annual report reveals th...   read more

After sacrificing thousands of Americans lives and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to supposedly bring democracy to Iraq, the U.S. government is seeking to suppress the Iraqi people’s right to vote on whether American troops should stay i...   read more

No one would ever expect to find a toy Ku Klux Klan figure in their Happy Meal in Mississippi, or for the McDonald’s in Tel Aviv to give out miniature Hitlers, so why would America’s legendary fast-food chain think it was good idea to give out toy...   read more