When Pope John Paul II visited Damascus in May 2001, Bashar used his welcoming speech to denounce the Jews, saying, “They tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and the same way they tried to betray and kill the Prophet Muhammad.”   read more

In Mexico, President Peña’s presidential campaign used neuropolitical techniques to gauge voters’ brain waves, skin arousal, and heart rate. One way the new methods are applied is by placing cameras in digital billboards and recording people's facial reactions to political messages. Use of neuropolitics could increase during the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Hillary Clinton’s campaign already hired a neuromarketing firm to help it improve its targeting and messages.   read more

Defense officials have denied SIGAR easy access to documents, which is unusual and possibly illegal given the inspector general’s mandate to investigate Pentagon spending in Afghanistan. “Frankly, I find it both shocking and incredible that DOD asserts that it no longer has any knowledge about TFBSO, an $800 million program that reported directly to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and only shut down a little over six months ago,” Sopko wrote to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.   read more

No sooner was the plan finalized than officials—mostly Republicans—in 26 states sued to block it. “America’s history of political conflict over climate change and the legal challenges to the Clean Power Plan might suggest that the nation is divided over regulating carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants,” said Yale's Anthony Leiserowitz. “This study finds the opposite: A large majority of Americans in almost every state supports setting strict emission limits on coal-fired power plants.”   read more

The town of Pagedale needs more revenue, so officials ticket residents for unmowed lawns, mismatched window coverings, toys in the yard, fallen tree limbs, and not having pants pulled up high enough. The number of tickets issued for such violations has increased 495% in the city since 2010. They result in people, many of them elderly, owing thousands of dollars to the city in fines for housing violations they were already struggling to afford to fix. Some people have even been briefly jailed.   read more

From the 1950s through the 1980s, the number of “floating voters,” or swing voters, amounted to between 10% and 15% of the voting public. That figure has now fallen to about 5%, according to “Polarization and the Decline of the American Floating Voter” by Michigan State political scientist Corwin Smidt. He found that voters currently have stronger identification with political parties and are more consistently loyal to them.   read more

Companies such as BP, Shell and Texaco, which is now part of Chevron, were also among those that questioned climate science and joined organizations that fought policies designed to tackle the problem. According to energy industry experts, those companies could also be investigated to determine whether their public stance on the issue coincided with their internal discussions. "ExxonMobil is not alone,” said professor Stephen Zamora. “This is not likely to be an isolated matter.”   read more

The problem was brought into sharp relief last year when a Tulalip boy killed four fellow students and himself with his father’s gun. The father, who had a restraining order against him, shouldn’t have been able to buy the gun but the order was never entered into federal databases."People with criminal records have been known to go from reservation to reservation. Without a one-stop place for information sharing, we’re all kind of working in the blind,” said tribal chairman Sheldon.   read more

Early in his Washington tenure, Mader was the IRS security specialist during a time when the agency came under fire because its employees were found to be looking at tax returns of celebrities and others they had no business viewing. He subsequently became a key figure in a fundamental IRS reorganization. That change resulted in the removal of several layers of management and caused the agency to move from a regionally based organization to one with customer-oriented divisions.   read more

Bodde returned to Nepal as ambassador in 2012. While there, he worked to build relationships with Nepal’s young people. While Bodde’s confirmation to the Nepal post was fairly routine, his next hearings might be more difficult. Republicans who now control the Senate may take the opportunity to bring up the 2012 attack on the Benghazi consulate in which a previous U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans died.   read more

Luli-Faber is from Shkodër, Albania, and was educated at the University of Tirana in her home country. In the mid-1990s, she studied for her master’s degree at the Norwegian School of Management in Oslo, but completed it at the Marin Barleti University in Albania. From 1995 to 2000, Luli-Faber worked for Deloitte & Touche in Tirana and in Prague.   read more

“I have nothing to say about that right now,” said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. But University of Washington women’s soccer coach Amy Griffin has identified more than 60 soccer players, particularly goalies, who played on crumb rubber turf and have been diagnosed with various forms of cancer. The Washington State Department of Health is now conducting its own study of the playing fields.The EPA in 2008 declared the crumb rubber fields to be safe.   read more

The states with the highest death rates also have higher speed limits. All have top speed limits of at least 70 mph and some, like Montana, have top limits of 80 mph. For a time in the 1990s, Montana had no top speed limit, merely requiring motorists to drive in a “reasonable and prudent manner.” The researchers also found that states with poorer and less-educated populations had higher road death rates than those having populations with higher incomes and more education.   read more

While suicides were up in big cities by 7%, rural counties had a 20% increase. Isolation, lower incomes, health and family problems all contribute to the increased suicide rate in rural areas. “Rather than say, ‘I need help,’ they keep working and they get overwhelmed. They can start to think they are a burden on their family and lose hope,” said Selby-Nelson. Those in rural areas have easier access to the most popular suicide method—firearms. Fifty-one percent of rural households own a gun.   read more

Cobert took over when Director Katherine Archuleta quit under fire because of two massive data breaches involving 22 million people, including federal employees and those on whom background checks had been done. (Cobert was one of those whose personal data was stolen.) In 2013 as OMB's deputy director, she urged changes in federal hiring practices, including considering the hiring of younger employees for shorter terms and putting hiring in the hands of the line departments.   read more

Ebert-Gray was brought home in 2009 to serve as Director of the Office of Overseas Employment. There, she coordinated such things as the hiring of local staff, setting pay scales within the prevailing pay structure for that location. Since 2011, she has been a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Administration. Ebert-Gray has been working in logistics management, particularly the handover of facilities in Iraq from the Department of Defense to the State Department.   read more

“The never-ending cases of corporate wrongdoing, seen most recently in the Volkswagen emissions scandal, make it essential for policymakers, advocates, journalists, and the general public to have access to systematic information across agencies,” said Philip Mattera. BP paid the largest penalty, totaling $25.4 billion, for the Deepwater Horizon disaster that polluted large parts of the Gulf coast. Toyota had a unique standing as it also received more than $1 billion in government subsidies.   read more