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

Forty-eight members of Congress have asked Office of Budget and Management director Peter Orszag to count same-sex couples as “married” in the 2010 Census, rather than as “unmarried partners.”The last time a census was held in 2000, there were no ...   read more

The U.S. government has committed itself to allocating almost one quarter of all federal contracts to small businesses, but when it comes to stimulus funds, these businesses have received only 10% of monies distributed so far. That has amounted to...   read more

“What’s the point?” was essentially the conclusion reached by a joint American-Russian team of scientists who reviewed U.S. plans to build a missile shield in Eastern Europe. According to the Bush administration, which advocated for the missile de...   read more

President Barack Obama is fooling no one, on the right or left, with his claims of steering a new national security course that differs from his predecessor, writes Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. The changes Obama has implemented s...   read more

With the war in Afghanistan, President Barack Obama and his advisors are at risk of falling into the same “process of self-hypnosis” that earlier administrations fell into when Vietnam was a burgeoning conflict based on the strategy of counterinsu...   read more

One day before President Barack Obama and former Vice-President Dick Cheney gave dueling speeches criticizing each other’s national security policies, the Obama administration supported Cheney in a lawsuit filed against him by former CIA agent Val...   read more

Lost among the news on Wednesday of the Senate’s rejection of President Barack Obama’s plan to close down the prison at Guantánamo Bay was a federal court ruling that said the government can continue to hold certain terrorism suspects indefinitely...   read more

It has been five years since Massachusetts decided to legalize same-sex marriages, and the decision has proven to be a smart one from an economic standpoint, argues The Williams Institute at UCLA. According to two studies produced by the institute...   read more

After forty years of running Libya as a harshly anti-Western dictatorship, Libya’s leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi has discovered that the United States and other developed nations are willing to turn a blind eye to his continued human rights violation...   read more

When it comes to finishing in last place in the U.S. government’s “The Best Places to Work” survey, the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) is a repeat champion. Once again, the independent federal agency responsible for handling labor issues...   read more

Life in The Gambia, which has been quite oppressive since dictator Alhaji Yahya Jammeh first seized power in 1994, took a turn for the truly strange in recent months when people were rounded up as part of a campaign to rid the country of sorcery. ...   read more

More Americans than ever are going completely wireless, with the latest survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showing that more than one in five households use only cell phones. A household is defined as a single-person ...   read more

A nine-year investigation into child abuse by Irish Catholic institutions has revealed a system that protected child molesters and trapped thousands of poor Irish children in an abusive environment for six decades. On top of the lack of adequate...   read more

Not since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda has there been a such a large-scale humanitarian crisis as the one currently growing in Pakistan. As a result of the massive offensive that Pakistan’s military has launched to root out the Taliban in the Swat ...   read more

The political art of redrawing urban boundaries, long an American tool in elections, is being applied to the U.S. effort to keep troops in cities in Iraq despite a legal agreement to remove them. Under the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that of...   read more

Perhaps the future for human-robot coexistence is a lot friendlier than portrayals like I, Robot. Kacie Kinzer, a graduate student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, conducted an experiment with small, disposable robots to see if New Yorkers would...   read more