Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) sent messages to all members of Congress terminating their positions, stating “Your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment.” All Democratic and independent members of Congress, as well as two Republicans, found themselves locked out of their offices after everything inside had been confiscated.   read more

Medicare, which accounts for about a quarter of Acthar prescriptions, pays an average of $41,763 per prescription for the drug and spent $141.5 million on it in 2012. The 2013 bill may reach $220 million. Despite the growing use of Acthar, there are no scientific studies showing that the drug works any better than cheaper alternatives for the conditions for which it’s prescribed.   read more

Hartley and Schlosstein have been active in Democratic politics. In the 2012 campaign, Hartley is credited with bundling at least $500,000, and possibly up to $1.4 million, for Obama’s re-election effort. In 2011 she and Schlosstein hosted a $71,600-per-couple fundraiser for Obama. She has also contributed to the campaigns of numerous Democratic Congressional candidates.   read more

“We assumed the drug was for one of their patients, so we sent it. We did not realize what the focus was,” Ulysses Gene Thibodeaux, a board member of Lake Charles Memorial Hospital, a private, nonprofit institution and chief judge of the Third Circuit Court of Appeal, told The Lens. “Had we known of the real use,” he said, “we never would have done it.” The hospital sold the drug to Elayn Hunt Correctional Center.   read more

Last year, the United States was ranked 99th most peaceful country in the world, out of 162. The U.S. has slipped two places in this year’s survey to 101st, nestled between Benin and Angola. Canada did much better in the rankings, coming in seventh in the world. To the south, Mexico landed at 138.   read more

Nevada Department of Wildlife personnel are gathering fish from ditches usually fed by the Truckee River near Reno to a hydroelectric generating station. Because of the drought, water is not being diverted into the ditches, which would normally result in a fishkill. But last week about 25 people waded into the ditches, electrically stunning then gathering fish to be transplanted back to the Truckee or into a nearby pond.   read more

When Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) confronted Bass with details of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s crackdowns on free speech, Bass proved reluctant to criticize Erdoğan. McCain asked, “Do you believe...that is a drift towards authoritarianism?” Finally, when McCain threatened to withhold Bass’s nomination if he didn’t get a direct answer, Bass conceded that “It’s a drift in that direction, yes.”   read more

In 1996, Osius was among the first U.S. diplomats to work in Vietnam since the end of the U.S. war there. The following year, he helped set up the U.S. consulate in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). While there, he travelled 1,200 miles by bicycle from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. Osius told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the time is coming to consider lifting U.S. restrictions on arms sales to Vietnam, which currently buys most of its weaponry from Russia.   read more

A new report says despite the assertions of the U.S. Supreme Court that voting discrimination isn’t a major problem anymore, hundreds of such cases have been documented in the South, particularly Texas. The report says there were 332 cases between 1995 and 2014 of voting rights lawsuits or the U.S. Department of Justice preventing a state or county from changing their voting laws that were submitted for preclearance in compliance with the now-void terms of the Voting Rights Act.   read more

Obama administration officials are trumpeting a penalty levied against Bank of America for peddling bad mortgages last decade. But the settlement announced by the Department of Justice may not be nearly as tough on the bank as officials claim, because it will be able to write-off a substantial portion of the cost. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan agreed to the settlement after months of stalling.   read more

With a growing population of tens of millions of Christians on its hands, China has decided to compete with established religions and create a socialist version of Christianity. Government officials intend to establish a “Chinese Christian theology” that they hope will compete with Protestant sects and the Catholic Church in China. There are reportedly 23 million to 40 million Protestants and about 12 million Catholics in the country.   read more

A year later, on September 11, 2012, the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked. Four people, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, were killed. Before the attacks, Polaschik had gone to Washington to urge more security for the diplomatic facilities in Libya. Her pleas were ignored, but she drew praise after the attack for having made the effort.   read more

According to an article Bassett wrote for Foreign Service Journal in 2010, she was shot at and took part in an embassy evacuation in El Salvador; her house was ransacked during her time in Nicaragua and she narrowly escaped a mob; and she served in Israel during the second intifada.   read more

Blinder and Watson also pointed out in their paper that under Democratic presidents, there were fewer quarters of recession, more job creation, better unemployment figures and more earnings for big business. “The corporate profit share of gross domestic income was also higher under Democrats: by 5.6% versus 4.7%,” the report said. “Though business votes Republican, it prospers more under Democrats.”   read more

Known as the U.S. Family Health Plan (USFHP), the program serves more than 130,000 military dependents and retirees, but not active duty military personnel. However the services it provides are largely duplicative of those offered by Tricare, the Department of Defense’s main health care system.   read more

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will for the first time publicize the amount of pollution being discharged from dams it operates in the Northwest. The change came about after an environmental group, Columbia Riverkeeper, successfully sued the Corps into agreeing to disclose the information and to submit to federal oversight by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has sought to oversee the dams run by the Corps.   read more

Levitt’s research discovered only 31 instances of voter impersonation out of more than one billion ballots cast in general, primary, special, and municipal elections from 2000 through 2014. "The factor that really influences whether people think the elections are fair? Whether their preferred candidates win,” Levitt wrote.   read more