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

High-tech unmanned drones aren’t just a growing part of the U.S. military arsenal. Drug lords in South America also are trying to utilize modern technology to automate their smuggling of drugs from Colombia to the United States, and even Europe. S...   read more

In Germany, the government is still allowed by law to regulate its citizens’ names. This right was recently challenged by a couple from Munich. A dentist, Frieda Rosemarie Thalheim, wanted to add to her name the last name of her husband, Hans Pete...   read more

The federal government currently sits on more than 65,000 properties, valued at $84 billion, which are of little use, so President Barack Obama thinks it is time to give agencies some incentive to unload their real estate. The current 2010 budget ...   read more

The 500 Sikhs in the British police force are tired of not getting into the action and want to be able to carry firearms and handle tough assignments, such as public demonstrations. But until now they have been prevented from doing so because poli...   read more

Larry EchoHawk, President Obama’s choice to head the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was born August 2, 1948, in Cody, Wyoming. A member of the Pawnee Native American tribe of Oklahoma, he is a leading supporter of Native American rights, a Democrat, an...   read more

So much for giving Guantánamo detainees their day in federal court. In spite of President Barack Obama’s pledge to do things differently from the Bush administration when it comes to suspected terrorists, the Pentagon’s legal system has quietly mo...   read more

The U.S. Forest Service is closing thousands of caves and former mines in national forests in thirty-three states in an effort to suspend the spread of white-nose syndrome, a fatal fungus that has already killed an estimated 500,000 bats. Bats, al...   read more

AmeriCorps became the center of media attention when the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act passed, tripling AmeriCorps’ size and allotting $5.7 billion in federal funding for the community service programs it provides. Few news sources noticed o...   read more

While most giants of the banking industry continue to slog their way through the sub-prime mortgage disaster, one bank is quietly succeeding with a clientele of poor people. The institution is Grameen Bank, which has set up a branch in New York Ci...   read more

U.S. military officials tried to blame the Taliban for the carnage in western Afghanistan earlier this week, only to have others in the Defense Department admit that American air strikes were at least partially responsible for the death of more th...   read more

The world of computer hacking and identity theft took on a new element recently when Virginia officials were told to pay a ransom in order to reclaim personal data and prescription records for millions of residents. The site of the break-in was th...   read more

This past Earth Day, April 22, senators from both ends of the political spectrum, including John Kerry (D- Massachusetts) and James M. Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), came together to support and present a bipartisan bill that would order the Environmental P...   read more

During the final week of George W. Bush’s presidency, the Defense Department’s inspector general issued a report exonerating a military public relations program that had drawn fire for trying to manipulate television and radio news coverage. At th...   read more

Sometimes it pays to study a bit of history before sending troops to a foreign land. The Bush administration learned this the hard way when they invaded Iraq without taking into account the fact that Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq had been in conflict...   read more

Whatever it is, you can get it on eBay, and that even applies to top-secret information on America’s missile defense system. A study sponsored by BT and Sims Lifecycle Services, and involving university researchers in the U.K., U.S. and Australia,...   read more

By late summer, it is possible that for the first time in American history, women will make up a majority of the labor force. When the recession began in December 2007, there were 138.2 million nonfarm payroll jobs, 48.7 percent were held by women...   read more